← Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
The future of Human-AI coexistence, according to Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired, futurist, author)
00:44:33
Kevin Kelly is a co-founder of Wired Magazine and a renowned author and futurist. Decades ago, Kevin predicted much of today's technological and cultural landscape. In this discussion, he presents his new bold vision for what’s coming next: The Handoff to Bots.
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- [00:00]
Azeem Azhar
Kevin, you just formed this compelling theory about our future. The economic handoff to bonds, it all starts from human population decline.
- [00:10]
Kevin Kelly
Every year you have a smaller audience, a smaller marketplace, a smaller workforce. That's gotta be a different kind of capitalism than we've had. I think it's kind of no coincidence at the very moment when the number of species of humans on the planet plunges that we actually are creating artificial.
- [00:28]
Azeem Azhar
Species in AI, we're going to want to have an autonomous economy populated by millions, billions, trillions of bots. We will soon be outnumbered.
- [00:38]
Kevin Kelly
So there might be a way in which the AIs are actually consumers as well as producers. You make a robot, it needs a room. So we're expanding the possibility space to include other kinds of entities.
- [00:51]
Azeem Azhar
And then the question is, what will motivate them? Right? What are the incentive signals?
- [00:54]
Kevin Kelly
It's not hard to program in values and judgment and stuff because it's almost like software, it's like code. The difficulty is for us to come to some consensus about what it is that we want to give them. We're trying to make them better than us.
- [01:08]
Azeem Azhar
A lot of our experiences are about struggle. What does a bot to bot economy feel like for us?
- [01:14]
Kevin Kelly
We don't struggle about surviving and starving. We have other kinds of struggles about who we are and what we're here for. And I think AIs can help us with that because they're gonna answer, what are we here for? Why are we doing this? And help us elevate to a greater purpose.
- [01:29]
Azim Azhar
Hey everyone, it's Azim. You've just heard highlights from my discussion with Kevin Kelly. Kevin is a co founder of Wired magazine and a renowned author and futurist. Decades ago, Kevin predicted much of today's technological and cultural landscape. Now he presents his new bold vision for what's coming next. We originally recorded this for Friday with Azeem Azhar. It's a new live video format we're running every Friday at 9:00am Pacific Time. If you're on the east coast, it's at noon and 5pm if you're in the UK, I'd love your feedback. So feel free to comment or email my team@livexponentialview.co we read every single response. Thanks for being here. And now enjoy this deeply thought provoking glimpse into the coming decades.
- [02:17]
Azeem Azhar
You point out that there are going to be fewer and fewer humans alive to contribute labor and to consume what is being made. What do you think is that fundamental driver of this baby black hole?
- [02:29]
Kevin Kelly
You know, we don't really know. It's Very, very correlated with modernity, with high education, increased living standards, increased higher child survival and birth control. There's a thousand different factors which has reduced the desire for having a lot of children. And the issue is that whatever the multiple causes of it are, we haven't seen anywhere in the world that's been able to reverse it. Once the fertility level lowers beyond replacement level. Governments are trying different things and so we don't. So we don't really know. There are a lot of theories about it and there are some natalist movements that are pro changing that and they have different dimensions. In fact, just, just the other day there was something weird happening in China which now, China apparently now has the three child policy versus the one child policy. And they were trying to somewhere a company was trying to mandate children. So I think we're at the beginning of that and I don't really have a theory about why. My analysis is only saying that I think this is where we're headed to and it would change the economy. And that's my argument is that for all of the recent human history and progress has always been associated with increasing population. We have no experience as a species of increasing living standards and decreasing population.
