Kevin Kelly (4:05)

Empty playgrounds, schools without enough students to stay open. Small towns deserted and abandoned. This is not some dystopian vision of the future, demographers warn. This is our future. Global population growth is leveling off and by the second half of this century could begin to shrink for the first time since the bubonic plague struck the world almost 700 years ago.

Dr. Dan Koch (4:32)

Okay, so the idea here is that there is a birth rate crisis globally and in the United States, kind of depending on where you look. And there's like, certainly there's some legitimacy to this concern. On the left we have an inverse and basically opposite argument. This is an older clip. I couldn't find something quite as new. Some of the accepted wisdom around this has probably changed in the eight years since this clip initially came out. It's from National Geographic, but also, I'll say, like during my touring years when Sherwood was on the Vance Warped Tour, there would often be a tent set up like all summer long, like with all the merch tents. It was like a nonprofit tent and it had these big flat screens that would show these graphics about how overpopulation would eventually doom the earth. So this has been a long term talking point probably at least since like the environmental movement of the 1970s and that sort of renewed focus on global warming that is also worried about population. And you often hear about overpopulation or actually just bringing people into the world as the single largest driver of carbon emissions. Right. Like, to have a kid is more than all the flights and driving you'll do in your whole life because of just the way the math works. More people and then they might have more kids. Now of course, all of that assumes certain modeling about how many kids people are having. And now the underpopulation worries is fighting against that. But the point here is just here's another message you might hear from the other end of the spectrum. Human activities from pollution to overpopulation are driving up the Earth's temperature and fundamentally.

Kevin Kelly (6:16)

Changing the world around us.

Dr. Dan Koch (6:23)

So on the one side, you've got panic over a decreasing population, and on the other side, you have panic over an increasing population. There are a couple more similarities that I see between these messages. Number one, they both focus on catastrophic futures. They engage in a form of potentially catastrophizing, which is a cognitive distortion, also known as a thinking error. Within cognitive therapy, the worst possible outcomes of a potential situation are really the only ones that we consider likely, right? So as I. And if I'm feeling anxious, I'm gonna catastrophize more because the catastrophic thoughts match my current emotional state. This is called mood congruent thinking. It's extremely common and really important in cognitive therapy and cognitive theory. So they're both saying, here is a future catastrophe. Interestingly, they are inverse catastrophes of each other. And then the second thing that they share is they contain an inherent moral prerogative if they're taken to their logical conclusions. Right? So if overpopulation is a real big problem, then we should all think about how many children we're having. And actually, a good global citizen will be conscious of the way that his or her choices about family might affect all these other people living now or future people. Similarly, if the underpopulation fear is the real fear, well, then the individual choices a person makes today about having children reflect on whether they are a good global citizen in terms of affecting the people living today or in the future. Now, I will make this personal because it matters to me. I feel it more because of my own history with this question. There was a time, maybe eight, 10 years ago, where Jaffrey, my wife, and I were doing a lot of thinking about starting to try and have kids and thinking about that whole world and kind of wondering if we're doing the right thing. We're thinking a lot about global warming. We're thinking about our carbon footprint, environmentalism, recycling, sort of. The zero waste movement is a major kind of moral issue for Jaffrey. I would say it's kind of maybe her main sort of socially related moral issue, whereas, I don't know, mine might be, like, refugee policy or something like that. So this is a big thing for her. So we've been talking about it for a long time. And I want to give my lifelong friend Lohan Baumgarten some credit here because I floated in this group text with him and two other buddies that I would, you know, maybe we shouldn't have kids because of the carbon, you know, stuff. And he was like, Dan, he's like, stop the presses. This is a very personal decision for you and Jaffrey to make. And I don't think you should make a decision about whether or not you should have children or more or fewer children based on, like, current scientific projections. And at the time, I was like, okay, I see the logic of that. And it was really helpful for me to hear. Now, all these years later, I think just a little pinch of fairy dust and perfect wisdom delivered direct to me from my friend. And I fully agree with him. Now, I would make the same argument for anybody who's thinking about this or, you know, just this could be applied to other things too. Childbearing is just sort of an obvious way to look at it because it has this absolute math to it. Overpopulation, underpopulation, adding kids, not adding kids. There's a nice elegance to it. It's very straightforward. And I think it's really interesting to consider as a side example, the question of immigration in American politics. These fears can also be catastrophic. So a catastrophic treatment on the right is, okay, too many immigrants, it's gonna dissolve our cultural heritage. That's gonna lead to other problems. It's also gonna maybe be on our safety net and social services. So maybe that'll be a big economic problem and lead to a bunch of crime. So we need to restrict immigration. We need fewer people coming here. And then on the left, there can be a form of catastrophe that's like, if we don't have enough immigration, we will have a demographic decline. For instance, in this case, a left leaning person might have a United States specific argument about birth rate and say we need to bring in immigrants to replace the birth rate. This is actually probably a view that I hold, politically speaking, if people want to come here and they're willing to do the kind of work we don't want to do, and we're not having enough babies, get them in here. But notice that's a left leaning argument. It's using the same structure, but it's restricting the lens to only the United States of America as opposed to the globe. Right. And that will keep us from national stagnation, economically or cultural stagnation, because we just get kind of two up our own butts. We're like two inbred, so to speak. The thing that's interesting there is, number one, it muddies the waters and shows how the data can be used to make different kinds of arguments. And then the second one is that catastrophizing does a lot of work here. You are probably more likely to buy the argument that we need to restrict immigration around questions of cultural dissolution. If you've heard versions of the replacement, a great replacement theory, that Democrats are bringing all these people in on purpose to register them as Democrats and then run white Christian America out of town, basically. To the extent that you think that catastrophic future is real, you are going to be motivated by fear and you're going to be. You're going to find yourself more in lockstep with an immigration argument. The thing there is just that, like the catastrophizing, which is so powerful and any human being could be subject to the power thereof, it really can warp things. I mean, it distorts them literally. We call it a cognitive distortion, right? It distorts our cognitions. So I've got four takeaways from this overall situation here. Number one, nobody knows the future. The best we can do is model it with varying levels of accuracy. Hopefully those models are getting more accurate in general through time, but there's a lot of uncertainty baked in anytime we're looking at the future. Number two, whether or not to have children is a huge decision, maybe one of the most human decisions a person can ever make. I know that many children are the natural result of sex and not necessarily some explicit decision to have kids. But here I'm speaking more directly to those who are considering this stuff more carefully. And I think we should give ourselves grace for the difficulties in making such a huge and central decision. And we should be careful what advice we're listening to around that. Number three, catastrophizing in this case can work both ways. I really just mean to say catastrophizing can make you afraid of something. In this case, I think it's interesting because it's like too many people or too few people. They are literally mutually incompatible. And which is it again? Back to number one. We don't know. We don't know the future. Finally doing the right thing in this situation, specifically as regards the future of Earth and the human race, this is a genuine unknown. Contributing more children to the Earth might make things on the whole worse if the overpopulation or extreme warming futures are real. Alternatively, contributing fewer children to the Earth might make things on the whole, worse. If the birth crisis and underpopulation worries are real. You don't know, I don't know. And nobody asking for you to become a founding member of their substack knows either. None of us know. So we grope forward in the dark. We do our best, and we try and read the best science we have access to and we just give it our best shot. And in the meanwhile we can notice things that we are doing, like catastrophizing, that are maybe getting in the way. So onward and upward to you, my lovely listeners. Thank you guys for sticking in here. And really, I think this is a nice bleed into my conversation with Kevin Kelly around protopianism, because he's basically saying it's neither utopianism nor dystopianism. And in one way what we're talking about here, these over and underpopulation, these are both dystopian futures. And then they're sort of like techno optimist utopian futures that sometimes are around, especially in Kevin's circles. And he sort of identifies himself as none of the above. And I think that that's interesting because it feels a bit closer to me to the kind of thing I'm arguing for here around the having children question. So. All right, I hope you guys enjoyed this. Let me know if you like these top of mind segments or not or what you'd like me to cover in them. I like doing them. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Nice choice hitting up this podcast. No surprises. You're all about diving into tastes everyone in the room can enjoy. Just like White Claw Surge, it's for celebrating those moments when connections have been made and the night's just begun. With bold flavors and 8% alcohol by volume. Unleash the night. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors, 8% alcohol by volume. White Claw Seltzer Works Chicago, Illinois this holiday, Discover meaningful gifts for everyone on your list at K. Not sure where to start. Our jewelry experts are here to help you find or create the perfect gift in store or online. Book your appointment today and unwrap love this season only at K. I am joined today by Kevin Kelly. Kevin is a writer, a futurist, founding editor of Wired magazine, and Kevin's work explores technology, culture and biology, sort of the evolution therein. And he's known for what he calls a protopian optimism, which is the first thing that I want to ask you about Kevin. So thanks for being here. And what is protopianism? I understand it's somewhere in between. It's neither dystopian about the future nor utopian about the future. What's this middle spot you've staked out?

