Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success

Kevin Kelly has spent over 30 years experiencing the edge of new technology: from the earliest days of the internet to the first years of Burning Man. But he’s always treated the frontier as a place to visit, not somewhere to live. It’s partially how he’s been able to stay grounded through tech’s various hype cycles.

As founding executive editor of Wired and author of The Inevitable, Kelly spends as much time analyzing the latest in AI as he does reading about significant moments in history. It’s a discipline he traces back to his work with the Long Now Foundation, which he cofounded to encourage long-term thinking, reaching from the last 10,000 years to the next.

On this week’s AI & I, Dan Shipper revisits his conversation with Kelly. They get into why historians can be the best futurists, and how our bid to understand what intelligence is has parallels with early scientists' attempts to figure out electricity.

Kelly also describes the joy he found in creating an AI-generated saga featuring Leonardo Da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, and Martin Luther—one that will only ever be read and enjoyed by him.

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Timestamps for YouTube:

0:00 Start

0:50 Introduction

1:10 Why Dan and Kelly love Annie Dillard

12:52 How to predict the future like Kelly

16:10 What the history of electricity can teach us about AI

20:13 How Kelly thinks about the nature of intelligence

25:44 Kelly's advice on discovering your competitive advantage

29:33 How Kelly assembled a bench of star writers for Wired

34:43 How Kelly used ChatGPT to co-create a book

39:12 Using AI as a mirror for your mind

43:43 What Kelly learned from betting on VR in the 1980s

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Kevin Kelly on X: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly: https://www.amazon.com/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0525428089

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323

1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly: https://www.amazon.com/1000-True-Fans-Kellys-Simple-ebook/dp/B01N9P9O4G

Full episode transcript: https://every.to/podcast/transcript-be243312-ea22-4193-8c56-b9cd45a79a87