- [04:20]
Azeem Azhar
I think it is a common pattern of modernity because we see it happening across cultures in rich and developed countries and you see it within strata of emerging economies as they get richer and richer. And there is some. One of the things that surprised me about the the population question was that it's such an important one. I mean we literally, if population is literally the temperature of humanity and it hasn't really been something that I think has been part of the mainstream debate for a while. In the last year or so, places like the Financial Times have started to talk about this a little bit. One of their journalists, John Byrne Murdoch have done some good work on this stub sucker called Alif Evans who has asked the question, you know, why, why are we seeing this happening? And she breaks it down a little bit. She says that, you know, it's economically and socially easier to be a single now than it ever has been. You know, you get services from doordash rather than your partner and you can have sort of economic security through your work. It's expensive to have children. Especially as countries get, get wealthy and wealthier, the relative cost of having a child goes up. And there are other forms of entertainment now. You know, there's Netflix and there's online gaming and you know, swiping on different pieces. And these seem to me to be quite, you know, Fundamental. And you rightly point out that pronatal policies have not succeeded anywhere at all. But I'm quite curious about why it's taken some time to, for the mainstream to wake up to this. You know, the United nations still has this view that 2086 is the peak for human populations. My view is aligned much closer to yours that it's more like in the next three decades. But where does, where do you think that mismatch comes from?
- [06:20]
Kevin Kelly
Well, partly it's because historically when birth rates have lowered, they've bounced back. And so there was some sense that that was a natural oscillation. So the idea that we're kind of on a one way plunge is, is very radical. And then secondly is I think our own estimates of the population in the world by country is also plus or minus at least 10% or more, just because there's a lot of political incentive for having those numbers, particularly in developing countries. And then I think also this pace at which is plunging right now was sort of so unexpected that there's a resistance to imagining that it keeps going. And people, you know, when I talk about it, people says, well, it's not going to go to zero. We don't know that. Again, we have done nothing to reverse it other than we do know that in religious communities like the Mormons, the Amish, Hasidic, they do have high birth rates. And that's one possible scenario is that the Amish take over.
- [07:26]
Azeem Azhar
Right.
- [07:26]
Kevin Kelly
You know that's right.
- [07:27]
Azeem Azhar
Right.
- [07:28]
Kevin Kelly
So, but, but, but to do that, that's not going to happen very quickly because there are so few of them that it would take many, many, many generations for them to become a majority of the population. So that's not going to happen by the end of the century either. And so again, I'm agnostic about what actually is causing it. I'm looking very closely at the trials and I suspect that we may come to a very high number. So it may be a matter of money in this way. There might be countries that do a calculation that says, well, the value of an additional citizen to our country over their lifetime is say worth $8 million. And so therefore maybe it's worth a million dollars to buy one to get an additional one. And so then you can imagine that families could be given a million dollars over the span of say 21 years to have children. And so if you have more than one, you might at that point actually have families that are their business, their career is actually having a family, which would be kind of a weird trad thing but also economically it might be feasible. And so that might make a difference where you actually are basically subsidizing families through the government because you want to have those additional people in your economy. So, but we don't know that. We haven't tried that. We, South Korea offered 75,000. That was not enough. I think that number has to be much higher to even make any dent. But even that we don't know if it is, we don't know. But I'm assuming for the moment that we don't change that. So I'm not, I don't have any policy about advocating what would change it. I'm saying let's assume that that's not going to happen. And what would that have an impact on the economy?
- [09:19]
Azeem Azhar
Well, let's get into that point, right? I mean, I think it is an incredibly seismic idea that human population doesn't rise. Essentially it's been rising consistently since there were a handful of us. There have been a few moments every century where cooling or a clay has reduced population. And you know, I suppose most recently around the time of the Black Death across Europe. But they, they bounced, they bounced back globally. And what we're talking about now is really for the first time a secular decline in, in our population. And a few months ago I wrote an essay called why Humanity Needs AI and it was along the lines of your handoff to bots. I was saying, look, to be human, certainly to be a modern human, has been to live in a society that gets more complex with more people in it, more people producing things, consuming things, exchanging ideas, building complex social structures and also undertaking scientific discovery which has always been functionally related to the number of people we have and the number we can afford to allow to be scientists. And that at some point in the next 30 or 40 years we're going to see a peak of population and that will be almost a species level change transformation that will require us to make use of AI for different reasons. And you've got there and you've made a very strong kind of economic argument. Just reprise what that argument is.