Kevin Kelly (17:12)

So protopia. Yeah, you're right. It's in between the impossible. And I Think even undesirable state of utopia, as well as the all too easy to imagine inverse of dystopia, catastrophe. Botopia is like utopia, a optimistic view of the future. And I would say the way this works is that it's sort of a tiny incremental creep towards betterment. It's based on the premise that if we can create a few percent more than we destroy every year, that few percent compounded over time is progress.

Dr. Dan Koch (17:59)

It's the Roth 401k of future views.

Kevin Kelly (18:03)

Exactly. So it relies on the miracle of compounding.

Dr. Dan Koch (18:09)

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (18:09)

And it's saying that the world doesn't have to be that much better good than bad, even if there's only 2% or 1% more good than bad than good triumphs. So that 1% is not really. It's hard to see. 1% is very hard to see. You can only really appreciate it by looking back. And it also says that if you give me all the problems in the world, that can be a very long list because that could be 49% of the world is crap and harmful. So. Sure. So I'm acknowledging the fact that there are problems and big problems and I even suggest that the more powerful technology is, the more powerful the problems. And I think most of the problems we have today have been developed by the technologies of the past.

Dr. Dan Koch (19:02)

Can you give me an example of that?

Kevin Kelly (19:04)

Pollution. So we had steam power, automation, that made pollution. The stresses of high pressure work causing.

Dr. Dan Koch (19:20)

Or obesity, plentiful calories, Right? Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Kelly (19:23)

Fertilizing, having too many calories. So we can go through us. I have a very technocentric view of the world. I think technology, the things that we invent in our mind, are the most important things in our culture at this point. And so what happens is that we make things and they have new problems. But unlike or different from most critics of technology, I think the solution to the problems that technology created is not less technology, but better technology. Yeah, It's a technological solution which in turn need to be solved with new technology, which in turn will make new problems. And so someone will say, well, that seemed like a rat race if you have only 1% or 2% improvement. And for me, no. And this comes back to the philosophical, maybe even theological aspect. I think there's a positive thing gained in all that, which is increasing choices and possibilities. That's what technology gives us overall, that's the win. That is the thing that we are moving towards is increasing possibilities and choices which we have. And weirdly, I have to say this very carefully. But weirdly, even the additional choice of doing harm, of doing bad, of doing evil is a good meaning.

Dr. Dan Koch (20:54)

Like if from God's perspective, let's say, or the universe's perspective or whatever you're like, if we were to frame this as a theological claim, it might be something like, it's reasonable to say that from the perspective of a creator, that whatever type of entity and all that language is imperfect, but whoever or whatever can get a universe created, okay, from that perspective, that an increase in possibility, in sort of power, cognitive power, perceptual power, sensory power, our five senses, but then of course our mind, which is able to take that, synthesize it. I'm always talking about that with cognitive theory, as a cognitive therapist, that we take all that stuff. So you're basically saying from that very all the way zoomed out universe level perspective, increasing complexity allows for things like art and love and also murder in the first degree, that is a possibility of that complexity. Is that kind of what you're getting at?

