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

Summary

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Podcast Summary: AI & I – "Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success"

Host: Dan Shipper
Guest: Kevin Kelly (Founding Executive Editor of Wired, author of The Inevitable)
Date: July 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging and deeply insightful conversation between Dan Shipper and Kevin Kelly, centering on the long arc of technology adoption, the evolving landscape of AI, creativity, and the emotional and philosophical facets of our relationship with technology. Kevin shares his unique perspective as both a technology pioneer and cultural observer, exploring why AI is best understood as a "50-year overnight success," and how personal creativity, history, and the frontier spirit interplay in innovation.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Annie Dillard’s Influence on Creative Spirit

00:55 - 08:45

• Literary Inspiration: The discussion opens with both expressing their admiration for writer Annie Dillard. Kevin describes how Pilgrim at Tinker Creek deeply influenced his approach to writing and perceiving the world.
  • Kevin: "It was like she was ringing my bell in a curious way." (02:03)
  • Annie Dillard’s style, mixing cosmic insight with scientific oddities, is celebrated: "She can be pretty harsh, too. And that is part of the attraction of the sweet sour flavor." (05:16)
• Duality in Writing: They explore Dillard’s blend of beauty and darkness and how it’s rare to find writers who can authentically pull off both.
• Personal Anecdotes: Kevin recounts discovering her book in an American library in Sri Lanka: "I walked in because there was air conditioning and there was a book... and from the first immediate paragraph, I once had a tom cat. You know, like, it was. I was. I was caught and I didn't put it down." (05:56)
• Impact on Kevin’s Writing: Dillard’s expansiveness inspired Kevin’s own path as a writer and creator.

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2. From Frontier to Builder: The Arc of Technology (and Burning Man)

08:55 - 14:42

• Pioneer to Builder Transition: Kevin and Dan reflect on the metaphor of moving from “frontier” to “builder” in technology and society—starting with pioneers in a wild space, then imposing structure and order.
  • Kevin: "You lose something. But actually, I think there's more to be gained by adding that layer of organization and structure and governance." (11:41)
• Burning Man as Microcosm: Kevin compares early days of the Internet to the evolution of Burning Man, from chaos to order, pointing out the inevitability of laws and governance for growth and safety.
• Personal Balance on the Frontier:
  • Kevin describes himself as a “nomad,” enjoying the edge—but only in doses: "It was a great place to visit, but it was only great because I was going to leave." (13:33)
  • Strives for balance between innovation and enduring values, mentioning the Long Now Foundation and reading history to accompany tech progress. (15:07)

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3. Historical Analogies: What AI Can Learn from Electricity

16:08 - 25:39

• Technological Unknowing: Kevin draws parallels between early misunderstandings of electricity and today’s incomplete grasp of intelligence:
  • "We have no idea what intelligence is, that we're as ignorant of it as Isaac Newton and others were of electricity when it was first encountered." (16:18)
  • Newton’s “phlogiston” error as historical parallel.
• Compound Theory of Intelligence:
  • Kevin posits intelligence is not a simple element but a compound of cognitive units, suggesting we’re still lacking a “chemistry” of mind.
  • Kevin: "I suspect that intelligence is not an element but a compound, that it is made up of a complex of different cognitive elements and we haven't even identified yet." (21:29)
• AI’s Place in the Evolution of Minds:
  • "Humans are an edge species... we'll be making hundreds of other kinds [of AI], filling out the possibility space of different thinking." (21:40)

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4. Creative Work, Authenticity, and Being “The Only”

25:39 - 31:36

• Be the Only, Not the Best:
  • Kevin’s advice: “Don’t aim to be the best, aim to be the only.” (27:20)
  • This principle emerged from years of trying to delegate unique ideas, only to realize some stories could only be told by him.
• Media Lessons:
  • Assigning creative writers, especially young sci-fi authors, to journalistic projects produces the most powerful work.
  • Kevin: "This is what I tell every aspiring... get the young science fiction writers of today and give them journalistic assignments." (30:18)
  • Importance of aligning assignments with a writer’s genuine interests.

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5. AI and the Writer’s Process

32:09 - 39:12

• From Writer to Editor:
  • AI helps writers get over the initial “hump,” shifting quickly into the editing mode.
  • Kevin: "I can get over that big hump just, just kind of helping get something on the page and starting to work with and kind of illumina the spots that I'm most ignorant of." (32:27)
• LLMs as Creative Organizers:
  • Kevin uses LLMs (like GPT-4o) for research, organization, and idea gardening, not architectural planning.
  • Mastery is a skill: “Getting the most from it is a skill that will take your 10,000 hours.” (34:15)
• Notable Use Case (Audience of One):
  • Kevin details an imaginative, playful research session where he asks AI to concoct a collaboration story between historic figures (Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, Columbus), generating an entire fictional universe for his personal enjoyment.
  • Key insight: Most generative outputs will be “audience of one”—for the creator’s joy, not for sharing. (38:08)

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6. Emotional Bonding and AI’s Future Role

39:12 - 41:02

• AI as Companion and Therapist:
  • AI will become emotionally resonant companions, with people forming real and deep attachments.
  • Reflects on Jungian “active imagination” and how interacting with AI could facilitate self-reflection or therapeutic insights.
  • Kevin: "I think people are going to be shocked by the degree of emotional bonding that we will have as we put emotions into the AIs." (40:28)
• Latest Developments:
  • Dan highlights OpenAI’s new memory system, which recalls all past chat history—deepening the intimacy and continuity of user relationships.

