Kevin Kelly is a very thought-provoking writer but he doesn't really address your question about the isolating impact of social media. I don't find his comparisons with cable TV and radio encouraging because the sheer reach and instantaneous effects of social media signal something qualitatively and not just quantitatively new. Throw in the long-term mental health effects of short attention spans and echo chambers and I don't think you can quickly dismiss social media problems as overstated.
I'm reminded by the often quoted (but less often properly contextualized or understood) rejoinder by Keynes, "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again." KK is making the same mistake that the economists Keynes was critiquing here were making: waving away the merely short-term effects of a new technology as the culture-innovation cycle (presumably) achieves equilibrium again.
In the long run, every Millennial and Gen Zer who grew up in the world that social media hath wrought will be dead. And so will be every Gen Xer and Boomer who maybe weren't shaped in their formative years by social media, but very much lived in and through it in their adulthood. But before we're ushered off the stage to make room for the future, there is a whole cohort of people affected by having their formative years set on a path dependency through social media and a lot of stuff that happens meanwhile. Hardly any of the 8 billion people alive today are unaffected and, since the human lifespan is relatively long, that will have big effects for a long time. Social media will have imprinted us and, by extension, directly shape the world through the entire 21st Century. Just like radio and movies and TV deeply affected the 20th, in ways both good and bad. (And remember, radio and TV weren't just about making us layabouts or cultural philistines. They were also essential to the development and mass appeal of Fascism, among other things. Was WWII merely a growing pain?)
So just waving that away as if it's all just eggs-for-omelets misses something fundamental. Because whatever accommodation that is achieved between the culture and the technology will be irreparably affected by social media. The future state will always be post-social media (and the resulting dislocations and maladies). Even after social media as we understand it no longer exists or is relevant, the scar will be there. And, so often, the "immune reaction" to a novel pathogen itself does lasting harm. Will our attempts to remediate the diseases that social media has created also do harm? Will these harms be only the first of many steps toward our increasing alienation, dehumanization, and societal disintegration? Maybe!
Is that too Doomer-y to think about? Well, what makes KK think that all technological development is "good?" As he explained, scenarios can help you to not be surprised, and often surprises are very unpleasant. There's nothing inherent in the development of tools and skills (or our societal reaction thereto) that guarantees goodness. The future can, in fact, be very bad. And in the present and recent past there's already been compelling evidence that despite our ever-increasing riches and health-/life-span, rich-world people have hit a limit in my lifetime on increasing happiness or edification, or even regressed. Presumably because of the cultural changes ushered in by wealth and various technologies?
Of course social media is different, but I don't see that it follows that we can't learn to use it in a responsible, healthy, society-improving way. I think that we already learning how to do this, in real time. It looks so bad right now imo because we've see the negative so clearly but don't yet see how how efforts to reduce that are in the process of producing a system that decentivizes the negatives and promotes the positives.
Its a brand new thing, and we always tend to misuse brand new things. But we will figure it out with time, just like we did with printing, radio, television, video games, and social media.
Such original and though-provoking stuff!! Thanks so much to both.
"Information wants to be copied, like life" - beautiful. There's competition there though, and it's needed - just look how much life spends on immune systems against some virus. Would be careful to conclude how we must manage copyrights in our society - I know it's strange for a free subscriber to say...
"Consciousness-free AIs will be advertised" is also beautiful, though I wonder if it's not really about individuality-free intelligence. Like organisms get rid of individualist cancer cells. But it will be interesting to see what kind of intelligence can emerge that is not individualist.
When the topic is technology and the future, here's a simple efficient method of determining whether a writer is an expert. Before you read the article, you can do a quick search of the article for "nuclear weapons". If the search comes up empty, you're not reading an expert.
You may still enjoy the article of course, as all of us have the right to speculate about the future. Just keep in mind, if we don't meet the nuclear weapons threat, there isn't going to be a future worth speculating about.
It's the simplest thing. Imagine that you have a friend that walks around all day with a loaded gun in his mouth. But he's too bored by the gun to bother discussing it, so he'd rather talk about his dreamy plans for his future. But you know that his future will last only until the next time he trips over a curb, or bumps in to a door.