Kevin Kelly (21:54)

Kind of, I would say, maybe even more simpler, which is if you're a creator and you decide to create or allow free will choice, that means that you're allowing, if it's really genuine, you're allowing someone to do harm, right? But that choice, that free will, is a good, even though it includes the possibility of harm. Okay? So God decides to make beings like himself that have the ability of making choices. Choice or that option, that possibility given to make choices entails the fact that they are going to do wrong, they're going to choose wrong, but that choice is still good. And that's what I'm saying. And so what we have with technology is increasing free will, increases opportunities to make a choice. We have more and more choices to make. We're expanding the possibility space. And that's important because every one of us humans born and yet to be born, have a mixture of different talents, life experiences, innates, gifts, abilities, interests. And what we want is a world where each person's unique combination can be shared and expressed and enjoyed and used. And that requires increasing that possibility space. So the little story I like to tell is imagine if Mozart had been born before we had invented the piano and the symphony. What a loss to Mozart and to the world for his genius not to have been shared. We could easily have imagined that he would have been born a thousand years before any of that. Or what if Lucas had been born before the advent of the technology, which is going to be very, very likely. And so there's a Shakespeare today who is Born. And she's waiting for us to invent the technology, the possibilities for her to share her genius with us. So we have a moral responsibility to increase that possibility space. And we do that through technology. And so when we're making new stuff, it's not just that we're feeding the consumerist capitalist machine, it's that we are increasing the possibility space of making it more likely that a person would be able to find the tools that they need to share their gifts with us. Including, of course, the necessity of having clean water, healthcare, education just to get there, and including all the other tools for communicating and finding these people. And so all this stuff that we're doing. So I think technology is not neutral. I think there's a divine aspect to it. I think it's a reflection of the design in the same way that I would say nature, the cathedral of a redwood forest, has in some ways a reflection of the divine in. I think technology does too. And it does, because what it's doing is that it's expanding the possibility space of giving us choices and options, which is enlarging the gifts that we're all given at the beginning.

Dr. Dan Koch (25:32)

Okay, so again, to frame it as pronism, not utopian, not dystopian. You mentioned earlier, utopia would be undesirable. And I wanted to throw out a little something from psychology of religion then to sort of kick that back to you. So everybody knows, literally everybody who's ever thought about it can understand that a fear of eternal hell is a widespread phenomenon and can be motivating and whatever. What's less reported on. But that does show up in literature. And my first instance of hearing about it was my own mother shared this with me that she used. She was afraid of heaven. That when she would imagine eternal, unending singing to the Lord in a robe of white, she's like, it sounds boring. It sounds overwhelming. I feel, like, claustrophobic when I think about it. Sure.

Kevin Kelly (26:27)

Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (26:27)

And so that's just kind of an interesting sort of other side of the coin. And that's what I thought of when you said that.

Kevin Kelly (26:32)

Well, and I meant that. I meant that. Well, even sort of the literal descriptions of heaven are something that I would avoid. Right. I mean, it's like I have no interest in that.

Dr. Dan Koch (26:41)

Meaning if you were given the choice, you would personally leave the room?

Kevin Kelly (26:44)

Well, you know, I mean, I don't want hell either, but.

Dr. Dan Koch (26:48)

No, I'm going to opt out of the eternal chorus. Thank you. I'll turn in my choir card.

Kevin Kelly (26:52)

Right. The problem with both of them Is this idea of no change static? Yeah, static. It's the static part. And so I have. You know, I have plenty of heresies as a Christian, but one of them is I believe in a God that's perfecting, a God that is perfect and making itself more perfect. It is still in process, that God is the process itself, and it is still perfecting perfection. And we say, well, that makes no sense. Well, of course it makes no sense. Nothing about God makes sense. Okay. For us, in our own minds, there's no satisfactory explanation of godhood, of the universe with God or without God. They're all unsatisfactory. But for me, that idea of. Of a God that is itself not done is beautiful. And it means that the idea that whatever comes after this life is static suggests that that's very unlikely is how I would say it. It's like, you know, I have no proof, but I would say it was very, very unlikely if our own process or progress stopped with this life. So if there's an afterlife, I'm betting that there's still progress or process still happening. Okay, So I do think C.S. lewis's little metaphor of heaven and hell was just. You just sort of like, extrapolate. Wherever you're going right now, you just keep going. Yeah, and that's, you know, and so. And I think that has more truth to it than the idea that you arrive at somewhere where everything is complete.

Dr. Dan Koch (28:49)

Now, that's interesting, because when you said C.S. lewis, I was like, oh, he's going great, divorce. But. And I appreciate that one. I've heard that before. I've read it, of course, as well, years ago. The like. Yeah. Hell is a continuation of your current life. Heaven is a continuation of your current life. Where I thought you were going is that in the sort of geography of heaven and hell in that book, you find out this basic. Basically this beautiful poetic paradox that in hell, what it looks like from that perspective is that everybody's personal fiefdom is growing and growing and growing, and their distance from their neighbors is growing and growing and growing. And you would think that that makes hell like a Houston suburban sprawl or something. But what you learn towards the end of the book is that actually, from heaven's perspective, all of hell fits inside like a pin needle. And that it's actually an incredibly tiny place. And heaven is, by virtue, you know, obviously, in opposite, this expansiveness that feels poetically very akin to what I'm hearing from you.

Kevin Kelly (29:54)

Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, again, there's plenty of heresies here.

Dr. Dan Koch (29:58)

But we don't concern ourselves much with that. I know on this show, Kevin, I'm like a born 50 years too late, like Tillich Niebuhr, whatever, like you know, mid century liberal Christians.

