Excellent Advice For Living: Kevin Kelly On Wealth, AI, Optimism, & The Future

30:27That's the deal. And the deal meaning that you're alive and you have this chance and you have a genius that nobody else has, and if you can share that with us, we all benefit. So I would say yes. It may not be that everybody can take advantage of it, but it's still true to the extent that it is possible for you. It'll be better for you and for the world if you did. Yeah, well said. Good advice. And that's just one kind of slice out of the greater slices of advice that are coming out of this new book that we've mentioned but haven't explained, which is your newest book, Excellent Advice for Living.

31:11this is sort of, this is a really interesting book because on the one hand, it's incredibly simple, but every idea that shows up on every page, the more you consider these very concise phrases, the more profound you realize they are. It's almost a tweet storm, right? This is like a tweet thread in the form of a book, condensed wisdom over the course of your life, offered up in very digestible form. you can open it up to any page and just consume one thought and think about it for the day. So talk a little bit about like why you decided to write this book and what your kind of intention for it is.

31:53Yeah. So I began the book, not with the idea of making a book, but I have been in the habit of writing down bits of wisdom into a little compact proverb of some sort to help me remember it so I could repeat it to myself. So a piece of advice I picked up at Whole Earth from one of the editors, Ann Herbert, was, this was, I don't know, 40 years ago. She said, look, you know, whenever you are invited to do something into the future, like to have a meeting, to go speak somewhere, to have coffee with someone, to make a presentation, ask yourself, what I'd do if it was tomorrow morning? And that was like, oh man, that was so useful.

32:45That was so, so powerful because that's what I would do is I would get an invitation to do something. I said, that's really great. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Would I wanna do this if it was tomorrow morning? Right. And then - If it's far enough out on the calendar, like I'll agree to anything. Exactly. but it'll be soon enough it'll be tomorrow morning and you're like I don't really want to do this so this future projection was very very useful and so I reduced it to that little thing and I would repeat that to myself and there was another piece of advice that I learned from I don't even remember where because these things come and go but it was if I lost something in my household and I couldn't find it and then I finally found it my flashlight whatever it was and I would go to put it back the piece of advice was I was like, no, no, don't put it back where you found it.

33:32Put it back where you first looked for it. Because that first impulse, next time you're going to look for it, that's where I'm going to find it. So I repeat that to myself. And so I decided I was writing these down and then I decided that I should keep doing that for my kids because I have three kids and our style of parenting was based on my experience, which was I didn't really pay much attention to what my parents said. I pay a lot of attention to what they did. So that was our style, which was, we didn't preach or even give advice to our kids very much. It was all through what we did. But as writing these things down, there were like a lot of them that I actually wished I had known earlier.

34:19So I was like, well, it's time. We should give some of those, write them down and give them to the kids. And so that's what I was starting to do. I started to write down things, first for my son, to things that I wished I'd known earlier in these little compact tweetable things. And that's how I began. And I put out 68 of them on my 68th birthday and I shared it with my kids and they loved it. And I then shared it with my greater family and went out from there and it kind of ricocheted around the internet and did its thing. And I was encouraged to do more of them and I kept doing them on my birthday.

34:56And then there was a point at which they were kind of scattered all over the place. And I thought they needed to be in between covers so they could hand it to a young person. And that's the origin.

35:13Yeah, it's great. We talked earlier about don't be the best, be the only. That's certainly one entry in here. And I wrote down a couple that kind of stuck out to me. I mean, they really are like, you know, these just really, they on the surface, like really simple thoughts, right? Don't keep making the same mistakes. Try to make new mistakes. Like, okay, well, what are you actually saying there, right? Like we should go make mistakes. Like you have permission to fail and you should fail. It's only problematic when you keep doing the same thing over and over and over again, right? I love this other one.

35:51Productivity is often a distraction. don't aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible. Instead, aim for better tasks that you never wanna stop doing. Right, and that's something, again, took me a long time to kind of realize that because you'd read all these productivity books and stuff and getting things done and all that kind of stuff. But no, no, actually what makes me happy is spending an inordinate amount of times things never getting done. So I make one piece of art every day I did that for last year. You're sharing the AI art that you share on Twitter every single day.

36:28But I spend an incredible amount of time. It's like, I'm not trying to reduce the amount of time. I'm trying to increase the amount of time I spend that because I just enjoy it so much. Right. Another one is, and this gets into kind of segueing into the broader picture of who you are. Over the longterm, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist, you don't have to ignore the multitude of problems we create. You just have to imagine how much our ability to solve problems improves. Right. So, this gets at the heart, kind of the core of like who you are as a human being. You're many things, but most notably, sort of the reductionist term that gets associated with you is futurist.

