November 17, 2020

Kevin Kelly: Seeing the Future | North Star Podcast with David Perell

Check out the North Start Podcast Page & Episode Notes

Key Takeaways

• “Most of theology today is done by science-fiction” – Kevin Kelly
  • Science fiction grapples with the questions that theologians used to ask:
    • What does it mean to be human?
    • Why are we here?
    • Who do we want to become?
• You cannot solve problems by just thinking about them
  • Kevin calls “think-ism” a disease
  • To solve problems you have to actually try different things
    • If you ban technologies you’re not able to figure out how to steer them for our benefit
• Technology provides us opportunities to blossom
  – Imagine if Mozart was born before the invention of the piano
  – We have a moral obligation to develop new technologies to allow for everyone to express their genius
• We need to be careful to not optimize everything to be efficient
  • Efficiency is for robots, humans are inefficient
  • “Every single thing that we really value as humans is terribly inefficient” – Kevin Kelly
    • Science, discovery, art, adventure are all inefficient

Intro

• Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is a futurist, the co-founder of Wired Magazine, and a best-selling author
  • Check out Kevin’s website
  • Check out these podcasts notes from Kevin’s appearance on the Tim Ferris Show
• Host: David Perell (@whatdavidreads)
• In this chat, Kevin shares his views on the future and on the way technology helps humans blossom

The Transition from Books to Screens

• Text in books are fixed, permanent
  • Books represent authority
• Screens are fluid, dynamic, never finished (Wikipedia is a great example)
  • There’s no authority to tell you the truth
    • You have to assemble your own truth
• With books, the enemy we had to fight against was propaganda
  • With screens, our enemies become conspiracies

Theology and Futurism

• “Originalist” Christians see the predictions of the Bible as the only permitted scenario for the future
  • Kevin thinks that’s unfortunate because we need to think about more possible scenarios
• “Most of theology today is done by science-fiction” – Kevin Kelly
  • Science fiction grapples with the questions that theologians used to ask:
    • What does it mean to be human?
    • Why are we here?
    • Who do we want to become?

Can We Shape the Future of Technology?

• The future is intrinsically unpredictable
  • “We drive into the future using our rearview mirror” – Marshall McLuhan
  • We can use scenario-planning to envision what’s possible (even if unlikely)
    • While we can’t predict the future, we can be ready for it
  • Kevin sees his role not as trying to predict the future
    • Rather he’s imagining the future that we want to strive for
• Shaping the future of technology
  • You cannot solve problems by just thinking about them
    • Kevin calls “think-ism” a disease
    • To solve problems you have to actually try different things
  • If you ban technologies you’re not able to figure out how to steer them for our benefit
  • Social Media, is still in its infancy
    • We haven’t yet figured out how to use it properly
• Silicon Valley taught us to embrace failure when starting companies
  • Yet, we are not able to accept the “moral” failures of Social Media and other technologies
    • To be able to correct errors, we have to accept failures

How Amish Decide Which Technologies to Adopt

• Amish process to adopt new technologies
  • Few early adopters will use and test the technology
  • The rest of the community observes the effects on the early adopters
  • They decide to introduce a technology if they find that it strengthens their families and communities
• Kevin approves their evidence-based system towards adopting technology

Technology Help us Blossom

• The problem with Amish culture is that it offers a very limited set of choices
  • We have the choice to pursue many different possibilities
    • Each possibility is an opportunity for our talent to blossom
    • This is why people move to cities
  • Technology provides us opportunities to blossom
    • Imagine if Mozart was born before the invention of the piano
      • We have a moral obligation to develop new technologies to allow for everyone to express their genius

Technology Abuse and Protopia

• Kevin believes that every technology we invent can be weaponized
  • “The more powerful the technology, the more powerfully it will be abused” – Kevin Kelly
  • AI will be really abused
• Even the possibility for abuse of technology is an additional choice we didn’t have
  • Kevin sees additional choices as positive
    • This makes new technologies generally more good than evil
      • Over time, the small additional “goodness” will compound
• Kevin sees himself as a protopian
  • He believes in the power of incremental improvements that compound over time

Increased Destructive Capacity of Technology

• David is concerned that it only takes one moment to destroy everything
  • It’s getting easier for one person to do more and more harm
• Kevin was also concerned about this, so he looked at the evidence
  • According to evidence, one person’s ability to kill hasn’t increased dramatically over time
    • On average one person is able to kill around 100 people
  • We can imagine the possibility of one person killing’s capacity to increase dramatically
    • Kevin thinks it’d be a lot harder than we think
  • “As these technologies become more powerful, they become more social. They actually require more people to be involved” – Kevin Kelly
    • The need for more people becomes a deterrent to using them

Moral Progress and Technological Progress

• Technological progress allows us to live comfortably without fear of constant scarcity
  • Scarcity was often at the root of human “savage” behavior
  • Could moral progress be a result of technological progress?
• Kevin thinks that technology and science allowed us to create surplus
  • We can worry less about survival and focus more on other, higher things

Future Divergence in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• Kevin sees a convergence towards the lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy
  • Around the World, everyone aspires to have their basic needs met in the same way (house, food, clothing, etc…)
• He thinks we’ll see a divergence about the higher levels of the Hierarchy
  • What we are about, what is our purpose etc.

Noticing the Present to Understand the Future

• Some of Kevin’s writing looks like he’s trying to predict the future
  • David brings up the example of “New Rules for the New Economy”
    • In it, Kevin is actually accurately describing the present
      • Doing so he finds the direction in which the future is leaning

Fame, Creativity and Inefficient Government

• In Kevin’s essay “The Technium: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice“, he advises against becoming famous
  • Fame is a constraint against creativity
    • When you’re famous you’re not allowed to make mistakes (in all aspects of your life)
      • Creativity requires one to try different things and fail
• In a similar way, Government is not allowed to fail and cannot innovate
  • But that’s the role of government
  • “The business of Government is to be inefficient” – Kevin Kelly
    • During COVID governments are stockpiling millions of extra masks, just in case
    • No company could afford to do that

Why We Should not Optimize for Efficiency

• We need to be careful to not optimize everything to be efficient
  • Efficiency is for robots, humans are inefficient
  • “Every single thing that we really value as humans is terribly inefficient” – Kevin Kelly
    • Science, discovery, art, adventure are all inefficient
    • Clearly, not everything inefficient is desirable
• Kevin thinks we should optimize for opportunities, choices, innovation, love
  • Again, none of those are efficient

Efficiency in Writing

• Kevin writes to discover what he thinks
  • The process shows him how much he doesn’t know about a topic
    • It forces him to research
  • He doesn’t see his process as efficient
  • In writing, he optimizes for clarity
• How David uses dictation in writing
  • After writing his first draft, he records a three-minute summary
    • Speaking a summary forces him to structure his argument in a more cohesive way

Exotropy, Technology and California

• The term was coined by Max More
  • Extropy as a positive transhumanist evolution in the right direction
• Kevin appropriated and hijacked the term to mean the opposite of entropy
  • Entropy is the degradation of the Universe through increased disorder
• Exotropy (Kevin changed the term) stands for the positive force that increases order in areas of the Universe
  • As order increases in exotropic areas, entropy also increases outside those areas
  • Kevin sees technology as an exotropic force
• California is a hub of exotropy
  • Historically California’s culture has been libertarian, do it yourself, independent
  • People were encouraged to come up with their own solutions, think for themselves, find their own funding
    • This led to the startup culture and technological development that we see today

North Star Podcast : future, innovation, technology
Notes By Giorgio Parlato