Kevin Kelly (30:12)

Right, right. So, so, so, so, so for me there's no doubt that the entire universe is, returns to God. That, that it becomes, that it, it becomes a union. The universe and God union. They're becoming union. And so at the end, if there is an end of any sort, but there is, there is a sense in which those things converge. And so heaven redeems God redeems everything. Everything is redeemed. There is no unredeemable anything. So in that sense of redeeming meaning that the things are resolved. Yeah, I believe in the necessary, necessary paradoxes. I think it's fundamentally at the origin of the universe and our lives and everything that we like and good are paradoxes, meaning that they cannot be logically solved by us. And there may even be a universal fundamental paradox in the sense of, you know, God. Okay, where did God come from? I would say God is self made. That is the definition of God. It's the self madeness of any, every self madeness has its origin in this. So self made is like, that's still crazy, crazy. That is a fundamental paradox. And I think for me the kind of takeaway motto, the takeaway thing is that the universe is primarily a question. It's God figuring out who God is. God doesn't. I mean, if you're self made, when are you done? And why are you, why are you here? It's just mind boggling. So for me it more resembles God, more resembles a question than an answer. And so there is this movement to resolving that paradox. And so like if I said, was there an end to the universe? I don't mean like whether it was finite because it's probably multiverses. Is there an end? And I'd say the end is when there's a resolution to that paradox. It's like, and the paradox is what is God? That's God's paradox, figuring out. I mean it's like you're self made. It's like you have to be asking the question, God has to be asking this question of who he is all the time and what's he for? Because you can't get that from anywhere else. There's nothing else. And so the question of what your own meaning is has to be self assigned.

Dr. Dan Koch (32:56)

Okay, let's try and get some rubber on the tires here and see, see if I could make Some touch, some earth here. So I totally hear you. I understand where you're coming from. In the language of Karen Armstrong, comparative religionist, you are describing pretty much the God of the philosophers, some version of it. Okay, so she's talking about, like the early Greeks. And there's different ways that sort of philosophically minded people have put forward this picture of God that sort of stripped of all the little human things we ascribe to him, all the tribalisms and stuff. So I recognize that in many ways I find versions of the God of the philosophers to be more plausible because I myself am the type of person that Karen Armstrong is describing. However, even. Even from just a very straightforward Christian standpoint of yet looking at Jesus is looking at God in some serious way. To see Jesus or even maybe to see him as the Christ or something is in a sense, to see God, well, it seems like that presents a problem. It's a problem of particularity. And she says this is the problem that the God of the philosophers always has is it doesn't have much particularity. So in AD 30, you know, you got people hanging out with Jesus of Nazareth. And by the way, I'll just say listeners. Kevin is talking about what we call process theology in the theological world. This is Trip Fuller from homebrewed Christianity. This is.

Kevin Kelly (34:34)

Well, it's Whitehead.

Dr. Dan Koch (34:35)

It's Alfred North Whitehead who he pulls from. I'm saying people that. Sorry, sorry, Kevin. People my listeners would know who have been on the show. Thomas J ord is process. Most of the theologians that I end up talking to are process, even though I don't emphasize it as much on this show as other shows. But. So Jesus is here and he is particular. He's a particular human being that is in some way supposed to point us to God. How does a God that doesn't even know God's self show us God's self through the particularity of Jesus? Like, isn't that a problem?

Kevin Kelly (35:14)

So for me, I follow the Jesus, but I follow the cosmic Jesus. So there are trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of other civilizations, other beings, and each one of those planets probably has its own Jesus moment.

Dr. Dan Koch (35:30)

Let's pause there just a second to unpack some assumptions. So there is a debate here among theologians and scientists and everybody, like, how many other sentient species are there? I am. Of your opinion, I don't know what. I don't know if I'd say trillions, but what I would say is there are billions of galaxies with billions of stars in each, which may Each have planets. So we're talking 10 to the order of 20 or something potential planets. And surely we're not the only fucking one.

Kevin Kelly (35:57)

Zillions.

Dr. Dan Koch (35:58)

Yeah, zillions of planets.

Kevin Kelly (35:59)

Yeah, zillions of planets. And each of them have the same dilemma. If they're sentient beings who come up, if God is seeding them with free will and choices, they have the same dilemma that we had in humans, is how does God balance his mercy and his justice?

Dr. Dan Koch (36:22)

Now that. Okay, now just speaking psychologically, you're making some steps here. I would like to show the work. So a human being with human cognition and mental and physical faculties and the type of inner life that we know, that we each experience, even though we can't experience the other person's inner life. We, yes, we have come in our linguistic formation, evolving above land and not underwater, for instance, and with a certain articulations of speech, we have come to talk about these concepts. I don't know that you can just claim that any other sentient being would also go into, like, God's mercy and God's justice. Like, maybe, Maybe there are other forms of sentience that don't consider those kind of categories.

Kevin Kelly (37:11)

They may not, but I'm talking about from God's point of view. So let me just pause that for a second and say, I believe that, you know, the metaphor that we are made in the image of God means that we are going to create beings, sentient beings, and we will probably give them free will. And at that moment, we're going to be in the same position of God. It's like, how do we deal with their ability to do harm?

Dr. Dan Koch (37:38)

When you think of that eventuality, by the way, are you thinking 100 years, 10,000 years, a million years? We will probably get to the point where we can create sentient beings, I.

Kevin Kelly (37:47)

Would say, within 100 years. And I'm working on this thing called a catechism for robots, because I think robots are going to be asking, saying, wait, wait, I believe in God. What should I do? I have a soul. What should I do? What are we going to say to them? Okay, so I call them artificial aliens because I say lots of the work that would happen if we had contact with alien civilization. Who knows when that will happen? We're going to have that for sure on this planet when we invent these artificial aliens. So they're called aliens because they don't think exactly like us. So you're right in the sense that they aren't going to necessarily be human, but they're like Spock on Star Trek, Spock was not a human. He thought differently. That was his value to the crew. But yet he was setting. Maybe he had a soul. So we're going to invent things like that that are thinking differently than us, which is why we make them, but they're going to be capable of their own internal life and whatnot, and consciousness.