37:16I don't know how you feel about that.

37:20But that is the thing, like you have this capacity to communicate and understand the present moment and how it relates to the near and short-term future. And you have the facility to kind of communicate around that that is rare and I think instructive. But I think, as we've already demonstrated, it's broader than that because you have lived this very broad life, well-traveled, deeply considered, clearly somebody who has devoted copious amount of time to pondering questions, big and small. And from that, extracting what the short and long-term future will hold and how to deploy our attention, what we should be worried about, thinking about, what we shouldn't be worried about, et cetera, all of which is sort of condensed and consolidated in this latest book.

38:17But the overarching theme to all of this is this unbridled optimism. And this is something that I personally struggle with, especially in our very current moment where things seem to be happening quite rapidly. And from my perspective, at times spinning a little bit out of control. So talk me through your perspective of, let's talk about the current moment first before we get into future casting. Like how are you making sense of what is actually happening right now? We're right in this moment of chat GPT-4 being introduced to the world and there's a global conversation that's occurring at a very broad level around artificial intelligence, what it means, what it portends, what it's doing for us, what our fears are, et cetera.

39:08So, where are you at with all this? Yeah, so I think you're right to kind of pinpoint the optimism as a pivot. And I think, I would say that I am generally, by temperament, genetically proposed to be optimistic. But that actually I have actually, but I also think optimism is something you can learn, particularly as a child. And I have actually deliberately become even more optimistic as I get older. And where does that come? As I said, there's a natural temperament, but it comes from other places. I don't spend much time trying to predict the future. I am trying to predict the present just to figure out what exactly is happening, going on right now, and to really look at that.

40:01And I think that's half of the president is just getting this understanding of what's happening right now. And but I have noticed over time that optimistic views tended to be more correct than not. So the people who like if so the more I became interested in the future, the more I would read the past and become interested in history, which I hated in high school. I just had no interest whatsoever. I was turned off by it. I just didn't see it. But as I started to travel more, as I started to have to work in the technology, which was changing so fast, the more interested I became in history, the more I read it.

40:44And now I just mostly read history. And what I get from that, and my own experiences traveling in these undeveloped and developing places, was the acknowledgement of progress. acknowledging that there actually has indeed been progress, material progress as well as moral progress over time. And that when people talk about this current time and the craziness of it, I have to say you can only say that if you have no idea of history and how crazy things, how crazy politics were in the US, say in the 1890s or whatever. It was, we just, it's almost beyond belief. I mean, think about the fact that there was a vice president who shot his political up.

41:32It was like, and then went back. Right, like dueling. Yeah, like Hamilton. It was like, that's like, that's totally, you know, I mean, and we disagreed to the point that we were killing each other during the Civil War. So, in that sense, if you, history gives a little bit more perspective to the current problem. That's what I'm saying. It puts it into perspective to say, well, actually, we've had periods like that in the past and what happened. So that sense of history and progress, I think, informs a lot of how I look at things. And that's a fundamental orientation. So the little heuristic that I have, that I play in my head, which is that if we can create 1 % more than we destroy every year, then we can have progress because that 1 % can accumulate.

42:26That's the genius of compounded interest. If you can have 1 % betterment, so 1%, if we can be 1 % better than we are bad, that's all we need. And that little tiny bit is kind of invisible in the world. 1 % difference in betterment, it means like 49.5 % of everything is crap and terrible and maybe harmful. So it's really hard to see that little difference of 1%. But we can see it in retrospect if we look behind. And I had the privilege of being in a time machine and going back to the behind, going back to where we were and really living there in a futile time with futile relationships and futile technology and very little.

43:14And so I know deep down where we've come from and how far we've come. and that sense of like, well, here's what we get. Yeah, we got some new problems, but man, we also have some new good things. And it's so much easier for us to imagine, going forward, the problems and all the ways in which it doesn't work. That's entropy. It's harder to imagine the one or two ways things do work. The way things work are much more improbable than the way things break. again that's the rule of entry that's the second law of thermodynamics that's never been broken which is that the ways in which things cannot work and degrade are far far vaster than the few ways that it can work because things that work are more improbable and part of what we want to be is we want to be improbable beings another way we could say it like don't be the best be the only is be the most improbable person possible okay and so that improbability is biased to things breaking down, to there being more ways that we can imagine things not working and the difficulty in trying to imagine ways that do work.