- [10:52]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah. So the idea is again, if you map out the curve of living standards and population, they're very highly correlated because we've had growth and that growth has come mostly from increased population. And if we had declining population every year, which we'll get to in a minute, that means that every year you have a smaller audience, a smaller marketplace, a smaller workforce. And that's gotta be a different kind of capitalism than we've had. So, so, so, so we'd have to kind of shift a little bit away from our ideas of what growth entailed and having growth more like maturity rather than gaining weight, you know, just getting bigger. You're going to actually drink, like not drink more wine, but drink better wine.
- [11:42]
Azeem Azhar
I like that idea.
- [11:43]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, right. So, so, so that's one thing. But I think it's kind of no coincidence in the cosmic view at the very moment when the number of species of humans on the planet plunges, that we actually are creating artificial species and AI. And so there might be a way in which the new economy is based around the fact that the AIs are actually consumers as well as producers, that they are in some ways an integral part of the economy and the way humans are, that not only do we generate stuff, but we actually consume it. And that's a lot. That's a large part of this whole big engine where people make things and other people use those and buy those. And so it may be that, that, that the handoff is, is to AI agents, bots, robots, AIs that are in some ways doing what a lot of the humans were doing, meaning that they were consuming a lot of the stuff that we produced. And again, you make a robot, it needs a room, you have a car, it needs a garage, it needs, it goes. It has a garage, it has a car hospital. You know, they have an AI, a robot hospital. There may be ways in which we're not imagining that they're handing off the economy to, to billions of agents and robots instead of billions of humans.
- [13:03]
Azeem Azhar
Right.
- [13:03]
Kevin Kelly
And they, they take more part in this new kind of economy that we're going to construct. And that's the thesis.
- [13:10]
Azeem Azhar
Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a fascinating, you know, fascinating idea. The idea that essentially we continue to have sufficient number of economic entities in the, in the economy to keep things turning over. I mean, in a way, we have these artificial entities in the economy already. We call them corporations, and we're talking about, you know, many, many more of them in order to maintain enough vibrancy. And there's a great line from a legal scholar, markets and capitalism as the comedy of the commons, because of the intersections and interactions and the emergent properties of that mixing. And there is this, this notion perhaps that that's the vibrancy that you need. One of the questions that I have is, what is that? What does that path to that future look like? You once described, you know, humans as the reproductive organs of, of technology. But where do the, you know, market forces fit? In with that mental model.
- [14:10]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, so, so again I think we, we're in the process of kind of revising the standard model of capitalism which was based on growth. And it's clear that we have to have a different kind of growth. And again, I call it more like maturing where you have an evolution not in terms of making it bigger, but you have evolution in terms of making things better. And so that's a big step that, that would, would take some adjustment in terms of our models, taxation, regulation, all these other things, you know, including again all the issues we have with AI is who's responsible for them if they do something that is harmful, who's accountable. And so those are kind of the, the basic infrastructure changes that I think we'll make as basically our population declines. And the aha moment for me was to realize that this moment is actually much closer than we think. Those official UN figures was that it was going to happen. The peak was going to happen around 2070 or something. When I look at the figures and also the rate at which the UN keeps changing, it looks like it's going to happen in 2040. So in 2040, which is 15 years from now, the number, the total number of deaths on the planet will outweigh or outnumber the number of births on the entire planet. So, so, so this is fairly soon. That's only 15 years away when we are actually going to reach this peak. So I think this issue of thinking about what that looks like where we're headed into in 15 years, within lifetime, the people who are listening, no matter your age, we need to think about what does that look like. And I don't have, I don't have a policy, I don't have a program. I'm just saying yeah, this is where we're headed.