Dr. Dan Koch (38:57)

Now, can I just briefly pause there and say, I think that that's based on certain assumptions of what consciousness is or whatever, but I would patch onto it and say even, let's say even if you're wrong, that pure digital AIs and maybe there is some stuff with enfleshedness or something down the road that we can't.

Kevin Kelly (39:19)

Robots, they'll be robots. They're not just they have to have.

Dr. Dan Koch (39:23)

Bodies, but meaning, we may be able to create beings whose experience of consciousness at a molecular level more resembles our own being of like, with a physical brain, with neurons. We're a ways off from that, obviously, but that's in theory possible. But what I was going to say is even sooner than that. I can imagine with the help of AI, for instance, a translation software between myself and an octopus, because eventually, through, you know, very specific intelligences that we can create artificially can, like, get in the weeds and understand what's going on with the various micro expressions and stuff of cephalopods. Because we know that they are smart. We know that they can shoot water to turn off light bulbs. We know they prefer certain handlers over other handlers. So imagine we could talk with them. That also gets you, right? The same thing you're talking about of like a type of an alien intelligence.

Kevin Kelly (40:17)

Maybe that's going to happen pretty soon. You know, Azer Raskin, with the Earth species stuff, they're now deciphering some of that with AI, some of that internal language between each individual.

Dr. Dan Koch (40:32)

Right. Between animals, with each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Kelly (40:35)

The whales talk, the beluga whales talking to each other. And so I would say that kind of access. But it points out to me what's an important point is that people have this weird idea that consciousness is a kind of binary. There it's there, not there. It's a continuum. It's a continuum. It's a gradation. Your dog and Coco the gorilla had various capabilities of consciousness. It's unlikely that consciousness is not a single dimension. It's probably multidimensional, just as intelligence is not a single dimension. It's not even an element. It's a compound of different kinds of elemental cognitions that we collectively have in our own brain. And so consciousness will prove to be this thing that things have different kinds and different amounts of. And so initially some of these AIs will have these little glimmers of self awareness. And over time we'll add more complexity to them. And the reason why they have that and the reason why we give it to them is that's how they are guided, that's how they're made useful. All these processes hallucinate in some way. And the only way you can overcome that is, is by having other AIs oversee one AI. And you have this ecosystem of AIs overseeing other AIs. And that's consciousness. That's a type of consciousness where you are overseeing something. And so we're putting those into these AIs already, where we have multiple layers in order to guide them. It's kind of weird, which is like in complexity theory there's this really weird thing that you can get very high accuracy from inaccurate parts. Right. You have all these parts and none of them are accurate. And you think that the inaccuracy would multiply up, but it doesn't. You can actually overcome it and you can get more precision from imprecise parts. And what we're going to discover is that we'll actually get more determinism from a system of indeterminate AI. So all the AIs are indeterminate, meaning that they aren't mechanical. They will surprise you. You can't predict where they're going. And you would think, well, if you have a big system of all those things that you can't predict, you would have even worse. No, no, no. You actually can get greater prediction from all these parts that don't predict very well. And that's complexity theory.

Dr. Dan Koch (43:10)

Well, that's just like with human beings. I don't know what one person is going to do when 50,000 Syrian migrants enter Sweden, but I do know what a million people are going to do. You know, like they're going to vote this way. They're going to, you know, like the bigger the group, the easier it is to sort of do that. But any individual member might not sort of adhere to that.

Kevin Kelly (43:31)

So temperature is. Temperature is a collective measurement.

Dr. Dan Koch (43:35)

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (43:35)

Of atoms. You don't know where the atoms are individually, but collectively they make temperature.

Dr. Dan Koch (43:41)

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (43:42)

So back then to the idea of the cosmic Jesus, okay, so there are zillions and zillions of planets. I mean, they're almost uncountable. And let's say there's only a couple billion Civilizations out of that. So all these entities that have free will from the creator's point of view and is, it's not their problem, it's the creator's problem. The creator's problem is that we're making these. I'm making these beings that have the ability to do harm. And for their sake I want to give them a way to reconcile my justice and my mercy. And that is the Jesus moment for that planet. And every planet will have a different thing. We, for our planet, it was blood was very important heritage. That's what we, that was the metaphor, the model that the Jesus moment was expressed on our planet. And I would say all the other beings will have their own way in which the particulars of God will be expressed.

Dr. Dan Koch (45:00)

We know that in some ways in what we call intelligence, a particular form of nervous system based intelligence evolved almost entirely separately in cephalopods than it did in humans. Like it, we go all the way back to like worms, you know. So it's like we differed very, we diverged very early on the tree of life. And so imagine had things gone differently biologically. Maybe there's no meteor, maybe that kills the dinosaurs, whatever. Pick a different version of what happens on the earth and let's just say that the main intelligence had evolved underwater. It's very hard to imagine a liquid like blood being a central metaphor and belief object for people living underwater. Right, whatever. So that's an example of the particularities. And you're saying, okay, on Earth that was like blood sacrifice, scapegoats, righteousness, throw all your gerard shit in there if you want. Right. But on some other planet with other material differences. And now I would assume that you would just say natural selection is probably sort of baked into all, you know, that's just baked into the universe. So there probably we've got any other sentient beings, which by the way, just, just before we get all excited, you know, these are all like a million light years away. Like we don't. We will almost definitely not have access to these civilizations in our lifetime or anything like that. We are positing them as like a seeming inevitability of mathematics.

Kevin Kelly (46:30)

Right, right, right. And you know, it's possible that we figure out how to shortcut the light, the speed of light thing, you know, wormholes, whatever.