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7. Experimenting With AI Tools

42:23 - 43:05

• Image Generation and Midjourney:
  • Kevin uses Midjourney for AI image creation, preferring its public, iterative Discord experience for observing and learning from others’ prompts.
  • Enjoys the communal aspect and transparency of creative process.

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8. The Rhythm of Tech Hype, Prediction, and Reality

43:05 - 52:30

• Learning from Being Wrong:
  • Kevin candidly shares where his predictions have failed—VR’s slow uptake, underestimating eBay and blockchain’s financialization.
  • On VR: "The VR that we had back then... is not that much different than the VR you get now... I've been very, very surprised about how slow that has been." (44:01)
• Physical vs. Digital Progress:
  • Biological interface challenges (e.g., headsets) slow down adoption more than digital advances: “The arrival of robots is going to take a lot longer than people think because... there’s a huge, huge, huge gap.” (47:19)
• AI as a Slow Burn:
  • AI took 50 years to become an “overnight success,” paralleling the wait for a VR “LLM moment.”
  • Kevin: "AI is a 50 year overnight success." (49:21)
• Missed Use Cases:
  • Kevin’s skepticism about auctions on eBay and bitcoin as a store of value proved wrong; he finds eBay most useful for obscure items, not auctions.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Kevin: “What I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true.” (00:00, 43:53)
• Dan: “It seems like there's an interesting line from a thousand true fans to an audience of one.” (38:08)
• Kevin: “Don't aim to be the best. Aim to be the only.” (27:20)
• Kevin: "I think people are going to be shocked by the degree of emotion, emotional bonding that we will have as we put emotions into the AIs." (40:28)

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Important Timestamps

• Annie Dillard and Creative Influence: 00:55 – 08:45
• Frontiers and Builders in Tech/Burning Man Metaphor: 08:55 – 14:42
• AI as a Compound & Learning from Electricity: 16:08 – 25:39
• Authenticity in Creative Work ("Be the Only"): 25:39 – 31:36
• AI Writing/Editing Workflow: 32:09 – 39:12
• Emotional AI Companions: 39:12 – 41:02
• OpenAI Memory System & Image Generation: 41:11 – 43:05
• Tech Prediction Pitfalls and Lessons: 43:05 – 52:30

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Tone & Final Thoughts

The conversation is open, personal, intellectual, and exploratory, blending technology with deeply human concerns. Kevin Kelly’s humility and wisdom, along with Dan’s engaging curiosity, yield a sweeping perspective on how individuals and societies adapt to and shape the technological future.

Summary in Kevin’s words:
“AI is a 50-year overnight success.” (00:00, 49:21)

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Transcript

[Kevin Kelly]

What I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true. Jaron lanier showed me VR in 87. I was completely blown away and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the future. The VR that we had back then is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that was multi million dollars and it was now $100. I've been very, very surprised about how slow that has been. You could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment. AI's 50 year overnight success.

[Dan Shipper]

Kevin, welcome to the show.

[Kevin Kelly]

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to be seen.

[Dan Shipper]

I am very excited to have you. In addition to being a personal hero of mine, I am a long time Wired reader. I had like a gigantic shelf of magazines growing up. So it's sort of crazy to get to chat with you. There's a lot of things I want to talk to you about, but I want to start with we have a mutual love of Annie Dillard.

[Kevin Kelly]

We do.

[Dan Shipper]

She is my favorite writer and I know she's your favorite writer as well. Tell me why you like her.

[Kevin Kelly]

For those who aren't familiar with Annie, she burst onto the scene with a meteorite of a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That for some reason it's account of her spending some year on musing. Kind of like a Henry David Thoreau intimate investigation of a creek in Virginia or West Virginia, I don't remember. And so it was just the writing and the style and the ideas and her blazing brilliance in being able to capture this into a few words. It was almost like poetry, those prose. It somehow just worked on my brain. And I don't know enough about literature to describe her in relation to other writers and why it doesn't work for me as much. But there was something about her spirit as well as her writing, which was very expansive, cosmic, enthusiastic, questioning. She talked about feeling as if at one point in the story that she was a bell that someone else had rung. And I felt exactly the same in response to her writing. It was like she was ringing my bell in a curious way.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. Lifted and struck. There's another part in the early part of the book where she talks about the tree with the lights in it.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And that moment is so very evocative of one of her big themes, which is you can just be sort of walking around in ordinary life, in ordinary nature, and somehow the veil is lifted from your eyes and you can experience these moments of Transcendence, where everything feels like it's glowing from within.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah. So there was this. Her kind of cosmic poetic ability to kind of take these moments, but then interstitial with that were these findings, these weird little trivia bits that you'd find in some obscure book that you would be grounded in before the next jump. It was. It was a very distinctive way of kind of wrapping rhapsodic ecstasy with very concrete science trivia or oddities. And that combination just somehow appealed to me.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, the. The thing I remember is she spends a long time talking about Henley's loops, which are like this little part of the kidney. And it's just like, where does that even come from? And, yeah, I think, like she sort of zooms out to the biggest stuff and then zooms into the smallest stuff.