44:31And that comes back again to why we should be optimistic, which is that because it's so hard

44:40to make things that work, they really work inadvertently. we have to kind of imagine that they could work and believe that they could work in order to make them work so there were a bunch of people who saw the Star Trek communicator and said I want to make that I want that to be real I believe that that could be real there were lots of ways in which it could not work and there were many tries the Newton and others that failed because it was easier to fail than not that's the general rule but there were people who really believed that that would work and it would be good and so that belief, that imagination of imagining what it is that we want and believing that it's possible those are the people who make the things and so in the end when we look back all the good things we have were made by people who believed that they were possible and believed that they could be made and so going forward that's going to be the same is that if we want to have a society that really works and is full of technology, we need to imagine an optimistic view of it and believe that we can actually reach that.

45:53I'm completely with you on the belief that we need to have a sense that the world can be better and aim our intentionality and our hard work in that direction. but on the subject of like the world becoming 1 % better or kind of looking around and seeing what's happening, is that not a factor of the lens through which you choose to perceive the world? Because you can look at the Star Trek communicator and then look at the iPhone, et cetera, and celebrate that. Or you can look at the accelerating rate of species extinction and climate degradation and the widening gap between the haves and the have nots and the sort of, to your point about understanding history, looking at the history of past empires and the rise and fall and the arc of these and to try to identify where the United States might fall on that arc.

46:57I think you might agree that we perhaps we're on the decline of that. and what does that mean in terms of the global, sort of power structure and where we sit in the world and what we should be focused on and whatnot. So there's a choice of perspective that comes into play here that sort of tempers my, my ability to just jump on the optimistic bandwagon. So you're right. And my perspective is decidedly in this respect, not American. Sure. Which is healthy. There are 350 Americans between China and India alone. There's 10 times the number of people. Increasingly, what they think about the world will matter more than what we think about the world.

47:45So I look at the world in a kind of a global perspective and I think that's where we're moving to. And that's part of what the US is still struggling with is this idea that it is a superpower and it doesn't want to be a globalist. I mean, this is sort of like the ultimate insult right now, which is crazy to me because look, people, this is where we're headed to. We're headed to a planetary economy. We're going to have planetary governance. That's the direction that we have a planetary machine right now. So on average, globally, if you do the Obama test, which is you're going to be born at some year in a random assignment of sex and gender and place in society, where do you want to be?

48:28What year do you want to be born in? There's not a year in the past. That's a better deal than right now. That's the Steven Pinker kind of notion of this is the best time to be alive. This is the best time. This is the acknowledgement of progress. And so, yes, there are new technologies. The more powerful they are, the more powerful problems they will produce. Right, explain that a little bit. Like this idea of fracturing the binary between, we're either moving towards a utopia or a dystopia. Yeah, so that is, and by the way, almost every single really good science fiction movie about the future is dystopian because they just make greater stories.

49:12I mean, the people writing stories really know how to tell stories and they're mostly about this dystopian world. There's very, very few about a world that you would wanna live in on this planet. And that's a problem for us. But that choice of, and then utopias, we just, first of all, I don't think they're a good idea. I don't think we'd want to be happy there and they're impossible. But this idea of no other choice and I coined a term called protopia, which is this idea that we can have a world that's a little tiny bit better, just going back to the little delta, incrementally a little bit better.

49:51We kind of creep towards betterment over time. It's not problem free. In fact, the problems are the propulsion for progress. And that world of inching forward where we have new problems as well as new technologies, that's the protopian world. And I think that's a more achievable destination. Part of that definition is also driven by human agency and choice, right? Of course. That's the thing. Like we are creating this in real time, right? I wrote a book called The Inevitable and the inevitability that I talk about in the book, which is technological inevitability, is that things like once you invent, once a civilization anywhere in the galaxy invents electrical wires and things, they'll begin to invent electric motors.

50:46And once they have electrical signals, they'll have radio. So it's like there's a sequence of things which will inevitably come up. Once you have electrical networks, you'll have the internet of some sort sooner or later on your planet. And the AI will come. So the AI coming is sort of inevitable. But what's not inevitable is the character of the AIs. And they're plural. There are many types. And who owns them? How are they governed? Is it international or national? Is it commercial or non-commercial? Is it non-profit? Is it open source or closed? There are so many different attributes that we have to decide and can decide and have the choice to decide.

51:28And all those choices make a tremendous difference to us. So the AIs are coming, but the character of the AIs and the system is entirely our choice collectively. So we do have tremendous choices, even in the fact that this stuff at the large scale is inevitable. But that choice can only drive so much of the landscape of consequence in the sense that there will always be, especially with these emergent technologies, a landscape of unintended consequences. And by their very nature, they are unintended, despite our best efforts to curtail them or to instill them with a certain ethic that we think is going to be the best for humanity.