It's the simplest thing. That's why "experts" have so much trouble getting it.
I think we all get that nuclear annihilation is a threat - we've only been talking about it nonstop since the 50s. Its always a danger that we have to think about now, but its not like we haven't been working on it.
There are lots of new interesting threats though, like engineered diseases and killer robots and the like. I don't know why everybody should have to address your pet theory of destruction before addressing others, or they are not an expert. The domain of futurism is big enough to support multiple types of experts!
No, we haven't been talking about nukes non-stop since the 50s. We don't even talk about nukes in presidential campaigns. Until we get rid of nukes, the domain of futurism is an exercise in fantasy. No, we don't all get that nuclear annihilation is a threat. If we did, we wouldn't be talking about anything else. Sorry, but you post is just more of the denial disease that afflicts the entire culture.
And I think your comments are not a waste of time, because we should talk about nukes, but they do smack of some pretty impressive self-regard, because you think other people are stupid if they think other issues are worth talking about.
If I had a loaded gun in mouth would that be just one of many issues in my life?
If I was bored by the gun, and preferred to talk about a thousand other things instead, would you consider me rational?
If I was talking about my future, how seriously would you take that talk if I was walking around with a loaded gun in my mouth that I found boring?
What are nuclear weapons but a loaded gun in the mouth of this civilization?
Are we bored by them? There's a presidential campaign coming up where we will select a _single human being_ to have sole authority over America's nuclear arsenal. As that campaign unfolds make a mental note of how much attention nukes get as compared to other topics.
We want to talk about just about anything other than the single biggest most imminent threat to the survival of America as a nation, and this blindness goes all the way to the top. Nuclear weapons denial disease has infected the vast majority of the population, including nearly the entire elite class.
And that's why you think the state of my self regard is a topic deserving of your attention.
Sorry, I don't mean this to be a personal attack, and I appreciate your engagement. I should probably bail on blog comments altogether, as I seem to be running out of patience with the process.
I can hardly avoid noticing it, but you're right its not worthy of attention.
At some point the gun becomes a part of your life, and seeing as how there are other things going on in life, and the efforts to remove the gun are slow and difficult and not especially tractable, you do have to accept that the gun is there and shift attention to other things. At least if you would like there to still be a life worth living once you do finally get that gun out.
Anyway my objection is not to the idea that we should pay more attention to the weight of nuclear weapons. We probably could do with more.
I understand your objection to be my claim that people like Kelly are not really experts unless they demonstrate an understanding that everything they're talking about regarding the future depends on us solving the nuclear weapons problem. And perhaps you don't care for the way in which I make that point.
Once you truly understand that everything we're discussing about the future depends upon the nuclear weapons question, it won't be long before you begin to clearly see the intellectual emptiness of nearly the entire class of intellectual and cultural elites.
Should you decide to act on that insight by sharing it, that will take some confidence, because you will be ignored and shouted down nearly everywhere you attempt such sharing. The thing is, people don't want to see how empty our elites really are, because that's almost scarier than nuclear weapons.
So, what to do?
I'm receptive to an argument that it would be kinder and more constructive to allow readers to remain safely in the cozy dream of the fantasy status quo. It also would be far better business for a writer to only rock the boat a little bit, but not too much. The more insightful an article, the smaller the audience.
So I feel myself headed in that direction, towards an acceptance that such issues are far bigger than any of us. But for now, I still haven't given up hope, so I'll keep shouting in to the expert machine a bit longer. And if that makes me look arrogant, so be it.
Aouch, tough reality check. We're daydreaming with a loaded gun in our mouth.
I would say though that that being the main threat doesn't mean we can afford to not think about other ones - of which there are plenty - especially considering we've had that gun in there for 60 years already
I don't object to thinking about other threats. I'm just suggesting we prioritize threats in order of importance. Something that could literally happen TODAY would seem to out rank other threats.
60 years. Apologies, but that kind of thinking reminds me of the fellow playing Russian roulette who takes comfort in the fact that everything is going ok so far.