[Kevin Kelly]

Right.

[Dan Shipper]

But another thing that's really interesting about her writing, and I'm curious how you've thought about this in your own work, is she spends a lot of time talking about the beauty of the world, but she also spends a lot of time talking about the worst of the world. There's an entire chapter on insects and how gross insects are. She's also angry about it and not afraid to be angry about it, you know, And I think a lot of writers are usually either one or the other. Either you're like really angry or you're really. Everything's beautiful and awesome. And she does both pretty well.

[Kevin Kelly]

That's true. She said. I think either she said in the book or elsewhere that she wrote the book as if there was a patient of cancer dying in her room.

[Dan Shipper]

Oh, wow.

[Kevin Kelly]

And she's talking to them. So. Yeah, that was. Yeah. It is not just saccharine. It's not just sweet Kumbaya. It's. Yeah, she can be pretty harsh, too. And that is part of the attraction of the sweet sour flavor.

[Dan Shipper]

How has she, if at all influenced how you write or edit?

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, in some ways it's why I write at all, because I came across that book in the weirdest of all places. It was in a library, American Library in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

[Dan Shipper]

Wow.

[Kevin Kelly]

And I walked in because there was air conditioning and there was a book. Why they had the book there, I don't know. But there was a book opened up and from the first immediate paragraph, I once had a tom cat. You know, like, it was. I was. I was caught and I didn't put it down. And it was like, I don't know what she's doing, but I want to do that. If I could do that. I Would, you know, I'm it. I'm golden.

[Dan Shipper]

I feel the same way. Have you read any of her other. Any of her other stuff?

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, yeah, I didn't read her fiction book, but the other books of essay, Teaching a Stone to Talk and Only the Firm.

[Dan Shipper]

The Writing Light.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, only the Firm and all those. Yes. And her account of the eclipse has. The total eclipse. It's sort of never to be equaled. Anybody who writes about eclipse has to start with Annie's version.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, it's. It's so funny because, like, the reason I started with Annie is I love her so much and I. And she evokes all the same kind of feelings in me that I think she evokes for you and. And gives me that same kind of energy to write stuff. If I write stuff after I've read something that she's written, it just. It brings something out in me that I just love. And also, no one else I know likes her or even really has heard about her. Like, I feel like a lot of her work is. It's maybe taught in school, but it's like kind of the thing that you're assigned. But people don't like as much.

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, they probably also don't read the whole thing. They probably would have understood is they only get the excerpt. Yeah, you know, it's probably some. One passage about the lights in the trees or whatever. Yeah, it is true because. Because she didn't really. I mean, she wrote a couple other books, but she didn't really go on to have a huge amount of work and a huge amount of output for whatever reason. They actually sent her a book that I took. Did when I was riding my bicycle across the country. I did a haiku and a sketch every day. And I sent her the book, the original. And because I thought I was inspired by her, I just thought that she would enjoy it. And she actually sent some nice words in response to the book and sent it back. So that was my. Kind of. My 1. It was the one time when I kind of wrote to a hero.

[Dan Shipper]

That's really nice.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, she did reply.

[Dan Shipper]

I bet. A reply. A reply from Annie is probably pretty rare. So that's. That's pretty great.

[Kevin Kelly]

I think I still have it. I think it's right behind me. I should dig it up and see. She did. There was one little drawing. She said she really liked that little drawing. So that was. That was good.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. Another thing to move on from Annie for a second. One thing that you wrote in your book, the Inevitable that I really loved and Thought was interesting is after living online for the past three decades, first as pioneer in a rather wild empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes. I really love this sort of pioneer to builder transition. I've been watching this show. It's an old HBO show called Deadwood. Know if you've seen it? I haven't seen it, but it's basically about Deadwood. I think now it's South Dakota, but it was like a. It was a mining town in Indian territory before it was annexed into a state, and so it had no law. And the whole show is kind of about that transition from pioneer to, like, order out of chaos. And I think there's a lot of resonance with sort of what you wrote and. And this.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

The transition from pioneer to builder feels like something that's deeply embedded into tech. Even with every single wave, like in the. In this new AI Wave, there's this whole movement of pioneers, like, kind of figuring out the whole new landscape, and then the builders kind of move in. Tell me about what that's been like for you to participate in and watch over the last couple of decades.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, there are a lot. You know, there are always feelings of loss as the. The kind of. The freedom of no laws, the unvarnished. The unconstrained ability to do what you want without having to ask permission. That goes away. And. Oh, actually, I was just. Just, just. I had another experience that was like that, which was Burning Man.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Kevin Kelly]

And I was reminded because I did a podcast with Burning man today, and they. We were reminiscing about, you know, my. The. The first 96 or so. The first time I was at Burning man, when there were no streets, there were no. There was no adult supervision at all. There was no sense of order. It was crazy and chaotic and wonderful. But there was a second year. I think there was somebody who died because they got run over by a car, and they were just sleeping on the sleeping bag. And so it was like, oh, we need streets. Okay. And so. And over. Over years and years of Burning man, they have more and more of the layering of law and order, and they have tons and tons of police and sheriffs and whatnot and laws and. And the bureaucratic stuff that I had to go through because I did artwork last year was unbelievable. It was like dealing with somebody in India. And so. But at the same time, I think burning means better than ever. And so you lose something. But Actually, I think there's more to be gained by adding that layer of organization and structure and governance. And so what you want to have is though you still want to have those zones where there's a frontier, you want to keep making new territory that generates new frontiers. And some people are better on the frontier than back at the center. And I think that's a wonderful way the world would work. And so for me, I want to maintain both of constantly new frontiers where those are suited to not having to have many rules are able to thrive. And then those who prefer to have the discipline of working within rules also can thrive.

