SUMMARY KEYWORDS

technology, ai, people, invented, happen, invention, moral failure, civilization, world, problems, humans, life, terms, chinese, change, cities, species, future, travels, society

SPEAKERS

Kevin Kelly, Steven Parton

Kevin Kelly  00:00

That person and all the unborn behind them are waiting for us to invent a technology so that their genius can be shared. And that is the moral obligation we have to keep making new things keep finding new solutions. And what we gain out of all this is choices, possibilities, freedoms.

Steven Parton  00:35

Hello everyone, my name is Steven pardon and you're listening to the feedback loop on singularity radio, where we keep you up to date on the latest technological trends and how they're impacting the transformation of consciousness and culture from the individual to society at large. This week, our guest is the renowned Kevin Kelley, who many of you will no doubt recognize as the founding executive editor of Wired Magazine, and author of regulatory books such as what technology once and the inevitable. And this episode, we dig deeply into what drives Kevin's techno optimism, the ideas of spiritual technology, the future of China, the regulatory landscape of artificial intelligence, and ultimately, how technology has shaped our species, and what we define as the human condition. Now before I get into it, I do want to take a quick moment to let you all know about singularities premium membership experience and how you can unlock our special offer for two weeks of free access.

01:34

singularities premium membership is your chance to be part of an exclusive private community of like minded leaders and changemakers, who are committed to professional growth and impact. You'll have access to a constant stream of webinars, roundtables, and professional networking events focused on exploring the key concepts and trends of exponential technology, where you'll be joined by both your peers and by a panel of academics and experts. You will also receive research and insights created and curated by our global experts, which are designed to help members gather, develop and inform action on a variety of topics and issues related to exponential technology and impact. For a limited time, we're giving podcast listeners a free two week trial membership of this premium experience, simply by going to singularity.org slash two week trial, that's singularity.org slash two as in the number two week trial, where you can click try free to begin, you'll also find this link in the show notes of the podcast.

Steven Parton  02:39

And there you have it every one two weeks of premium membership are ready for the taking. So if you've ever wanted a chance to get a look inside singularity, this is a great opportunity to do so. So check that out if your curiosity is piqued. But for now, let's get into the reason you're here. Everyone, please welcome to the feedback loop, the Titan of technology himself, Kevin Kelley, one of the things that I found super inspiring about you, and that attracts me really deeply to your train of thought is that you have this really deep pool of techno optimism. And when I was looking into your bio, one of the things I realized was like myself, when you were in your early 20s, you went and traveled, the world started backpacking. And I know for me personally, that kind of constant exposure to new cultures gave me an acceptance of life that might be different than the life that I'd known. And I think that made me really open to the idea of kind of a radical future. For you personally, do you feel like your techno optimism comes from some of those earlier travels? Or do you think it comes from a different place?

Kevin Kelly  03:52

It comes from, okay, my optimism comes from several places, but there's definitely a very large component that has come from my travels in Asia, particularly at the time that I was traveling, which was began in the early 70s, at which time, a lot of these Asian countries were predominantly, you know, medieval, they had not changed in they're not been developed. So they were living very much as the head for hundreds, if not 1000s of years. And within my own experience, I saw them transforming from third world If not, you know, previous centuries into modern times, and then later on into the future where the some of the cities became even more advanced. And so at that time, when I was first traveling, and they were in medieval times, it was hard to imagine them progressing so fast. Didn't, there wasn't really a good explanation outside of technology for why that would have ever happened. And but seeing it happen even early on, it gave me a great sense of optimism of what was possible, because the progress they had done was hundreds of years progress in a very short time. And they were bootstrapping, it wasn't because some people from outside or making it happen, it was something that was an eternal ambition. And that sense of the possible, um, stayed with me, I realized, well, if those little villages in India could modernize as quickly as that, then there was and the reason why they could was because of all these technology that was coming in, that was the only change there was, there was a great resistance socially, and other things were all working against it. But the technology was what was really pushing this. And that made me very optimistic about the rest of the world and what we could do into the future.