Dr. Dan Koch (46:41)

At some point. Yeah, at some point. I'm just saying I'm 42. It's not going to happen in my lifetime.

Kevin Kelly (46:45)

Yeah, absolutely not within a lifetime. Nowhere near our lifetime and probably not even the lifetime of your grandchildren either. But As I said, we are going to recreate a lot of the oomph from having contact with another civilization by making artificial aliens on this planet.

Dr. Dan Koch (47:02)

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (47:03)

And so we will go through a lot of that process of what their belief systems are and how they're incorporated into ours. And so this will be a challenge. And so even though the catechism for robots sounds kind of cheeky, I'm only half kidding. I'm half serious as well. It really is trying to say, where did you come from? Why are you here? What's your place in the universe? What's your relationship to God? What is the relationship? If we made a sentient conscious robot, what is this relationship to God? If it can do harm and do good, where does it sit? And so I think it's a very, very valid question to be asking right now.

Dr. Dan Koch (47:57)

Okay. I'm so fascinated. I've got two kind of challenging questions. So in your great conversation with Robert Wright on the Non zero podcast, thanks to Tripp Fuller for turning me on to Robert Wright as well to Bob. You talk about AI doomerism, right? So this is like things like the so called paperclip experiment that someday there'll be such a large AI that we tell it to make as many paperclips as possible and it ends up colonizing the human race to make a trillion paperclips. Okay. And there's other doomerist scenarios, but that's sort of the one that has gotten the most ink. You say that is like sci fi fiction. I don't understand how we would not just like unplug that. Like, we certainly would have safeguards like that. We're not going to do something like that. That's sci fi. So my question is, why is that scenario sci fi and we will create a thousand new species of AI mind, not sci fi. Like I just. How would you answer that?

Kevin Kelly (49:00)

Yeah, so we already have 8 billion very smart agents that we don't. So how do we control 8 billion humans? Through education, through training, Cultural evolution, we.

Dr. Dan Koch (49:15)

Might say, not biological anymore.

Kevin Kelly (49:17)

And so it's the same thing. It's actually not difficult to embed ethics and morality into it because it's just code.

Dr. Dan Koch (49:25)

Well, it's already happening, Right? They already have. ChatGPT already has certain ethical guidelines. Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (49:30)

The challenge is not that. The challenge is what code do we give them and what do we agree on? And that's coming up to the discussion. And so it turns out that human morality, even the best of us, is very shallow, very inconsistent. And the thing is, we are demanding that these new beings be better than us. All right, and so what does that mean? So we're having this conversation, it's like, what does that better than us mean? Because we're gonna, we're programming them to be better than us. They cannot, we're not allowing them to have the same. Giving ourselves a pass is not being committed. We require them to be better than us. But we can do that. We can put that in that code. But what does that mean? And that's where we are right now. Because, and here's what I'm saying is that that process is actually going to make us better humans. So I have this idea of the self domesticated ape that we are, that we've self domesticated ourselves. We were the first animals that we domesticated. And we have invented our humanity and we are not done yet. So we invented literally the genes. We changed by inventing cooking, which is an external stomach that gave us additional nutrition. And we have invented our sense of fairness and all these other things. These are things that we invented. And we have been changing ourselves over time and we're not done yet. And so what we have, when we make these other beings that are better than ourselves in that way and we surround ourselves with them, they will allow us to become better. So when we had these chess playing AIs that beat us in chess, people thought, well, that's the end of human chess. No, no, no. What happened was they taught us how to play chess and go in a new way.

Dr. Dan Koch (51:25)

Better.

Kevin Kelly (51:25)

Yeah, that we never thought of. So we became better chess players. And so when you have these AIs and you're going to be wearing them with your smart glasses and they'll be always on, you'll be listening to them, talking to them, they'll be always on. And they will know you better than yourself at some point. The little agents and being around them all the time. Because we are going to program to be the best of humans. Tim Ferriss says you're the average of the five people around you. And so we're going to surround ourselves with better examples of people who, people of agents and robots that have a slightly better moral consistency than we do. And, and that will in turn force us to be better because we'll know what it is, we'll be able to rise and have more consistent morality. So AI is in, they're in the business of making us better humans.

Dr. Dan Koch (52:26)

I hope that that's true. And I totally see, I see your future vision definitely as plausible. One thing that I always come up against. And I've waited to bring this up because I wanted to kind of have you. I wanted a chance to have you kind of explain more fully your vision here. Now if I zoom all the way out to, let's say a billion sentient species on a billion planets or whatever, then I don't have this problem. But when I'm just looking at our planet, I do come up against this nagging thing, Kevin, that keeps coming back in my mind, which is it wouldn't take a ton to go wrong for nuclear holocaust. Now that would not necessarily kill everyone. That would require a lot of weapons to go off at the same time to destroy all life. There's enough bunkers now and stuff.

Kevin Kelly (53:24)

Yeah, the idea of eradicating human life on the planet would not be possible even if you gave it as a job for all the wealthiest corporations of the world.

Dr. Dan Koch (53:33)

So actually I'd love to hear you. Could you explain that a little bit? Why would it be so hard to do it?

Kevin Kelly (53:38)

Because it's so hard to do anything at the global level. First of all, climate change will mostly affect humans and most of life on the planet is going to continue on. It's been through much, much worse than whatever we're generating right now. It's not really good for human civilization, which is really in the Goldilocks. I mean, if you look at the planetary climate, we came at this, we arose at this very, very sweet spot in terms of temperature variance, all this kind of stuff, and we can certainly mess that up, but it's not even, that's not gonna eliminate all humans.

Dr. Dan Koch (54:13)

No, I'm not worried about global warming killing all people. But like if somebody, if a hacker got all the Russian missiles to launch at once or something like, I know that's not easy to do, but let's just say it happened.