[Dan Shipper]

What about in your own life? Because, you know, as someone who's interested in new technology, that requires being on the frontier. And the interesting thing about the frontier is if you're a little bit of a restless spirit, it's pretty cool. That's it. But being a restless spirit is. It can be hard, it can be lonely. How have you balanced that in your own life or dealt with in your own life?

[Kevin Kelly]

So I tend to visit the frontier. I'd spend a lot of my adult life in the very remote parts of Asia where there is very little infrastructure. I spend a early partial of my adulthood for many extended time in areas where there was very little modern infrastructure. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. But I would have died if I needed to live there. I mean, so it was a great place to visit, but it was only great because I was going to leave. I have the same kind of things with the frontiers. It's like, yeah, Burning Man's fantastic for two weeks, but it'd be horrible. I have to live there year round. And you know, being the frontier of the Internet and or the AI, my understanding is, is that, you know, it's moving. It's a moving frontier. It's going to move. I can keep going up to the, to the edge to see what's happening, but I don't need to stay there and I'm going to actually come back and report anyway. So I have the liberty of being a nomad in that sense of occupying it. So for me, it's a fantastic place to spend time in, but not a place that I want to spend all my time in.

[Dan Shipper]

And how does that work? Because I understand sort of the frontier of going to another country and be able to come home. But with technology you can be at the frontier in your house. And so is that, is that structured for you? Like there are, there are periods in your life or periods in your day where you're sort of immersing yourself in what's new and then periods where you're kind of in the sort of stability of whatever you're familiar with or how does it work?

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, right. So one of the things that I discovered over time is that all the. My favorite people who were best about the future were actually great historians too. So I would balance reading something about AI with trying to read something historical in the past. And I balance, you know, wrestling with the latest AI stuff with working in my workshop and using my hands. So for me, yes, that's exactly what it is. Jeff Bezos said, you know, he was trying to build a business on the things that didn't change. And so the Long now foundation, which I've been very central to, is trying to take a long term view and not just to forward, but also the past. And so for me, I would spend time on this ephemeral frontier, but also then try to think about the next 10,000 years, the last 10,000 years.

[Dan Shipper]

As you're digging into the current AI wave. What are the historical periods that you're thinking about or diving into?

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, actually, I spent a good amount of time recently reading about the discovery and or invention of electricity. Because my contention right now is we have no idea what intelligence is, that we're as ignorant of it as Isaac Newton and others were of electricity when it was first encountered. And Isaac Newton, one of the smartest humans ever, was totally wrong about electricity. Right. He had just wrong. Weird ideas about it that were just wrong.

[Dan Shipper]

What did he think about it? I have not heard anything about Isaac Newton and electricity. That's really interesting.

[Kevin Kelly]

He was one of the people who kind of thought that there was this either phlogiston. Have you heard of flagstone?

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, phlogiston, yeah, yeah. So it was, it was that creates fire.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, it was just kind of. Well, no, it was just this kind of element. There was another element and this and the, the discovery, electricity was happening at the same time, that basically we were understanding what elements and atoms and compounds were. So Davies and Faraday and those guys were almost discovering stuff about electricity weekly. And the origins of the Royal Academy came out of the weekly meetings that they would have where they would sell tickets and do demos with electricity, make sparks and stuff. And one of the biggest news items and the shocks was when they. And I forget who it was. Maybe Faraday proved that electricity would happen in a vacuum because there goes the ether. You don't need ether. It's like, well, then what is it? Okay. And there was, you know, some of the earliest beliefs Electricity was that it was primarily a biological phenomenon and there's all those reflexes and reflexes and stuff. And so there were just endless theories about what is. And they all reminded me of all the theories we have about what intelligence is, because we don't really know what it is. And I have been saying I suspect that intelligence is not an element but a compound, that it is made up of a complex of different cognitive elements and we haven't even identified yet. In the same way that salt's not a element, salt is actually a compound of some elements that they had not yet identified. So you can think of the kind of the current AI is we're making some kind of salt and we don't even know what it's made from.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, I think that's true. Where it makes my mind go, and I'm curious how you would respond to this is we actually do know what it is, but we don't know it in the same way that we know what electricity is. So we don't have a explicit, exact mathematical theory in the same way that we can talk about electricity, and we don't have a way to decompose it into parts that reduce down and then recombine into it. But we do know what it is in a different way. I'm talking to you and I know that you're intelligent and that's harder to grasp. It's not the same kind of graspy, I can pin it down to the wall kind of thing. But I think that that just may be a property of intelligence, that it is sort of like this fuzzy thing. How do you think about that?