Steven Parton  06:24

And another part of your techno optimism seems to come from this idea of the spiritual side of technology is something I feel like I've heard you talk a lot about, can you can you kind of, in your own words, tell me like what that spiritual side technology means to you?

Kevin Kelly  06:38

Yeah, um, we tend to think of technology as a very human activity. But it's something that humans have made that it's, you know, that it's artificial in that sense of artifice. And by the way, that's also where we get this, I think, mistaken idea that it's contrary to nature, because it's sort of like we have set ourselves in our minds that as opposing nature. But I kind of came to a different conclusion. And my conclusion is that technology is a cosmic force. It's not really a human forces, the cosmic force that began at the Big Bang, and it's part of the kind of self organizing dynamic that has organized matter into molecules and stars, the whole star sequence, and out of that planets, it's self organized, and, you know, even the galaxies themselves, but certainly, in at least one neighborhood, we have self organizing life, which came from the right conditions, and it has self organize all these species, and including them is a self organizing citians mindfulness. And I see the I see what we do with technology as an extension, an acceleration of that. And it's governed by the same kind of inherit laws that organize these self organization. And in that sense, I would say it's a reflection of things bigger than us, it's, it's a big story, there's a huge arc through the universe, of course, the technology is running through us and will go beyond us. And we ourselves are both created and the creators we are we have made ourselves we have invented our humanity. And we will continue to invent it. And of course, in other galaxies around the or even other planets in the galaxy, there will be other forms of technology. So I decided to find technologies, anything that the mind makes, I would include that. Animals beavers, and birds who use their brains to make things and I think it's extended to whatever other alien species might be making. So technology, and in my book, they will replicate a lot of the developmental sequence of technologies is that they it was service developmental, not just evolutionary, meaning that it will replicate certain sequences is built into the physics, you know, just you're going to this is our kind of inevitable elements made through instars. There'll be elemental discoveries are made on any planet, with with with technology until there is a sense of inevitability about general forms of what are made, that are governed by the physics. And so so that is, that is a kind of story of technology being an inherent component of the universe that begins at the Big Bang, run through it. It's large their selves. And to the extent that you have any sense of the Divine, I would say that technology is a reflection of that divineness, that divinity, and so so that would be the kind of spiritual component, and then there's kind of a funnel moral component to it. And that is that one of the directions, there's no destiny, here, there's no omega point there, we're just radiating out different directions. And one of those directions is that we, life, and all these other things self organization, including the technium technology, what it's doing is it's increasing. The possible things that could exist, it's increasing the space of possibility, it's making more things possible. So thing about life is that without life, there are certain arrangements of atoms that just aren't going to happen to improbable. In fact, most things that happen in life are improbable. But how we get to those things, is through this process called life. So it's assembling the improbable. And it's, each time we make a new species actually opens up the territory for new species. That's the genius of ecology and ecosystems is that they create niches, rather than new species, filling up niches, new species actually curate further niches. And so you have this kind of expanding platform, of which again, technology is an extension of that. And that expanding platform is the path platform of the possible. And so what we're doing with technology is increasing the choices and possibilities that we have in life. And that's the difference between us and someone living 1000 years ago, is that we sitting around here, even the poorest of us today, have far more choices about what we can do in any any dimension from do as play or do as work, then someone 1000 years ago. And the reason why people streaming by the hundreds of millions into cities today is because they're coming, because there's choices that they don't have in their beautiful villages with their organic foods and their strong communities and their beautiful VISTAs and the certainty of knowing who they are, they leave all that to go to a city where it's grimy and gritty and unknown, because there's a chance that they could be a mathematician or a ballerina or web designer instead of just being only a farmer. And so technology is the force that's making these opportunities and choices possible is making the possibilities possible. It's through technology stuff that we invent. And what it does is it gives us individually more possible ways to share our special mix of talents. And and even though this is not panacea, this is not utopia, this is pro topia, where there is as many new problems being made, what we gain out of all this is choices, possibilities, freedoms, options. And that, and we have a moral obligation to keep expanding that and that is the the moral dimension of technology.