- [16:13]
Azeem Azhar
Well, we can play about with that in our, in this conversation for a few minutes. One of the things I think that is also interesting is that even if population doesn't decline until 2060 or 2070 or 2080, as a UN you used to think it would. The thesis is actually is still true because we can manufacture AI system extremely cheaply. You know, the first version of GPT4 cost a lot and then you get the nth version in Deep Seat V3 and it's much much cheaper and we will soon be outnumbered. We all choose choose to be supported by many more since AI's whatever we call them than than there are people. I mean if you just look at how you, you might work today or how I work Today, I have five or six LLMs, I've got a whole bunch of other tools that keep me company and, and help me with my work and through my day. So we're already, you know, heading in, in a sense, in, in that direction. And I suppose the thing to play around with is why is that beneficial? I think it's beneficial because the world gets more and more complex. And I actually, as a human, really like the fact that when I turn the tap on the faucet in my kitchen, I know clean drinking water will come out of it. Behind that is a whole load of really complicated stuff that involves machinery and pipes and hygiene systems. I mean, I don't even know the words, but I can actually just trust that to work. And as our world gets more complicated, we actually, I think, do want to abstract away from that, that complexity. So even independent, frankly, of population decline, we're going to want to have an autonomous economy populated by millions, billions, trillions of bots. And then the question is, what will motivate them? What are the incentive signals that they get? And of course, how do we govern that sort of sea of entities for our own, own benefit? And you know, I think that that is a really interesting infrastructure question and it's a kind of a governance question. Right? What is, what does a bot, bot to bot economy need to. Need to look like?
- [18:29]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I did a calculation a couple of years ago about the amount of energy used on the planet, and I think it was three quarters of the energy that we were now producing or consuming was being used not for the benefits directly of us, not to move us, not to heat us. It was being already devoted to the technium. It was moving other physical things, it was heating other physical things. So in a certain sense, already a large portion of our economy is machine to machine to begin with. And we're just kind of making it even further where your agents will interact with other agents, they will consume the information generated by those agents and then they will send it to other agents. And so if there's an, so there could be an economy built on that, all behind the scenes, as you said, it's kind of infrastructural like. And by the way, you know, 95% of the AI that's going to be ever generated, you will never see, you will never be aware of it. It's going to be in the back offices and it'll be this kind of agent to agent contact. And so the question is sort of, everybody asks is, what's the role of humans? I'm Very, very optimistic about this. And I think the reason is, is because what I think technology gives us. You mentioned complexity. I have another term. I use the, I use the word options, possibilities and opportunities. That's what we get with technology. It's not just complexity. It's, that's the fact that we have more options, more choices about what we want to do in life. And by the way, if we want to be an Amish farmer, farming the old way, that's still a possibility. And that is there. If you want to be a mathematician, if you want to be a ballerina, if you want to be a mortgage broker or a web designer, you now have that possibility. And we have even new ones in the future. And so that's what technology gives us is expanding possibilities and options that you don't have growing up in a little village with organic food and strong families is you have only one choice when you're going to be a farmer. Now we have, you come to the city, which is a possibility factory, and you come to modernity, which is increasing the options. And that's what this, these agents are going to do is they're going to give us even more possibilities of things that we can do, ways to be creative, how we can spend our time. If you still choose to, you know, farm organically by hand and go to the opera, those are still choices. And so we, what we're doing is we're making a new economy that's going to have even more possibilities and choices. And a lot of those possibilities are for the AIs.
- [21:16]
Azeem Azhar
Absolutely.
- [21:17]
Kevin Kelly
So we're expanding the possibility space to include other kinds of, of entities.
- [21:25]
Azeem Azhar
I would definitely want to touch on that and explore that idea because there's a lot that you've raised around, you know, choices and options. But before we get there, I would love your. You've been part of the, I think the sort of deep, deep creation and narration of Silicon valley culture for 40 plus years. This technology right now is largely being built by a certain class of, of companies. Of course, there is the sort of open source movement alongside. How comfortable are you with the ways in which those choices that will define this world that you see coming in 10 to 15 years will be made in a way that you would feel comfortable with. And I'm thinking OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft and the rest.