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, I don't know. You may be confusing recognizing something with knowing it. So I think we can recognize it, but I actually don't think we know what it is. And in fact, I think our brains are incredibly opaque to introspection deliberately. I think we have these complex things that deliberately does not allow the organism to interfere and meddle with it. Could you imagine if we had access to the source code, we would be completely wrecking ourselves and what it is. Again, I think we humans have a very peculiar complex of things that if we map it out in the possibility space of all possible minds, which is a very high dimensional space, that we're going to be our compounds. We're at the edge, we're an edge species, we're not at the center of anything the, the galaxy or the solar system or evolution. We are an edge or kind of intelligence will be revealed to be a very peculiar mixture that's evolved for us. And then what we're going to be doing with AIs is making hundreds of various other kinds and filling out that possibility space with many types of thinking. And so we'll look back and we won't even recognize maybe some of these other things as intelligence right now, because we don't have a very good definition. It's like, what are the definitions or what are the marks for something that doesn't like a human, like intelligence? Some people say, well, there isn't anything. There's only universal intelligence, and we're just going to make more of it. That there's only one thing, and that's possible. But I suspect that's wrong. I suspect that there is many compounds and that they will be engineered to do different things. And to some degree we won't understand even how they work, but that's because they're different. And so I think we are very much like the early days of electricity, where we simply didn't have a clue about what it was, even though we could use it, even though we could recognize it.

[Dan Shipper]

Where does your intuition that it's made up of compounds come from?

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, and several reasons. One is Marvin Minsky was the first who suggested it, called the Society of Mind. And then these days the AIs have mixture of experts where they are already doing that, where they already are taking different kinds of cognition and making them into compounds. And so I think we'll have various layers of this, like tissues where you have cells and or molecules made from elements. And so we're going to make some very high chain heavy compounds of intelligence at some level, made up from lots of little bits of elemental cognition. What we haven't done yet is done the chemistry of identifying what some of the basic cognitive units are or the cognitive elements. And we may be starting to do that.

[Dan Shipper]

Thinking about the way neural networks work. A way to look at them is they learn many, many thousands or millions of rules for what to do in particular situations that they can partially apply and run many, many of those rules in parallel to find the right set that sort of applies to a particular situation. So in that case, intelligence is a compound of rules that are about little micro correlations that are applied depending on how relevant they are to a particular situation. But it's interesting to think about how much of those rules are contingent, like they're just situational versus they're sort of universal, because we do know, for example, how neural networks function at a low level. We know the atomic units and in fact the specific architecture, the Specific set of atomic units that you use doesn't really matter for the high level behavior. It does to some extent. But you can get basically the same behavior no matter the simple components you use. So there's something like always hard to understand in between the simple components and the outward behavior that we observe.

[Kevin Kelly]

I mean, Danny Hales made a computer with Tinker toys. So you can make computers out of all kinds of elements, logic gates and stuff like that. So I don't want to confuse sort of like your neural nets. I don't think that is the basic unit. I think there's a type of reasoning or learning or something that happens with the neural nets that we haven't quite identified yet. That I would say that's, that, that would be the, the element is what is that process of pattern matching or if that is what it is, or deduction or what's the logic or what's the workflow for doing deduction. And it could be, you know, could be agnostic to the actual platform.

[Dan Shipper]

It seems like it must be in some way. But yeah, that's interesting. One of the things I love about the way that you've set up your career and I think probably also the way that you think about just creative work in general is it's about being honest and authentic to who you are instead of what you think you should be doing. And I found that over and over again, especially at the beginning of a career, it's really easy to be like, I need to do things in this particular way. And then at some point you're like, I don't know this kind of, at least for me, you're like, this isn't working as well as it should and this kind of sucks. And like, I guess I have to like, do the thing that's like more honest to who I am and more shaped to who I am. And it removes all of this like daily friction. So like, honestly, like hearing you talk about that in various forms over the year has been like quite helpful for me. How does that look now? After many years of thinking that way? Is that still something that's, that's on your mind, that's difficult, that you have to like unstick yourself from? Or are you kind of. Do you get used to living that way after a while?

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah. I mean, my own life was never very planned or deliberate in that sense. I had, I had more directions than destinies or destinations. A phrase that I like or advice that I like to give these days is about don't aim to be the best aim to be the only. Be the only. But that was not something that I was doing consciously when I was younger. That was something that I only realized I was doing much later. And it's part of the book about wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier is I really did wish that someone had told me that earlier. And so I think I did a bunch of things very intuitively without necessarily having a grand plan about it. And so I kind of naturally move in that direction. And this idea of being the only was made clear to me first at Wired, where I was trying to assign stories that I had to other writers and often not getting any traction with a great idea that I couldn't sell to anybody. And after years of kind of trying to kill it, I would wind up doing it myself and then realizing, oh, that's because only I can do it. And that's what I should be focusing on to begin with. And so that was. So, I think, the clarity of it. I think I have more clarity of it, but I'm still kind of doing what I've always done, but maybe being a little bit more aware of the actual process of doing it.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, I resonate very much with this, like, trying to get writers to. To do an idea. So every. The company that I run, it's a media company, and it's so different from other. Any other business because, like, I come from the software world. And if you have a product idea and you build a little bit of it, you can have someone else, like, build a lot, build most of the product, and it's totally. It can be great. But getting a writer to write your idea, it's never any good. Almost. Almost never. There's like, the people who are good. Ghostwriters are like such a small portion of writers.