“ Edison is renowned primarily because he was the first to figure out the business model of electric lighting.” This is a good example of an exceptional individual making a difference, not just simultaneous discovery. What use is an invention without someone to distribute it?
I doubt that the world would be bereft of commercially viable electric lighting just because Edison wasn't born - somebody else would have figured it out and capitalized on it soon enough.
I agree, but the fact is that it would have to be someone of Edison’s calibre. We cannot entirely remove the individual from our analysis. Few could do it.
When KK mentioned similar technologies simultaneously arising on separate continents I thought he might venture into the idea of the collective human unconscious (Joseph Campbell and Rupert Sheldrake come to mind as intrigued by this phenomenon). I mean talk about the undiscovered region---our unconscious seems to be uniquely human, out of reach by AI.
I think there's a provincialism at play - we have no way of knowing what kinds of discussions are taking place in other languages. There could be an equivalent to this blog published only in Farsi, Mandarin, etc. I think the concept goes back many generations - and heaven forbid, you might want to ask a ...
Are you adopting some kind of number-for-word cipher, Noah, like the Culper Ring? I guess 5 = which...
"His books and articles are a mix of technological prediction, interpretation 83 of the current zeitgeist, and philosophical exploration. Interestingly, his most recent book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is a book of life advice! His intellectual breadth and ability to synthesize various seemingly unrelated trends and ideas are something to 5 I can only aspire. "
I had exactly that same thought there. It struck me the way that English speakers use "4" for "for" and "2" for "to" or "too", and Chinese speakers use "8" for "wealthy", but I couldn't think of a language that pronounced "5" and "which" the same way.
I find podcasts to be a waste of time- too little real content over too long a time commitment, even at double speed. I only have a limited time per day to gather info. I’ll read transcripts, though (and I visit Cowen’s MR website)
Perhaps if I still had a long commute I would listen to Podcasts.
The other activities you mention, and I would add gardening, that is when I let my mind quietly drift in an alpha state and do subconscious processing. I need several hours of this daily to function
One of the best writers on the subject of the emergent properties of a technological society writes here on Substack: Paul Kingsnorth. He writes The Abbey of Misrule.
"It is NOT difficult to program in ethical and moral guidelines into AIs — it is just more code"
You know I'm thinking this guy might not know what gradient descent is (or any other training method).
Consider some extremely simple guidelines: don't tell users how to hotwire cars or rob banks. LLM developers are working pretty hard on controlling AIs and yet they can't reliably follow even the simplest guidelines like those.
Modern AIs consist of billions of parameters, which are just numbers, they're called "model weights". Trying to figure out how modern AIs work is hard, it's called "interpretability", and interpretability researchers still have very little idea how GPT2 works, let alone GPT3.
Very Nice Interview... On AI, one worry is the impact on innovation. On the plus side, generative AI programs such as chatGPT are great at building a first draft .... kind of like your own "creator" buddy and preventing the blank page syndrome. On the other hand, the integration of these programs into core editing functions creates a sort of uniformity which raises the barrier for building unique thought. The advantage of uniformity is clearer communication. However, there is an old philosophical paradigm where miscommunication and misinterpretation lives in a world of knowledge much bigger than the original. Some very creative and innovative things have been discovered from miscommunication and misinterpretation.
I used to work for this guy. I didn't really appreciate it at the time but the culture and vision he built around Wired and HotWired in the mid 90s was really rocket fuel for the Internet. As Louise Rosetto said in the original issue of Wired "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon." And it did.
Kevin Kelly is a very thought-provoking writer but he doesn't really address your question about the isolating impact of social media. I don't find his comparisons with cable TV and radio encouraging because the sheer reach and instantaneous effects of social media signal something qualitatively and not just quantitatively new. Throw in the long-term mental health effects of short attention spans and echo chambers and I don't think you can quickly dismiss social media problems as overstated.
I'm reminded by the often quoted (but less often properly contextualized or understood) rejoinder by Keynes, "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again." KK is making the same mistake that the economists Keynes was critiquing here were making: waving away the merely short-term effects of a new technology as the culture-innovation cycle (presumably) achieves equilibrium again.