- [22:14]
Kevin Kelly
First of all, one of the principles that happens in this kind of technology is that there is a tendency to win or take all. There is a tendency of network effects to kick in because of the communication technology. And we see these monopolies happen and that makes a lot of people nervous. And a lot of the concern about the AI where we're going is that there are a few companies that seem to be running big. And there are several things to say about that. One is that I think these are natural monopolies, but they're always very, very temporary. Okay. You'll notice that despite the strong efforts of the incumbents, Amazon, Google, Meta, they were not the ones to dominate the conversation with what's happening. It's startups, because that is the general trend. You know, you had IBM, who could compete against IBM with making computers. Nobody could. Well, it was a software company, Microsoft, that came along that displaced them. And then who could compete against Microsoft? Nobody. Then it was a search engine. It was always outside of the current regime. And so these monopolies are very, very temporary. And I think they're good while they're there, and then they're going to be displaced by something else. And so right now it's the startups, it's deep seek, it's all the outsiders that, that where the real disruption comes from. So I'm not that concerned about the fact that there's this dynamic of the increasing returns that's just part of the landscape. The second question is, where are the values? What, what, what's being embedded in it? And I find that the people who are working on this right now, which are my friends and my family, very, very cautiously trying to think about what it is that they're doing, what is the values, how do we align it with humans? I find them really trying very hard, but it's a very difficult prospect. It's the thing about the values is that we can put them in. That's not hard. It's not hard to program in values and judgment and stuff because it's almost like software, it's like code. The difficulty is for us to come to some consensus about what it is that we want to give them. And so that's the difficult part. It's almost very philosophical. It's like, yes, we can put values into these machines, but our own morality system is very shallow and very inconsistent. We're horrible with this. So here's the thing. We're trying to make them better than us, and that is really challenging and beautiful. We are actually trying to make the, the morality of the AI self driving cars better than we drive better than us. And so that making it better is a beautiful moment, I think.
- [25:10]
Azeem Azhar
Well, I think we've got a rare opportunity here where we have Two optimists on a call like this. So let's have a, let's have this kind of virtuous circle that's going to build out. So, so I, I have a, I have a thesis that I have. Maybe it's intuitions rather than the thesis which is that the, the LLMs of, of today are trained on everything that's out there and some of it they've, they've got in ways that might make a copyright lawyer uncomfortable. And yet they all behave reasonably similarly despite their fine tuning. They are, they are pretty enlightenment J.S. mill, a small liberal. I don't mean an American political sense, I mean in a political theory sense, types of people, systems that embed a sense of fairness and kind of morality. And you see it across grok, you see it across running deep seq. If you run it locally, you see it in Claude and OpenAI. They all express it in slightly different ways but what they've got in them is a sense of the rationality that started to emerge after the scientific, scientific revolution of the 18th and 19th and 20th century. It's really hard to get your LLM to persuade you or persuade itself that the earth is flat. It's really easy to have deep SEQ run locally and talk about things that happened in, in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and to evaluate them from some kind of ethical or moral standpoint. So there's the optimist in me has this intuition that of course they're trained on how to make bombs and so on, but in reality for them to be useful they have to reflect some underlying rational truths about the world. And embedded in there are some moral truths perhaps.
- [26:57]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, exactly. And by the way, you know, you said the right thing is they're trained on every, all the documents this is say to the first approximation, including the best and the worst of the writing and the ideas. But in general the way that their system works is they tend to put out the sort of the average, like the average human view, the average human consensus, the average human morality. However, in their latent space they are capable of actually producing the best, but you have to nudge them in that direction. That's one of the skills of working with these LLMs is that you're constantly trying to nudge them into the latent space of the professional of the highest level, of the highest caliber thinking of the highest morality, which they don't. They tend to want to come to the average. And so part of the skills of working with these agents, these aliens, is nudging them to their best. And so that's the, that's basically the prompting engineer's task. And the skill that we're all going to learn is how do we get these to be on their best behavior to give you the best answer, to take that extra time to do. Not just the average. They're kind of lazy in that way. You, you want to go, no, no, I know that you, I know that you can do better, behave the best you possibly can. All right, I'll do that.