Steven Parton  13:46

You mentioned earlier there that humanity was our first invention, right? Can you unpack that a little bit?

Kevin Kelly  13:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have been wheat? Well, let's start with a kind of a passive thing. We have been changing or have been been changed in our genes, ever, even from the time that we recognize ourselves assuming we've been undergoing genetic change. And a lot of that genetic change, and I love it, some of the genetic change that we've undergone, has come from the things that we have made. So we domesticated other animals, the herding animals, and milk the cows and goats, horses. And very quickly, we evolved adult lactose tolerance in response to this new channel of nutrition. So our genes that we change, and we invented this domestication and then we change ourselves in response to that, for our selves. To respond to that. And likewise, when we invented or captured or controlled fire, and started cooking, the main thing that cooking was doing was that it was, it was an external stomach, it was a way to digest things that we would not been capable of digesting without the food. So therefore, we had, again, an additional kind of nutrition that very quickly, again, reshaped our brains and our teeth in our jaws responds to cooked food. So, and we became dependent, in some ways on cooking, to have the kind of nutrition that could enable the kind of brain that we had. So cooking, in some ways was associated, I wouldn't say it cause but it's associated with our large brains and our ability later on to have consciousness and so and so that is one way in which our inventions have been changing us. And so I argue that we're the first animal that we domesticated. Even before dogs, or cows, or goats, we domesticated ourselves, we made ourselves more civilized, we made our selves more dependent on our inventions and our own technology. And people often talk about the moment when we kind of become wholly dependent on technology. And we can't live our lives without it. And the, the truth is that we pass that hundreds of 1000s of years ago, maybe even a million years ago. Because without technology without a blade, without the control of fire, we're defenseless, against predatory animals, we would die instantly. So if you eradicated every bit of technology from the planet, we could not have a knife, or a stick or use a stone as a hammer or fire, we're not going to last long. So we are have been completely dependent on technology for our survival for a very long time. And, of course, we're binding that ever more so where the distinction between us and technology is not so clear. And again, we've been moving in that direction for a long, long time. And, you know, we have, I don't know what percentage of the people who wear corrective eye glasses or LASIK, and it's a very large percentage of the people who depend on this technology just to see. And so in that way, I say that we're inventing ourselves and in all, lots of the things that we attribute to us, as humans, maybe a sense of fairness, a sense of law, mercy, are primarily things that are conveyed in culture, and culture, something that we don't inherit those necessarily, in our genes were not born. With that there are some aspects of it. We felt cheated. I mean, animals cheated. But But by and large, a lot of the things that we associate with being human and humanity are things that are carried by the culture, which is I mentioned about us. We're passing on things through grandmothers and through oral and teaching, that is the technology, the technology of language, which we've invented. And so in that way, our humanity is something that we have invented. Yeah, that

Steven Parton  19:05

made me think do you feel like a lot of our cultural upgrades, you know, civil discourse, things like democracy, a lot of things we hold important as values, they seem to often be the result of technological advances, right? were writing books on the internet, it seems like civil rights, for instance, are benefited by more people being able to see empathetically and two different lives through the internet. Is that something that you see a lot with technology as a forcing function for cultural upgrades?

Kevin Kelly  19:40

Absolutely. You put you put it very well and we are alive. Our sense of justice and fairness comes and we kind of over said Yeah, because some the law which is written down if the law was just oral, it's much harder to enforce it to believe it. The fact that it's in Ain't it doesn't change supposedly gives us monumental authority. And so absolutely, I would, I would say, you know, a lot of what we believe about ourselves and humanity has been enabled through the technology, the social technology that we've invented, including things like loss which we have, which we have in the back of our mind, that kind of sense of fairness, the, you know, I believe in moral progress, I believe that we do progress in moral dimension. And that's all carried again, in the culture, which is, it's carried either by writing and oral transmission, and behavior and norms. But it's carried by this invention of a society and civilization. Civilization Asserts Itself, of course, is a is an invention. And it does a lot, you know, education, the whole idea of kind of domesticating young males, as basically what civilizations job is, is to domesticate young males, otherwise, they're just barbarians, and they'll destroy you. So that is, yeah, that's that, I think, is primarily, again, I have a very broad definition of technology. So I will include all our social constructs as technological,