In the long run, every Millennial and Gen Zer who grew up in the world that social media hath wrought will be dead. And so will be every Gen Xer and Boomer who maybe weren't shaped in their formative years by social media, but very much lived in and through it in their adulthood. But before we're ushered off the stage to make room for the future, there is a whole cohort of people affected by having their formative years set on a path dependency through social media and a lot of stuff that happens meanwhile. Hardly any of the 8 billion people alive today are unaffected and, since the human lifespan is relatively long, that will have big effects for a long time. Social media will have imprinted us and, by extension, directly shape the world through the entire 21st Century. Just like radio and movies and TV deeply affected the 20th, in ways both good and bad. (And remember, radio and TV weren't just about making us layabouts or cultural philistines. They were also essential to the development and mass appeal of Fascism, among other things. Was WWII merely a growing pain?)
So just waving that away as if it's all just eggs-for-omelets misses something fundamental. Because whatever accommodation that is achieved between the culture and the technology will be irreparably affected by social media. The future state will always be post-social media (and the resulting dislocations and maladies). Even after social media as we understand it no longer exists or is relevant, the scar will be there. And, so often, the "immune reaction" to a novel pathogen itself does lasting harm. Will our attempts to remediate the diseases that social media has created also do harm? Will these harms be only the first of many steps toward our increasing alienation, dehumanization, and societal disintegration? Maybe!
Is that too Doomer-y to think about? Well, what makes KK think that all technological development is "good?" As he explained, scenarios can help you to not be surprised, and often surprises are very unpleasant. There's nothing inherent in the development of tools and skills (or our societal reaction thereto) that guarantees goodness. The future can, in fact, be very bad. And in the present and recent past there's already been compelling evidence that despite our ever-increasing riches and health-/life-span, rich-world people have hit a limit in my lifetime on increasing happiness or edification, or even regressed. Presumably because of the cultural changes ushered in by wealth and various technologies?
Of course social media is different, but I don't see that it follows that we can't learn to use it in a responsible, healthy, society-improving way. I think that we already learning how to do this, in real time. It looks so bad right now imo because we've see the negative so clearly but don't yet see how how efforts to reduce that are in the process of producing a system that decentivizes the negatives and promotes the positives.
Its a brand new thing, and we always tend to misuse brand new things. But we will figure it out with time, just like we did with printing, radio, television, video games, and social media.
Noah, it was a great interview. You let KK talk and he was interesting and provocative. A lot to think about.
Such original and though-provoking stuff!! Thanks so much to both.
"Information wants to be copied, like life" - beautiful. There's competition there though, and it's needed - just look how much life spends on immune systems against some virus. Would be careful to conclude how we must manage copyrights in our society - I know it's strange for a free subscriber to say...
"Consciousness-free AIs will be advertised" is also beautiful, though I wonder if it's not really about individuality-free intelligence. Like organisms get rid of individualist cancer cells. But it will be interesting to see what kind of intelligence can emerge that is not individualist.
When the topic is technology and the future, here's a simple efficient method of determining whether a writer is an expert. Before you read the article, you can do a quick search of the article for "nuclear weapons". If the search comes up empty, you're not reading an expert.
You may still enjoy the article of course, as all of us have the right to speculate about the future. Just keep in mind, if we don't meet the nuclear weapons threat, there isn't going to be a future worth speculating about.
It's the simplest thing. Imagine that you have a friend that walks around all day with a loaded gun in his mouth. But he's too bored by the gun to bother discussing it, so he'd rather talk about his dreamy plans for his future. But you know that his future will last only until the next time he trips over a curb, or bumps in to a door.
It's the simplest thing. That's why "experts" have so much trouble getting it.
I think we all get that nuclear annihilation is a threat - we've only been talking about it nonstop since the 50s. Its always a danger that we have to think about now, but its not like we haven't been working on it.
There are lots of new interesting threats though, like engineered diseases and killer robots and the like. I don't know why everybody should have to address your pet theory of destruction before addressing others, or they are not an expert. The domain of futurism is big enough to support multiple types of experts!