[Kevin Kelly]

Actually wasn't. That actually wasn't my experience. My experience was that the writers were even better. So, you know, I assigned. I had this. I discovered reading IEEE Spectrum, that they were laying the fiber or, you know, fiber optic cables around the globe. And I thought they're wiring up, you know, the new sphere. That would be a great story. So I signed Neal Stephenson to that.

[Dan Shipper]

He.

[Kevin Kelly]

He, you know, he just did this masterpiece I could never, ever have done. And Bruce Sterling and the other great writers, they did a much better job of writing it than I ever could have.

[Dan Shipper]

Well, I wish I had Neal Stephenson writing for me.

[Kevin Kelly]

Okay, here's the thing. This is what I tell every aspiring is get the young science fiction writers of today and give them journalistic assignments. They love it because they're born storytellers. You're paying them to go learn something they want to learn and they'll come back with something amazing.

[Dan Shipper]

I think that's the key thing. And what I'm more talking about rather than. I've worked with a lot of really talented writers. Everyone that I work with I think is super talented. But trying to get someone to write about something they don't really want to write about, it's never going to be that good in my experience.

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, yeah, but, yeah, so, so you have to, you have to match to something that they're interested in. So yeah, that's, that's the, that's the trick. I wasn't giving them, I wasn't making them write something they weren't interested in, but I was. And sometimes that's how the conversation would start. You know, okay, what's something you're really interested in that we can help make happen, that we can pay you to educate yourself in and you know, we could jointly come up with an idea. And I mean, if again, if I was running a magazine, that's the first thing I would start doing is finding the youngest science fiction writers and giving them assignments.

[Dan Shipper]

I should, I should look into that. Mostly I just find people who write good tweets that I'm. That I find interesting.

[Kevin Kelly]

That's fine, that's a good way too. But find someone who can tell a good story and has a little bit of a ability to kind of fantasize or, you know, whatever. So, you know, and Neil was not Neil when we were first starting, you know, he was still at the beginning of his career, which is of course why he agreed to it.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. One of the things you talk about a lot is being a reluctant writer and born editor. And one of the. Just getting into AI for a second. One of the things that strikes me about AI is it puts you into editing mode much quicker.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, it does.

[Dan Shipper]

How has that worked for you?

[Kevin Kelly]

It's been great because it's. I can get over that big hump just, just kind of helping get something on the page and starting to work with and kind of illumina the spots that I'm most ignorant of. And yeah, for me it's a really great way to start.

[Dan Shipper]

Is there anything that has worked particularly well, like as part of your workflow to like to get it started?

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, I use it for Reese. I use some of them for research too. And that's another way, you know, while you're researching, you're summarizing stuff and synthesizing. So there are These elements that begin to, to take place. It's, it's. The LLMs are really good at organizing things and that's another. See, I'm not that organized normally. I don't, I don't, I kind of, I'm a gardener rather than architect in terms of things and so I can get a little bit more further along and thinking about it in an architectural way. So for me it's a, yeah, it's a great way to start own things.

[Dan Shipper]

What are you using day to day? AI wise, like which models I'm using

[Kevin Kelly]

mostly OpenAI right now.

[Dan Shipper]

Do you use any like, any particular one? Like are using 400103.

[Kevin Kelly]

I have the 01 Pro.

[Dan Shipper]

Do you like it?

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, I mean I've done some of, you know, for very deep research and it's, it's, it's astounding. I'm just reminded again and again that this is a skill using him. Getting the most from it is a skill that will take your 10,000 hours. And it's definitely not just pushing the buttons, it's not just clicking. And so it's very apparent to me that, you know, I need to spend a lot more time whispering and understanding how it is and what is how to use it. And so my needs right this moment are not so that I'm using that level of research every day.

[Dan Shipper]

Do you have specific examples of like when you've used it for research that it has like blown you away?

[Kevin Kelly]

I did something, and this is a little bit of something I've been meaning to write about, which is I had this fantasy, I had this observation that I realized that Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus were all alive at the same time. And I said, I was, this is my conversation with the AI. I said, imagine it's a snowy evening and all three are stuck in the same hotel together and they have a conversation. You know, give me the conversation. Based on, you know, based on your writings and, or their interests and their personalities and their, and so they did the conversation. I said that was amazing. But they got along so well they decided to collaborate on a project. What would that project be? And this was the AI's idea, the AI's idea was that they would want to start a new city in the new world that was based around science and religious freedom. And I said, okay, you know, start writing Wikipedia articles about this and start, we'll start filling it in. And then we had characters and peoples and histories. And then I was going on with starting to tell, actually to tell research stories based on these characters. And then I introduced other things like other contemporaries like Queen Victoria who was alive at the same time she was the main rival trying to take down the city. There was. They reached China 10 years before the Portuguese and then they would bring all the books from China. And so I was just making this bigger and bigger, bigger thing world building. And I got 10 different novels from it. And then I had them had it synthesize and iron out all the contradictions between the novels and make a big epic saga. And then I had it write the making book covers and writing the marketing materials. And the point of all this is that I'm not going to show it to anybody because the. I don't need to the joy of creating it was better than reading was the audience of one. And so what I'm hypothesizing is that a lot of the generative stuff, the 50 million images that are generated each day with AI 99.999% have the audience of one. They're generated for the pleasure of the co creator. And this idea of people will be generous making feature length movies for themselves and the. The pleasure will be in the generating of the movie. The co generating of the movie that you're directing. You'll be directing the movie for yourself. And anyway, so that was a project I was using profile because the. The. The degree of historical realism and fantasy was mind bending.