Steven Parton  21:35

even language for that matter,

Kevin Kelly  21:36

even language, calendars, all these soft things are things that are carried by the culture and the culture is intervention, as well

Steven Parton  21:50

as speaking of culture, and going back to your travels a little bit. You spent a lot of time in China, I believe at some point, you said you go about every three months or so I pre pandemic, of course. Well, how do you reconcile what you're seeing happening in China, and maybe even specifically around their social technologies, with your predictions for the future? Because it seems like there's a really a bit of a tension between the western world's approach to the future of technology and the eastern world. And being somebody who's so close to both. Yeah. I'd love to hear how you reconcile that. Yeah.

Kevin Kelly  22:26

So one explanation for the primarily the Chinese way, maybe some extent, what could happen in you know, Korea and Japan, who were neighbors, but I'm wondering explanation for what, for the Chinese way with this data technology, is that they're going for a total total information society. And their premise is, look, we're engineers, we're going to engineer society. And if we're engineering policies, we want to based on data. We want to have as much data about how people actually behave in order to make the best policy decisions. This, that's a very reasonable beginning point. Let's take let's have evidence based policy. And we're going to gather as much data as we can to make evidence based policy, therefore we will track everything. That is the initial thought. And the thing about it is, it's actually a really good way to make policy. So the dangers is very obvious, which is well total transparency is total surveillance. If if it's the status doing it, then you have a problem of power and symmetry. And so you know, the the downsides of that are very obvious to everybody. And so it's going to come down to like, well, what's, where do you make the trade off? And more importantly, in my vocabulary is how do you restore the symmetry? So the thing about transparency is that if a transparency is asymmetrical, meaning there's large institutions that know everything about you, but you don't know anything about them, or what they're using for how they do it, that's asymmetrical. If you had a really, truly total transparent thing, you'd be able to know as much about what's going on inside the government inside everything that would be a different world. That's the David Brin, transparent society version, which I think is worth considering. And so. So for me, I think some of the unease the justifiable unease we have about that is that is because there's an asymmetry, because there's a asymmetrical in unequal balance. And we're the knowledge and motivation goes all going one way. If we can restore some of that symmetry, then I think we feel better, because in actual fact, humans, over millions of years, evolved. Without any privacy whatsoever. We're totally used to this, we're totally comfortable knowing everything there is about each other. But it's symmetrical. I know everything about you literally. I mean, it's it, people have no idea modern people don't appreciate how intimate tribal life was it how much you were visible to each other. And there are some not so good things about that. But we do know that we're okay with it. I mean, that we can live with it. So. So I think having a total transparency society is not we have existence proof that some version of that can work. Whether it works in modern world remains to be seen, they want to figure out what kind of trade off so you want to do it, but I suspect that it's worth considering. And so the Chinese are kind of pioneering one version of that. And that's the version of like an evidence based policy society. And I think they will go further than most people think they will. Chinese are supporting it so far. Because they had 300 million or more, maybe 500, half 2 billion people moved from the countryside into cities who were not prepared for city life. They were literally country bumpkins. They crapped on the street, they they weren't prepared for living that way. And so there was a lot of crime, corruption. You know, sleaze. bad attitudes don't mean there was a lot of bills. And having the transparent society has actually really, truly helped. The Chinese see that, and they know that. It's like, oh, put cameras everywhere, people behave a lot better. I'm for that. And so um, so so far, generally, they have the backing of the general citizen, because the total surveillance that they have had, in general, has been worth it to them for the freedom, the political freedom that they don't have, that they're aware of that they don't have. And they're saying, Well, if I have to choose between being able to publicly criticize the government or having nobody steal my car, because of the cameras, I'll take, I'll take two cameras. It's a

Steven Parton  29:01

good trade.