- [28:18]
Azeem Azhar
Yeah, well, I mean, confession, that's, that's how I use them as well. You know, if I've got a difficult email to write, it's normally about, you know, getting my pocket ticket, parking ticket overturned. I really nudge them. They like, write the most persuasive, humbling, but effective email you possibly can, and you kind of run up to this idea, which I really love. You build off some of the ideas from Robin Hanson and his book the Age of M. This notion that you'll have these kind of more empathetic systems that are out there that will be working for us. And this idea that, you know what, you'll, you'll, there's going to be lots of content out there, there are going to be lots of things to do, and our sea of agents can be consuming all of it for us, figuring out what we need better than we might otherwise need. And then I guess the challenge that that raises is that, you know, a lot of our experiences are about, are about struggle, right? A lot of the things that grow and develop us, the things that we remember are about challenges. Being able to make choices, recognizing that things don't always have to be perfect. And one could argue that some aspect of the Western condition, and, you know, any sense that there's a malaise perhaps may come from an excess of comfort, right. Culturally and economically than we, we've had. So the appeal of being sort of super served by a network of thought also sits counter to something that has also been inherently human, which is we have to struggle, and we often do struggle. And struggle forms a part of the creation of our moral virtues. So how, how do you bring those together?
- [29:56]
Kevin Kelly
So, so I don't, I don't believe in utopias. I, I think they're, they're a bad idea, even if you can make one. I believe in protopia, which is this incremental move to slight betterment, even if it's only 1% improvement over time, and that you accumulate, accumulate goodness over time. And that's what civilization is, is you Know, if we can create 1% more than we destroy each year, we can accumulate a civilization. I think the struggles are never going to go away. I think most of the problems that we're going to have in the future are going to be created by the technologies that we're making today. But I believe that the solution to those problems are more and better technology, which will produce new problems. So for me, problems are the source of progress. Okay, so we're not going to eliminate the struggle. The struggle is the process. And so we may change the kinds of things that we are occupied and struggled with. But I see that again as progress where we don't struggle about surviving and starving. That's behind us. We have other kinds of struggles about who we are and what we're here for and what our purpose is. And I think AIs again can help us with that because they're going to answer some of the questions about what are we here for, why, why are we doing this? And help us elevate to a greater purpose. I think we'll look back and say there was an utter waste of a human life to be mining, collecting coal and a dirty thing that was not a thing that humans should be doing. A lot of the jobs that people are trying to protect are jobs. I think we should will be embarrassed that humans were doing it all.
- [31:37]
Azeem Azhar
Of course kids are now mining, but in minecraft. So it was. Or crypto or crypto mining. Yeah. I was wondering whether you were going to suggest that. But turn to the question of how it would actually feel. How's it going to feel over that 15 to 20 year period? Now this is an unfair question for me to put to you and if you put it to me, I would feel it unfair as well. Because it's the wrong timeframe, we don't think in that timeframe. But, but I was thinking about what it is like in places which have had 30 years of population decline. There's a fantastic essay in the New Yorker in the last couple of weeks about Korea and focuses on a school which hasn't had a new student in a few years and has all these facilities. And you know, what you see are adaptations in, in other places. So in Japan, for example, there are these adaptations where the 70 year olds look after the 80 year old to look after the 90 year old. But I'm curious about, about what you think it might look like across different cultures over that next 15 to 20 years.