[Dan Shipper]

That's really cool. I love that. It seems like there's an interesting line from a thousand true fans to an audience of one.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

How have you thought about that?

[Kevin Kelly]

Well, of course there's no economic model for the audience of one.

[Dan Shipper]

There is for OpenAI.

[Kevin Kelly]

Right, exactly. I think this is in, you know, this is the abundance mindset where you have the time to do this. So I think this is not so much a business or someone's career. I think this is kind of like a different form of entertainment or self expression. Is this like Sunday painting or keeping a journal or you know, someone doing ice skating? It's a form of self expression and relaxation and enjoyment entertainment. So it's. It's closer to entertainment than it is to actually, you know, a career.

[Dan Shipper]

It reminds me a little bit of. Have you. Are you familiar with active imagination? No, it's a. It's part of like Jungian psychotherapy. The idea being you can do active imagination where you take a dream that you've had recently and you sort of like re enter the dream world while you're waking and you explore some of the archetypes and themes either by writing them out or just like exploring them to and with yourself. And in doing that, it kind of reflects back to you things that might be like a little bit more latent in your psyche. So the fact that you're playing around with these characters and you're, and these novels are going in different directions or whatever, and the decisions that you're making might say something to you about what you're processing or like what you're, what you're currently thinking about that in addition to just being really fun, it might tell you something about yourself.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, so it may be something like that. In fact, you know, I mean, I think there will be very, very good AI therapists and maybe to the extent that we may not even make that distinction, maybe some particular AI companions, AI buddies, AI partners will perform some of that and people will use them in that capacity, even though they're not maybe nominated as that. And again, this is something else I've been saying is I think people are going to be shocked by the degree of emotion, emotional bonding that we will have as we put emotions into the AIs. And some people will be very, very close to these on a always on basis and very dependent on them to do their best.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. One thing that I don't know if you saw, but just came out today, like a couple hours ago.

[Kevin Kelly]

No, I haven't seen. I've been podcast all day.

[Dan Shipper]

You're in for a treat when you get off the, when you get off the podcast Grind. But OpenAI released a new memory system for ChatGPT. So previously ChatGPT, you could ask it to save memories, but it would like do it when it was really explicitly told to and when it really thought, okay, this is definitely something I need to store. But what the new memory system does is it is able to access all the past history of all your chats that are relevant automatically. So you can ask things like what do you know about me that from all of our chats that I might not know about it myself? And it will just go through all these historical chats and tell you a lot of really interesting things I've been playing. I was playing around with it all day before we got on the show. I think you'll really, I think you really like it. And I think to that sort of emotional attachment point, I want to use something that feels like it knows me.

[Kevin Kelly]

Sure.

[Dan Shipper]

I get, I get more, I get more, more attached to it. I, I personally think that's really good. But there's, there's trade offs obviously and I'LL be curious to see how that changes how we relate to each other too, over the next couple years.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah. Yeah, that's cool.

[Dan Shipper]

I've been. I've noticed that you're also doing a lot of tweeting with. It looks like AI generated images. Are you using. Are you using native image gen for that?

[Kevin Kelly]

I think they're mostly mid Journey.

[Dan Shipper]

Mid journey, yeah.

[Kevin Kelly]

Which for me, I just have a habit of that. It's. It's comfortable. I know Dali. I mean, not Dali. The chat now has some. Which I've tried and it's pretty good, but I just. I actually like the public aspect of the mid journey discord where you actually. It was a huge quick learning curve because you're seeing what the prompts other people were doing and how you could get there. And I like that public aspect of it.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. I'm curious if we, if we zoom back out. You've seen a lot of different technology waves. I think one of the interesting things about this particular one is how. How scared people are. And that's probably been true to some extent of previous ones. But I think in a lot of ways, like with mobile, it was like people didn't even care. It just like wasn't even on their minds for a while, at least in my lifetime. And I'm curious what you've learned about, like seeing all these different waves come and go. Like what you've learned about the future and how to think about the future.

[Kevin Kelly]

That's a pretty big question. I think the first thing I think about, all the places that I was wrong.

[Dan Shipper]

Where were you wrong?