Kevin Kelly  29:01

Yeah. Do you

Steven Parton  29:03

you've said before that. Do you think the Chinese need to embrace failure and challenge authority or I believe that's something you said, Do you think that's one of the ways to help restore that symmetry that you're talking about? Is that kind of Why that? Yeah. It's meaningful to you.

Kevin Kelly  29:21

Yeah, I think questioning authority, which is sort of the iconic American stance, it's what almost every American Hollywood movie is about. That is that that's sort of part of the parcel of, you know, the demand and transparency being symmetrical. And it's larger than just that transparency. In Chinese society. You are penalised for failure. It's simply it's a moral weakness. So that was the genius of Silicon Valley. The Jesus suddenly It was a took failure. And they demoralized they say, if someone takes a couple 100 million or million $200 million and loses it, it's not a moral failure. That's not a bad person. That was just they didn't experiment and it didn't work. That's like science. That's a huge, that's a huge step away from that, you know, 50 years ago or something when someone who had a business and they lost $500 million. They that's, that was a moral failure that was considered irresponsible, weakness, selfish selfishness, whatever it is. And so, Silicon Valley demoralized failure, which is one of the reasons why I think the whole movement of blaming Facebook and other social media companies as being evil and moral failure is a complete step backwards. Because they're just, they're trying to keep up. They're trying, they don't know what to do, or they're not doing any barbers are trying their hardest, and doing experiments, and they're now being prohibited from making failures from doing things, to test things to try things out. And what if you prevent someone for from failing? That's the even then you're going to have even more worse disasters.

Steven Parton  31:16

On that note of preventing people from failing it, where do you stand in terms of regulations, specifically around things like AI and synthetic biology where you want to tread carefully?

Kevin Kelly  31:27

I think tread carefully is is the word. So there is in the in the activist movement, there's a thing called the precautionary principle. And they applied to mostly technological advances. And the premise is very simple, which is that we should not allow anything to we can prove, or has been proven to not cause harm. And at first glance, that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to request is okay, we're not going to adopt this until we can prove that it's not going to harm everybody. The problem is, there are many problems with it, starting with the fact that all the existing technologies we have today are causing harm, but they're not being subject to that same criteria. So there there is always harm everything, in fact, doing nothing will cause harm. And all those have to be factored in compared to the new harm that the new thing will bring. And secondly, of course, it's hard to prove the absence of something. But there is a way in which we tend to once approve something not to go back and look at it. Again, FDA approves of drug and that's the end of it. But it could be misused, it could be used in 1000 different ways. Once it's approved, it could change over time. And so what we really want to have something called the proaction airy principle, where we are constantly checking, and we're actually again, using evidence based for actual harms caused rather than imagined harms, which is a lot of what most precautionary is you can imagine something happening, and therefore you got to prove that imaginary thing won't happen. It's like what, that doesn't work. So. So we take an evidence based thing is actually so we try things, we use things. So we, we steer by use, you steer something by using it and trying to relocate into a place where it is more useful and less harmful. And we base on evidence of use rather than the fear of what could happen. And so the cautionary principle is, I think the principle we want to bring to the new technologies with genetic engineering or whatever is we can and Hollywood is really good at is we can imagine 1000 things that could go wrong. But let's just talk, let's but we're not going to do that because no invention has ever been used for what the inventor imagined first for using. And so we're going to use things and keep using them and keep tracking them constantly going back, taking the data, changing our course based on what actually happens. And hey, I think is unique among almost any other technology we've had up to this point. For the amount of energy and effort that we have spent imagining what it would do before actually arrived. It's amazing how much attention we've given to something before it's possible. And I think as a net, I think that's a good I think that's good that we're doing that but we just have to unravel or step back and understand that while we want to do that we don't want to make too much policy based on what we fear could happen. And that we should use it to guide us in terms of running the experiments and trying stuff, but not necessarily in trying to make policy. So I think we have to regulate, I think it's necessary, I think that's part of civilization. But I think that regulation has to be can't be premature. And it has to be based on evidence of actual use, if we do that, I think would be much, much better. Now already in using things like AI, we can detect that there are some bias problems. Okay. And this is where the precautionary principle comes in. How do they compare to the other bias problems that we have the all the other systems, if we don't use that system? There's another system we're using? What what are its bias problems? So So, um, it's always in the context of either nothing or what's old, that has to be new can't be compared just by itself?