- [32:43]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, I mean actually I was in the village in Japan that had mannequins set out in the bus stops and stuff to give a sense of more people being there. It was a little creepy. I don't think that's the solution. But I think what we're going to have is this is my hope. This is a, not a prediction, this is a positive scenario that I hope would happen which is that people, people, countries begin to compete for population. I mean basically if we don't have any more in a global total, then you can kind of like you can win some to come to you, your country and say, look, we have fantastic healthcare, we've got a great language program, we've got a free education, come to our country and work. And so that competition I think would be really great for policies and nations around the world competing to attract people to their country. And so I'm imagining even places like China or Japan, Japan right now has finally turned around a little bit and they are trying to for the first time ever have foreigners come and work. So my last visit there, just this last year, for the first time, I saw Bengalese and Nepalese in the 7 11s who were speaking pretty good, pretty good Japanese. And so these were the first foreign immigrants that because they needed the workers. And so I think this idea of having places catered to, welcoming people to come in. And so if that worked, then we might have the universal right of mobility. The universal right of mobility which says if you're born on this planet, you have a right to live anywhere on the planet if you follow the local laws and pay taxes and all that. And so that universal right of mobility would be a huge factor in general peace on the planet. But I think is one way in which we could work to accommodate. And so there might be countries that said come, we have great taxation, we have great schools and we'll try to have healthcare and we'll try to encourage you to have a family here. We'll have more kids. And so that would be something where people are moving to the place where they want to have good lives and have kids.
- [35:13]
Azeem Azhar
I agree that it's likely to be quite heterogeneous. It feels like this is a place where different countries because of different, you know, sort of cultural paths, these things are often very path dependent, will make different, different choices. And you can imagine some countries saying, listen, we want to preserve, we're going to extend life as far as we can. We're going to use automation and labor to maintain the quality of life for a small number of people. But we're going to keep that, keep that sense of cultural purity. And others who may say actually will follow the route that Kevin, you've just described now. And that creates quite a sort of interesting picture, sort of this jigsaw as it comes together. And one of the things that I think also happens over this period of time is a sense of the relative scarcity of human connection and human interaction. So there's often this argument that says, which, you know, I think has a lot of scientific and engineering validity, which is that machines will get better and better and better and then you won't be able to teleport a synthetic video from a real video, but it won't be the real video. And so I imagine also that as we go through this period, there'll be a point in time, maybe last for longer, where the sense of something having been touched by a human will increase its, maybe its value or just signify it. Right. It's a sense that, you know, it's artisanal cheese rather than shop made cheese. Perhaps it has a price premium to it, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps there will be entire products where the promise is not touched by machine or not touched by machine intelligence. And how long that that lasts, I, I, I don't know. But it, we already again start to see hints of that. It's not, it's not luxury goods, but it is artisanal wine and micro brewing. And you know, the sense that people go for, you know what's fascinating for, for me, having grown up alongside mass tourism, is that we've gone through a phase where if you weren't very affluent, your holiday involved a kind of cold, rickety chalet. And if you were rich, you got five star treatment and a butler and now 50 years on, wealthier, you are the nest for your creature comfort. You take. Right. These things are sort of relative in their sense. I mean, how do you, do you think that there is that sort of interplay between what we will value as humans in the economy and how it gets valued?
- [37:52]
Kevin Kelly
Absolutely. I mean, I think the, ideally if the bots are doing most of the work that we don't want to do, then we can do the work that we like to do, which is sit around and chit chat and to hold hands of someone who's ill or to play around and that becomes more valuable. And so I think you're absolutely right that something made without the touch of a robot, where a human, and maybe there's documentation, there's video whatever, showing that the entire process, it's on the blockchain. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, so, so, but, but While that's there, I don't think that's going to be most, how most things are made. I mean, I think again this will be a premium product, whereas most things are going to be made by automation of some sort. And, and that's sort of effective. What we have right now where you can get a very high end meal, but most of it is kind of like most of the food consumed is, is processed. And so that will continue again because humans will be a minority of the workers of the world. Most of them will be bots. And so we can spend our time paying for this special human attention because it, because our human attention becomes ever more valuable right when we, when there's fewer of us. And so getting attention from a human will become, I mean, and your attention will become the most valuable, valuable thing that you have to give away. And so that's a really.