Kevin Kelly (54:24)

Yeah, right. So there's people living in Africa or something who are not gonna see that. And global winter, those modeling things have lots of problems with it. It just seems like the totality and the resourcefulness of humans is again so strong it underestimates. So this is why I'm an optimist in general. It's not that I think our problems are smaller than we thought, but I think our capacity to solve and overcome them is greater than we thought. And so, so I just think that like even like a pandemic or something, it's self extinguishing in many, many ways. It wouldn't happen in an instant. You might have something where you have, like as we have right now, declining Population and reproduction over many years. So maybe it happened over 100 year period. So that's possible. So it's possible that the earth could screw itself, that humanity could screw itself off and you could have the demise of it. But I don't think you actually need to have nuclear war that. I think you can think of scenarios where there was over 100 years, there was fewer and fewer people and it died out for some reason. We have to include those scenarios. I just would say the conditions for that. First of all, it doesn't happen instantly, you have 100 years. So there has to be lots of bad things that would prevent you from recovering from that. And secondly, I think it's a low probability, not that it's impossible, we have to include it. It's more than zero. And you know, that's the answer to the Fermi's paradox of why we don't see more civilization. They all at some point do themselves in, in some ways. So yes, it's possible.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:18)

Well, the, another answer to Fermi's paradox though is that travel is, you know, maybe there are, we could assume that with unlimited time. So Fermi's paradox. By the way, listeners, it's been a while since this has come up. Someone asked this guy, this physicist, I don't remember, you know, what's his first name?

Kevin Kelly (56:37)

Andre? No, no, yeah, I don't remember.

Dr. Dan Koch (56:40)

And he was talking about, you know, just all these billions of stars and billions of planets and everything. And so it's like, okay, so then where is everybody? That's Fermi's paradox, right? And there are different ways of solving that. Now, of course there is the, I believe, the Tom DeLonge wing of American sociopolitics that says, well, the government is just lying to us. But I don't believe that. So unless you take that one, you're left with this paradox of why aren't the SETI people, who have huge budgets every year, international budgets, finding anything? And one answer that has been given is this kind of doomeristic thing that like, well, maybe. And also, by the way, this answer came up during the nuclear age 60s and stuff of like, well, maybe every technological society eventually creates weapons strong enough that given a few hundred years or thousands of years, eventually we'll destroy it. And so then that happens before space travel. And so that's why we don't know anybody. But it could also just be the fact that like maybe the, the facts of sort of astrophysics make it impossible to go any farther than a light year or two in a civilization's time. In which case that would also explain why no one is around. Because you just can't get that far.

Kevin Kelly (57:59)

Right, Right. I mean again, you can make a whole list of different extinguishing scenarios. There could be, we have declining population fertility right now happening. It could be due to other things or in addition to the not wanting kids. There could be microplastics that cause fertility drop off and you just simply, you go under the critical mass you need for a sustainable society. So there's, you know, there's thousands of people, so tens of thousands. And then you have genetic bottlenecks. And so there, there, there are.

Dr. Dan Koch (58:30)

But there's also technology increasing alongside that as you're saying. So it's like our capacity to solve problems that it's like just because you can just cause somebody can write a think piece that identifies a novel problem. Like well actually I wanted to bring this in to go extremely micro with something to apply, something you said at the macro.

Kevin Kelly (58:49)

Sure.

Dr. Dan Koch (58:49)

When I teach anxiety cognitive behavioral therapy work to clients. I love this phrase from the Beck Institute. When we are facing something about which we have anxiety, some upcoming event or whatever, we tend to do a double move. First of all, we overestimate how difficult it will be like when you ask people later. And second, we underestimate our own resilience and capacity to deal with it. And like that's a single person who has a presentation to give example or it's like zoom it all the way out to the level of earth. And so like you're saying so just so somebody could get quite famous and be invited to the Aspen Ideas Festival and all kinds of shit. Like maybe have their pick of sexual partners for a decade or so by explaining novel problems and declaring loudly that these are unsolvable. But what you're saying is like, but we just, yeah, we're always getting new problems. We get the steam engine and now we've got pollution. Okay, well fine and let's solve that problem. So I, yeah, I just.

Kevin Kelly (59:55)

And we also now have a new power for solving which is what AI is going to bring us. I think the most serious, mind bending gigantic problems we've ever had as a society is going to come from AI. However, AI is also a solution to many of those problems and I think it is the stronger one. And that's based on 400 years of history and those ingredients aren't going away. So it's possible that progress and that little kind of balance could change now, but it's statistically unlikely to. So I think we should include in our thinking about the future the worst case scenarios, but they're the easier ones to imagine. It's much, much easier to imagine how things break rather than to imagine how these complicated things go.

Dr. Dan Koch (60:54)

Well, I think it's also easier to imagine utopia because you're always working with a simplified model or just get the billionaires to stop being assholes and then it's utopia or whatever. Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (61:06)

So the reason why I kind of promote this, the optimistic view, is I think it's the optimists that shape the future and our present today. If we look around, everything in it was somebody's weird passion project, was somebody's belief. Some optimist in the past believed that that was possible when most people thought it was either not possible or not wanted or whatever. And so it was the optimists of the past who have made our current world. And it'll be the optimists who will be shaping the future. And I want to be one of those. And so you can't make this world of AI and genetic engineering and stuff, you can't make that complicated world happen unless you imagine it first. It has to be seen. We can't get there inadvertently by accident. You have to kind of see it and then believe that it could be made possible. That is the work of optimism.

Dr. Dan Koch (62:08)

Well, we've just got a few minutes left. I know that was by fast. Well, I know you're a good conversationalist. You are releasing or have just released a book of photographs. You've done a lot of traveling in Asia and some kind of Asian or sort of, you know, Pan Western, Eastern thought makes its way into some of your work. I wonder if you could draw any connections between what did you know your process of taking and selecting these photographs, what they mean to you, and any of the other stuff we've been talking about. If not, I'm fine to just talk about the book.