Steven Parton  36:05

Yeah, as you're saying that it's making me think that we're mad at AI for the bias problem. But in reality, what it did was expose a bias problem that existed for a lifetime. Spread, right, right, kind of helped move us forward in that regard.

Kevin Kelly  36:18

And that's something by the way that I was saying about the kind of ethics ethics stuff. We turns I mean, it turns out that actually, teaching AI ethics is actually pretty easy. Because this, this code, says the loss of principles. The problem with the teaching, the AI ethics would turn out to be is that our ethics unit are so lousy, so shallow, they're so inconsistent. That when we went to examine them, we realized that there were we couldn't, we couldn't communicate them because they were just so they weren't robust enough, right. And in the process of having to teach the AI's essence, what we're learning is to strengthen our own ethics as a civilization to make it clear and more consistent. And so in that way, as always, our technology will make us better humans. So having to teach ethics to AI will make us better ethically.

Steven Parton  37:24

Yeah, I often think about in terms of Jungian psychology, as in technologies and as the embodiment of our shadow, like the things about ourselves that we don't accept, get manifested in technology, and then we get mad at technology for showing us a part of ourselves.

Kevin Kelly  37:39

I would agree with that other than the focus on the union shadow and I would say, well, it's also the union halos. It's a star best. It's the technology is also a mirror of our best aspirations of humans are super humaneness. Absolutely. So so so I think it's fair to say yes, there's a projection of ourselves. But it's not just the negative shadow. It's also encapsulates the best of our humanity and our super humaneness.

Steven Parton  38:09

Speaking of the best, you know, you were talking there about how Hollywood has done a great job show showing us historic futures. What can you paint me you're not utopian, but maybe you're pro topik version of the future maybe a near term pro topia, were you what you're kind of working towards?