- [39:20]
Azeem Azhar
Sorry, I don't jump in there. That's a really important part of the equation and it does connect to another point that we've learned. So fundamentally the thing that is gated right now is the amount of attention we have. Call it eight hours a day, call it 12 hours a day, and the amount of attention in the world is 12 hours times 8 billion people. That number will start to, you know, drop and, but our attention per human is going to stay fixed. And it is interesting because right now companies compete for our attention in particular ways in ways that I think in, in decades to come we'll think of as dark patterns. You know, the dopamine device to get us to stay on.
- [40:02]
Kevin Kelly
Right.
- [40:03]
Azeem Azhar
What is the mechanism by which that flip is right, by which we start to respect attention?
- [40:09]
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, well, you know, I, I did a calculation some years ago about the average cost of our attention, how we give it away. And if you take all the, the total volume of television or even online and the total revenue, total hours, hours that we give revenue is that we're working for coolly wages. I mean basically we're selling our attention for a couple bucks an hour.
- [40:30]
Azeem Azhar
Right.
- [40:31]
Kevin Kelly
Which is ridiculous. Okay, so part of it is, is that we haven't yet learned to, to value that we're not yet being paid. We're compensated for at its true value. And I think that may be coming as we have more and more agents is we'll understand that for instance, the people who are watching right now, thank you for your attention. You're giving us millions of dollars worth of attention right now, even though it's not valued at that. But keep that in mind.
- [41:01]
Azeem Azhar
That's one of the things, by the way, Kevin, that I think about with my writing, I think about with, with my team as we write things, we say this is going to go in the inboxes of a couple hundred thousand people. It's got to be worth their time. Like they are giving us their attention. This has got to be well written, it's got to be well researched, it's got to say something that helps them move their thinking forward. And I think it's one of our values because of course, the time and attention that we all have is the one thing that we can really not manufacture. Moral.
- [41:30]
Kevin Kelly
Right. Well, I mean, I propose that there might be versions of this where you are being paid to watch them. You're being paid to read an email someone sends you, right. So you take out the advertisers who are your intermediaries and you say, no, no, no, we'll pay you to watch this ad. We will pay you to read something. And so you're actually getting paid for that kind of attention. And so that's one way that we could shift things is that you have a publication and they're actually paying you to look at the ads.
- [42:08]
Azeem Azhar
Kevin, we have covered so much ground. I've got one last question for you and I'm going to make it a personal one for me and for you. So I first came across your work in 32 years ago actually. To the. To the week. 32. My math is terrible. 31 years ago. Wired Edition 2.03. Laurie Anderson on the COVID America's multimedia tricks.
- [42:30]
Kevin Kelly
This is Wired magazine.
- [42:31]
Azeem Azhar
Yeah, Wired magazine, absolutely. If 1994 Kevin could read 2025. Kevin's blog. What thing would most blow his mind?
- [42:45]
Kevin Kelly
Oh wow, that's. I think the thing would blow his mind is that he's probably writing about the same stuff and he would have hoped that I would broaden out beyond what I've been writing about all along. Yeah, so I think that would be the thing. It's like you're still writing about this. Come on. But here's the thing I've learned and that is you have to repeat yourself in a certain sense. Because I wrote my first book in 1990s chapter on crypto. It had all kinds of things about AI. I said it, but nobody was listening. I said it, nobody understood it. And it just takes a long time to absorb some of these ideas and the ideas of bottom up architecture, the idea of decentralization as a very robust thing. The idea that you have to let go of things in order to get the best from them. Amazingly, people don't understand the first time you, you, you tell them. And so I have sort of kind of come back to these because it it's necessary to kind of explain them again in a different way for a new crowd of people. And so for better or worse, that's what I'm trying to do.
- [44:08]
Azeem Azhar
It's well, it's fantastic. Your blog is@kk.org you add a substack as well, I guess if people look that up. And mine is, of course, exponential View. Thank you to the 700 or so people who tuned in live. And, of course, thank you, Kevin, for joining me with Friday with Azim Azar. Thank you.
- [44:26]
Kevin Kelly
My pleasure. It was a delight, a lot of fun. Thank you for asking some great questions. I know that you're a human because you're asking good questions.