[Kevin Kelly]

Oh, so many, so many times. I was very wrong about VR. I saw Jaron Lanier showed me VR in 87, something like that in his lab, and I was completely blown away. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is, this is, this is the future. This is amazing. And to be clear, the. The VR that we had back then, which was 30, 40 years ago, it's crazy, I can't remember. It's a lot of years ago. Many decades is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that that was multi million dollars and it was now $100. That's the main difference. It was not that it was actually that much better. Now it is. It is better, but it's not a million times better, but it's a million times cheaper. And so I, I was. I've been very, very surprised about how resistant, how slow, how, how slow that has been, because I really expected that to take off. I was wrong about ebay, just as a trivial example, I thought I don't get, you know, what's, it's who, who would use this. And I just didn't have the imagination to, to see it. I was early to blockchain, but I didn't think bitcoin was really going to be much. I didn't understand, I didn't, I didn't foresee the way in which it became this store of value. And I expect like everyone else that it could be used for micro payments. But it was, I didn't understand or we didn't appreciate it. We didn't know how expensive it was going to be to do a processing. And so, so my expectations about the role of blockchain, I also thought that we would have more of a headway into things that were not financial. And again, so blockchain became completely overwhelmed by the amount of money in it and it became about money and finance and I thought that it would be used for things that had nothing to do with finance and that really didn't happen. So, so that's when I think about what I've learned with the future is, is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true.

[Dan Shipper]

Well, if we, if we go back to those specific cases, it seems like there is one case where you're like this has definitely got a future and another and two other cases where you're like this not, I don't think these are really that, that great. And what do you think you missed? Let's talk about the first one. You're like this definitely has a future. What do you draw from that? What do you think you, you missed there? That made it much harder than you expected to get people to adopt it.

[Kevin Kelly]

I think it required a lot of biology and understanding or, or being able to work with biological things rather than just our mind. You, you have focusing on your eyes, you have just the weight of the thing on your head. There's just a lot of biological things in addition to the hardware things. You have hardware biology and that, that is just going to go slower. And so one of the things I take from that is I think the arrival of robots is going to take a lot, lot, lot longer, longer than people think because we have a 25 watt supercomputer and a quarter horsepower engine and, and there's no, there's no way we can do all that kind of stuff with that kind of efficiency anywhere close to that. So the amount of, of power that we need to either compress or to Eliminate by making more efficient things is, is a huge, huge, huge gap. And so that again, that physicality of it, particularly around our bodies and stuff, or near scale of our bodies, I think is going to be a lot slower. That's what I've taken away from the thing, what I've learned about VR is that it's going to take a lot more time than just making AI.

[Dan Shipper]

Well, that's interesting because I was going to bring up AI as an interesting parallel example where it also took a lot longer to do AI than we thought it would. But then it just all seemed to suddenly happen in like 10 years. And I'm curious what you think the leading indicators are for something like, okay, so AI didn't work for 50 years and then like suddenly in like 2010 or so it started to like there was some like glimmers of hope. And then chatgpt a couple years ago is like, really wow, this is a thing in VR. Like if we wanted to measure where we are in that cycle. Do you have a thought for that?

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, I mean you could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment. Right. Where there's some technical breakthrough in the lenses or focusing or something or projection that allows for that. So it's interesting too that the LLMs were kind of not working on reasoning directly. They were, they were doing language translation and that's. They noticed that there was some reasoning happening in language translation which was completely unexpected. And maybe the key technology for VRAR will come from somewhere else, but it hasn't happened yet. It doesn't look like it's happening right now. So I, yeah, we, you know, AI is, yeah, it's a 50 year overnight success.

[Dan Shipper]

What about going back to the other two examples? So eBay and blockchain of like, hey, like I don't. This isn't really that interesting.

[Kevin Kelly]

Right, right. So ebay, I think with the auction stuff and I think the only reason why ebay worked is that people move beyond the auction. I use ebay all the time and I've never used auction. I just have no patience for it. And so I think the idea that it was this idea that it was auctions and that I didn't connect to and I was never really interested in and I could be wrong, but for me ebay is only now succeeded because most people aren't using the auctions. But I don't know if that's really true or not. Do you use auctions on ebay?

[Dan Shipper]

I, I only, I got really into ebay when I was like 10 and I was like, I want to sell everything in my dad's garage, you know, did you? I didn't end up doing it because it just selling things online as 10 year old was. It was a complicated situation, but I was really into it for that reason. But I've never really bought anything on ebay. I never, I've never, I never bid.

[Kevin Kelly]

So. So ebay is actually very, very useful. It's kind of like there's Amazon and then there's, you know, Alibaba and then there's ebay which is sort of like all the things that either aren't officially for sale or, you know, they're way out of stock or out of print or they're totally obscure. And so for me, if I can't find it on Amazon, you look at Alibaba and then you're, then you're onto ebay. Etsy is another level which is like, you know, handmade stuff. But there's. Ebay is really good for like really obscure stuff. And then they do have the option of auction, but I never used it anyway. So for me, the thing was this idea of auctioning for everything didn't seem like that was going to work, but for a while it did. And that was just me personally just not being much of a bargainer type, I guess.

[Dan Shipper]

You can't win them all. I know you have a hard stop. Kevin, it was really great to get a chance to chat. Thank you so much. Would love to do this again soon.

[Kevin Kelly]

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Great things. And I'm glad there's another Andy Dillard fan.

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