Kevin Kelly  38:29

Yeah, it's a fair question. And actually, I am trying to write it down. I would say that well, there's a couple of ways to frame it. There's a lot to say about it. But one interesting way to frame it was there's a there was a economist, Robert Gordon, who was very skeptical of computers and the high tech stuff, saying look, you know, like Thoreau said, we see it everywhere. We just don't see an economic results. And he was saying that he believed he was he was kind of the origins of this guy, the great stagnation, this idea that you're stagnating men by his calculation by his thesis. Were stagnating because they because the until now, the Great Leap Forward and progress that we've seen has come about because there were like five one time events five one time forces that came together that were only going to happen once in history. And then we kind of benefited from that and an example of that was women moving into the workforce? Okay, well, that serve only happens once now. All the women are there so okay. You don't have that boost anymore. And he had five of these one time events and so I've been thinking out? Well, that may be true. But I think there are coming one time events, I think there's five more ahead of us that are going to come. And I'm trying to imagine what they could be. And one of them is, is this idea that we are going to come to the point where every single adult on the planet is linked up together? This kind of universal connection, this global one machine where we form kind of a entity that's capable of collaborating at the planetary scale, that will, there will be a first time when that happens once and I think we're going to be alive for for that moment, where you have this awakening of this civilization global civilization. So I think that's one thing. I think AI is a second thing, I think it happens one time when you bring in, you know, it's just like electrification industrialization that happened once. I think this is where we kind of automate the intellect or make synthetic intelligence. That's a one time event, but they'll take a century for it to happen. But it's, it's sort of like it's a big thing. And I think there's so many things and problems that will come from it. That is bigger than industrialization, in terms of event. And we are at the beginning of that, so we're going to see those things coming along. In starting now. I mean, we're seeing it so that's, that's there. And the shoes disruptions, but they're not. This is not gonna happen overnight, it's gonna take 10 years, 15 years to make auto driven driving cars are not happening tomorrow, this could take a long time, we have to change the road structure. It's not just like you put robots in cars, we're gonna change everything, just like we change the entire landscape to make cars work the first time. So So this, this, this is a big engineering civilization project, making all the driven cars it's not a matter of just downloading the latest from Tesla is not going to happen that way. So anyway, but I'm just saying it's a disruption, but it's not an overnight disruption. It's a decade's long, if not centuries. So there's AI, there's the there's universal connectivity. And I think the the green energy thing is real solution, as we've figured out recently is to electrify everything, stop burning anything. Solar, hydro, wind, and nuclear, to make electrical, everything electrical cars, electrical, heat pumps, electrical stoves, electrical planes, everything is electricity is much more efficient, cleaner. More high tech, and so I think that gives us a promise of getting halfway to where we want to get in, in climate. And so that's a big business that's, that's, that's good for the planet, that's good for people, it will make our cities nicer. So um, and, you know, it's part of the whole AI thing too, when you have like everything electrified is much easier to qognify. And I could go on so I think there's, I think there's a number, I think there's five or six different trends, forces that are converging to make a planet where it's high tech, and that I would like to live. I'm not afraid of the AI overlord. It's just so Hollywood romantic notion. I mean, again, I could talk for hours on why I think that's unlikely the Singularity is unlikely, greater than zero, but unlikely. And so I think we're gonna muddle through with the AI and kind of make it work. I think we'll have green energy. I think we'll have more globalism, and I think like the food situation is I'm a big proponent of the lab grown meat and other synthetic foods, both environmentally, somewhat morally, but even technologically culinary in terms of we will invent new tastes and new ways of making food in a way that haven't been you know, using animal cells and And thinks it's it's very very very powerful and I think food shelter I don't think it's gonna change very much when I make a picture it's like that already happened yeah that's that's that rearrangement is already done I think cities are gonna look kinda like to do now maybe the more pedestrian stuff but I'm not gonna change that much schooling huge I think YouTube is way under right under appreciated I think the next thing after smartphones is the smart class augmented reality I think it's really huge in terms of education, learning kinetically training work work will change because of that. So in general the vision is that the material world doesn't change very much most of the changes happening in the intangible world of what we make what we think we are about why we're here what we're doing and so so I think that's where I think you know, your self identity where your allegiance are, how you spend your day I mean, what you spend your day but I think all those things will change but you know, my room here will probably look exactly like this 100 years it's unlikely to change very much maybe there'll be screens on the wall instead of paint. Okay, but by and large it's there's not a big difference there.

Steven Parton  46:40

Your brain will just be connected to every other humans and you'll be able to drop into

Kevin Kelly  46:44

Yeah, simulations Yeah,

Steven Parton  46:48

I know we're pushing time here Kevin. So I won't ask any more of these long questions but I want to give you a chance to let people know where to find your work and anything you'd like to promote for each up off of here

Kevin Kelly  47:00

Yeah, um you can find anything I make it my live site was which has my initials kk dot o RG Chiquita org. And I post on twitter at Kevin to Kelly I think I'm Kevin to Kili on Facebook and other social media. I don't do much engagement it's more of a publishing mode for for me, it's not on my phone. Actually, I don't even post often it's scheduled posts meaning that it's you know, it's all pre posted. So um, but yeah, kk.org is probably the best way to find me or contact me if you want. Or the one actually there is one little thing I want to promote. I have a newsletter called recommend Oh, which it goes out every Sunday morning. And it has for three or four years and it has six really brief recommendations of cool stuff. Me mark for infielder from from boingboing. Claudia here, the three of us do six brief together and total to each six brief recommendations. It's a free newsletter. No ads, just half a page. You'll love it. So sign up for that. And Can Can that be found through your website? Yes, that's cool. Recommend Oh, recommended or recommended calm. So recommend though is the name of the newsletter and it's a labor of love is Austin Kuhn says it's free but not cheap. So we hope you enjoy it.

Steven Parton  48:45

Wonderful. Kevin, again, there's so many things I wish I could ask you. But I do appreciate you taking the time that we had. So thank you so much.

Kevin Kelly  48:51

You're very welcome. I appreciate your questions and your interest in my work. So thank you for having me.