No, we haven't been talking about nukes non-stop since the 50s. We don't even talk about nukes in presidential campaigns. Until we get rid of nukes, the domain of futurism is an exercise in fantasy. No, we don't all get that nuclear annihilation is a threat. If we did, we wouldn't be talking about anything else. Sorry, but you post is just more of the denial disease that afflicts the entire culture.
And I think your comments are not a waste of time, because we should talk about nukes, but they do smack of some pretty impressive self-regard, because you think other people are stupid if they think other issues are worth talking about.
If I had a loaded gun in mouth would that be just one of many issues in my life?
If I was bored by the gun, and preferred to talk about a thousand other things instead, would you consider me rational?
If I was talking about my future, how seriously would you take that talk if I was walking around with a loaded gun in my mouth that I found boring?
What are nuclear weapons but a loaded gun in the mouth of this civilization?
Are we bored by them? There's a presidential campaign coming up where we will select a _single human being_ to have sole authority over America's nuclear arsenal. As that campaign unfolds make a mental note of how much attention nukes get as compared to other topics.
We want to talk about just about anything other than the single biggest most imminent threat to the survival of America as a nation, and this blindness goes all the way to the top. Nuclear weapons denial disease has infected the vast majority of the population, including nearly the entire elite class.
And that's why you think the state of my self regard is a topic deserving of your attention.
Sorry, I don't mean this to be a personal attack, and I appreciate your engagement. I should probably bail on blog comments altogether, as I seem to be running out of patience with the process.
I can hardly avoid noticing it, but you're right its not worthy of attention.
At some point the gun becomes a part of your life, and seeing as how there are other things going on in life, and the efforts to remove the gun are slow and difficult and not especially tractable, you do have to accept that the gun is there and shift attention to other things. At least if you would like there to still be a life worth living once you do finally get that gun out.
Anyway my objection is not to the idea that we should pay more attention to the weight of nuclear weapons. We probably could do with more.
Maybe you should. Maybe I should.
I understand your objection to be my claim that people like Kelly are not really experts unless they demonstrate an understanding that everything they're talking about regarding the future depends on us solving the nuclear weapons problem. And perhaps you don't care for the way in which I make that point.
Once you truly understand that everything we're discussing about the future depends upon the nuclear weapons question, it won't be long before you begin to clearly see the intellectual emptiness of nearly the entire class of intellectual and cultural elites.
Should you decide to act on that insight by sharing it, that will take some confidence, because you will be ignored and shouted down nearly everywhere you attempt such sharing. The thing is, people don't want to see how empty our elites really are, because that's almost scarier than nuclear weapons.
So, what to do?
I'm receptive to an argument that it would be kinder and more constructive to allow readers to remain safely in the cozy dream of the fantasy status quo. It also would be far better business for a writer to only rock the boat a little bit, but not too much. The more insightful an article, the smaller the audience.
So I feel myself headed in that direction, towards an acceptance that such issues are far bigger than any of us. But for now, I still haven't given up hope, so I'll keep shouting in to the expert machine a bit longer. And if that makes me look arrogant, so be it.
Aouch, tough reality check. We're daydreaming with a loaded gun in our mouth.
I would say though that that being the main threat doesn't mean we can afford to not think about other ones - of which there are plenty - especially considering we've had that gun in there for 60 years already
I don't object to thinking about other threats. I'm just suggesting we prioritize threats in order of importance. Something that could literally happen TODAY would seem to out rank other threats.
60 years. Apologies, but that kind of thinking reminds me of the fellow playing Russian roulette who takes comfort in the fact that everything is going ok so far.
“ Edison is renowned primarily because he was the first to figure out the business model of electric lighting.” This is a good example of an exceptional individual making a difference, not just simultaneous discovery. What use is an invention without someone to distribute it?
I doubt that the world would be bereft of commercially viable electric lighting just because Edison wasn't born - somebody else would have figured it out and capitalized on it soon enough.
I agree, but the fact is that it would have to be someone of Edison’s calibre. We cannot entirely remove the individual from our analysis. Few could do it.