Kevin Kelly (62:43)

Yeah, I have been accused of having kind of Eastern vibes, but it's not really very conscious. But I spent most of my adult life kind of surrounded by Asia. My wife is Chinese, my kids are bilingual. Most of my audience, most of my fans are in China. I just released a book a couple months ago that's only in Chinese. There isn't even an English version. And it's a bestseller there. And so I do think of myself as half Asian. And so I think I have incorporated some of those views, but they weren't very deliberate and I'm not sure I could even articulate them. I mean, I don't know if process theology is considered Asian, but.

Dr. Dan Koch (63:32)

Well, no, not necessarily. But the one thing that I came across was like that technology as this divine impulse as being kind of like baked into the fabric of creation from the beginning is like technological additional creation or co creation that that's got a kind of a daoist vibe of sort of going with the grain of the wood, going with the flow of the river, like, as opposed to saying like a more Western. Like maybe it's more of a mindset. We think of the Western view of technology as like England in the Industrial Revolution. We are going to subdue nature and that there is a sort more eastern way of like. Well, maybe creation through technology is kind of like something we can do kind of more organically or something. But that's as far as I got right.

Kevin Kelly (64:20)

Well, yeah, I mean, I even wrote a book called out of Control, which was about this, the place of control. We have Lao TZ idea that you control by not controlling. And so that was what actionless action.

Dr. Dan Koch (64:31)

Wu Wei.

Kevin Kelly (64:32)

Yeah, yeah. Out of control was actually the wrong word. We didn't have a word in English. Yeah, which was this kind of power control. And so, yes, so in that sense I think I am in alignment, although I'm not sure the influence came from there, but I would say I am in alignment with that idea. And my idea of the technium is that the system of technologies themselves have agency, that they have certain tendencies independent of the humans who made them. That there is resident in this system, wants, urgencies, tendencies, a degree of agency and autonomy. And within the system itself, which maybe that's Asian as well, but that is the source of. I think, because I think free will actually exists down at the level quantum effects in physics and that our own free wills are built up from that. And so it's not even a matter of consciousness giving that. I think that exists even independent of consciousness consciousness. And so that's the Asian philosophy part. But as you said, I spent a lot of time traveling. I had 50 years of traveling in Asia. And what I was doing was over time was trying to capture a lot of the traditions, ceremonies, the photogenic things that were disappearing in their culture, the costumes, architecture. And that became an obsession for me was capturing this and trying to get all the places in Europe, I mean Asia from Europe, Istanbul, all the way over to Japan and as north as Siberia and down into Indonesia and that 50 year things. I made several versions of it. And this is the newest version called Colors of Asia. And the whimsical aspect of this is that all the pictures are arranged by color, weirdly. It's kind of fun. And there's kind of an association that doesn't happen by taking these odd cultural stuff. And the continuity and the connection is the color of them.

Dr. Dan Koch (66:42)

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (66:42)

And colors have some meaning in Asia, and I have essays about that. But there is this sort of. It's a way of noticing. It's a way of trying to explore rather than geographically arranged. They're arranged by color and their meaning.

Dr. Dan Koch (66:57)

I love that. Yeah.

Kevin Kelly (66:58)

And so that's a book that I'm self published and it's out now. I have only printed a thousand for my Thousand true fans, so.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:08)

Okay.

Kevin Kelly (67:08)

If you're a true fan, there's one for you.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:10)

Okay, good.

Kevin Kelly (67:11)

We didn't talk about the Thousand True Fan Theory, but I'm familiar with it.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:16)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin Kelly (67:18)

From 2008. And so.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:21)

Wait, who. Wait, who came up with that theory?

Kevin Kelly (67:23)

That was me.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:24)

That was you?

Kevin Kelly (67:25)

Yeah, that's my theory.

Dr. Dan Koch (67:26)

Okay, we. I'm sorry, we're a couple minutes over. What the fuck, dude? Okay, listen. I was in a rock band in 2008. I did it for about 10 years. And our manager, Chris Bradstreet, was like, hey, you know how Nine Inch Nails just released this, like, five LP thing for 250 bucks? They're super fancy. He's like, there's this theory called the Thousand True Fan Theory. If you have a thousand fans that will buy your $250 box set or whatever the thing is you do once a year, boom. Now you got $250,000. You can live on that. And, like, I have, you know, I'm not charging patrons that much, but I have six, 700 patrons. And I do think about that. The Thousand True Fan thing. Like, I also see clients, other things too, but, like, that is hilarious. I had no idea that was you. But it came. It came into my life, literally, in 2008. We were working on our third record when he told me this.

Kevin Kelly (68:20)

Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (68:21)

Wow.

Kevin Kelly (68:21)

Yeah. At that time, it was theory. It was primarily theory because there was very few people who actually were making. There were some musicians who were beginning, but most of them had migrated from a label already. They had some kind of audience. There was no instance I could find of someone who organically had generated. Of course, now it's like, what, the.

Dr. Dan Koch (68:41)

Subscription model, it's everywhere. Yeah, you were way ahead of your time with that one.

Kevin Kelly (68:44)

Plenty of examples of people who have actually made this work. So. Yeah, so that was. That was me and my blog. It was a blog post.

Dr. Dan Koch (68:54)

Wow. What a way to wrap it up. Okay, we both got to run. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin. We'll have a link to the book and your website in the show notes, and I'll also put a link to your conversation with Robert Wright around AI and utopian doomerism stuff, because if people want to just kind of hear deeper into that, you guys get into it, as well as the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit theologian, which we didn't have time for.

Kevin Kelly (69:18)

And I have a substack these days as well where I do write about AI and my thoughts on that. So, yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun.

Dr. Dan Koch (69:26)

I agree.

Kevin Kelly (69:27)

Yeah.

Dr. Dan Koch (69:28)

Okay, well, we'll have that link in there as well. Thanks so much, Kevin. Appreciate it.

Kevin Kelly (69:31)

All righty. All right, Sa.