When KK mentioned similar technologies simultaneously arising on separate continents I thought he might venture into the idea of the collective human unconscious (Joseph Campbell and Rupert Sheldrake come to mind as intrigued by this phenomenon). I mean talk about the undiscovered region---our unconscious seems to be uniquely human, out of reach by AI.
I think there's a provincialism at play - we have no way of knowing what kinds of discussions are taking place in other languages. There could be an equivalent to this blog published only in Farsi, Mandarin, etc. I think the concept goes back many generations - and heaven forbid, you might want to ask a ...
woman
Are you adopting some kind of number-for-word cipher, Noah, like the Culper Ring? I guess 5 = which...
"His books and articles are a mix of technological prediction, interpretation 83 of the current zeitgeist, and philosophical exploration. Interestingly, his most recent book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, is a book of life advice! His intellectual breadth and ability to synthesize various seemingly unrelated trends and ideas are something to 5 I can only aspire. "
I had exactly that same thought there. It struck me the way that English speakers use "4" for "for" and "2" for "to" or "too", and Chinese speakers use "8" for "wealthy", but I couldn't think of a language that pronounced "5" and "which" the same way.
If the other number in there had been a 93 instead of 83 I might think Noah was getting into Thelema. 😹
Brilliant on AI! In general excellent at speaking in well-edited, pithy summaries. If more people were like this I would listen to podcasts
Methinks you just haven't found good podcasts:
The Gist
Cool Tools (with Mr KK)
All Wired stuff
Hard Fork
Tyler Cowen
I find podcasts to be a waste of time- too little real content over too long a time commitment, even at double speed. I only have a limited time per day to gather info. I’ll read transcripts, though (and I visit Cowen’s MR website)
You listen to podcasts when you are working in the kitchen, or cleaning house, or exercising . . . that is, you aren't losing productive time.
Perhaps if I still had a long commute I would listen to Podcasts.
The other activities you mention, and I would add gardening, that is when I let my mind quietly drift in an alpha state and do subconscious processing. I need several hours of this daily to function
Never heard of this guy. Its nice that the world is big enough thats theres still interesting people with new ideas I haven't heard before.
One of the best writers on the subject of the emergent properties of a technological society writes here on Substack: Paul Kingsnorth. He writes The Abbey of Misrule.
"It is NOT difficult to program in ethical and moral guidelines into AIs — it is just more code"
You know I'm thinking this guy might not know what gradient descent is (or any other training method).
Consider some extremely simple guidelines: don't tell users how to hotwire cars or rob banks. LLM developers are working pretty hard on controlling AIs and yet they can't reliably follow even the simplest guidelines like those.
Modern AIs consist of billions of parameters, which are just numbers, they're called "model weights". Trying to figure out how modern AIs work is hard, it's called "interpretability", and interpretability researchers still have very little idea how GPT2 works, let alone GPT3.
If I want to start reading Kelly, what book should I start with.
What Technology Wants.
Ty
Great article and interview, thank you! So inspiring, refreshing, and energizing. KK is one of my favorite humans. I profiled him in one of my first pieces https://silviocastelletti.substack.com/p/the-inevitable-kevin-kelly
Great interview! I read Out of Control like a quarter century ago and its overarching themes have informed how I think ever since.
Very Nice Interview... On AI, one worry is the impact on innovation. On the plus side, generative AI programs such as chatGPT are great at building a first draft .... kind of like your own "creator" buddy and preventing the blank page syndrome. On the other hand, the integration of these programs into core editing functions creates a sort of uniformity which raises the barrier for building unique thought. The advantage of uniformity is clearer communication. However, there is an old philosophical paradigm where miscommunication and misinterpretation lives in a world of knowledge much bigger than the original. Some very creative and innovative things have been discovered from miscommunication and misinterpretation.
I used to work for this guy. I didn't really appreciate it at the time but the culture and vision he built around Wired and HotWired in the mid 90s was really rocket fuel for the Internet. As Louise Rosetto said in the original issue of Wired "The Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon." And it did.