52:15In addition to the unintended negative consequences, there are also unintended benefits. And that's sort of what we see happening right now with GPT and the image AI generators. And that to me is a thrill is that lots of things that they're doing, the inventors of them had no idea that they could do. Right, and within 24 hours, there are use cases popping up that nobody thought of. Nobody thought of. In one day. Right, and that's the thing I discovered in researching the history of technology is that the first of all, several things. One is simultaneous independent invention is the norm because the idea of the heroic inventor is totally wrong.

52:56It's a Hollywood invention. But the idea is that ideas and inventions are networks of things. There are many, many parts. And if someone didn't invent it, someone else right behind them would, which means that also the inventors of them don't know what they're good for. I tell a story in one of my books about Thomas Edison who was an inventor of the phonograph, the wax cylinder, recording things and he that evening or day or whatever it was, he made a list of all the things he thought this device would do. And the number one thing, which actually he did and somebody had been recovered, was to record the last words of the dying for prosperity.

53:44So this was like a really freaky thing. It was like, oh, in the future, you could hear Albert talking. And he made other ideas. And number 10 down at the bottom was you might be able to use it for music. Right. So he had no idea. Yeah, no concept of what it is. And the only way we are going to figure out these new technologies, particularly as they're complicated, is through use. It's through use. We can't thinkism. There's a term I call thinkism. Thinkism is this idea that we can decide and figure out things and have solutions and solve stuff by thinking about them. But it's action. It's using them.

54:20These technologies are so complicated, they have to be used in action for to discover both the plus and minuses. And that's what's happening right now with the AIs is that we've been talking about it for 100 years, but it's not until we actually use them every day that we begin to see what they're good for and bad for. And so this idea, there's unintended negatives but they're also unintended positives as well. Right, so within days, as we said, of GPT-4 going online, there's tweet threads about use cases that nobody thought of before. Somebody figured out that you could automatically have a lawsuit filed against a robo-caller.

55:04or like these amazing, like very like, you know, specific small use cases that are kind of amazing, you know, writing out in handwritten notes an idea for a website and then chat GPT, just creating that website in minutes or whatever it is. But also we have, you know, meta launching or sort of, you know, introducing its AI and somehow that immediately finds its way to 4chan when it was supposed to be guard railed, I guess, within the ecosystem of meta, like there are these things that humans do, right? Like whether they're malevolent or just chaos agents, you know, that despite our best efforts to guard against, find a way, right?

55:51And so protecting against that causes concern. And I think the deeper concern perhaps, or the thing that I think myself and other people find alarming, it's just the pace at which this is happening. It's a dizzying pace, that it's occurring so rapidly that we don't have time to even get our footing before there's a new announcement and a new leap in technology. And that gives us the sense that this is getting away from us a little bit. Yeah, well, it's not getting away from us, it's barely, I mean, if you get into the actual thing, we can unplug these at any time, we can set back. There's very few things that are completely irreversible.

56:33And that's one of the myths about AI is somehow it's irreversible that it's going to unleash and then it's going to turn around and kill us. And that's just Hollywood again. It's a good story. But there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever in any direction that it's on a runaway exponential curve. In fact, it's the opposite. So the idea would be that it's an exponential curve. We get it going and it's unstoppable. It becomes kind of a superpower. but if you actually, there is no exponential growth in the intelligence part of it. Exponential growth is in the resources that we consume to make it.

57:10So it's actually the inverse of exponential growth. Meaning it's requiring more and more compute power to produce a little bit of a gain. So the gain is not increasing exponential. The gain is pretty linear, but the number of resources required to make that increases exponentially. So it's actually self-limiting in that sense right now at this time. Yeah, I mean, we should distinguish between narrow AI, generative AI, and then the kind of thing, the sexy thing that's out there on the horizon, which is general AI, which we're nowhere near at this point. But we're in this uncanny valley in the way these chatbots speak to us that create the sensation of humanity or some level of consciousness that's truly just an illusion.

58:04But it is unsettling in that, I guess. So, let me acknowledge something. It is unsettling. It is moving fast, but it's not out of our control. And then secondly, what we're discovering is something more fundamental, which is not that this thing is getting so much smarter. It's just that we're realizing that many of the things that we held as being highly elevated to achieve turned out to be fairly mechanical. I can assure most people you're not going to lose your job. You may lose your job description. And the task in your job may change. Some of the tasks may go away, but your job is unlikely to go away.

58:40So far, I've found only one kind of job, one person, one kind of job who's lost to AI. Everyone else is going to change it. But we have time. if we pay attention to it, what we don't wanna do is to prohibit or outlaw or ban these things because then we don't get to steer. We can only steer these things by using them. And so there is a tendency to want to, well, I wanna stop it, I wanna halt it. I don't want this thing to happen. And that means that no, no, you're not gonna get to steer. The people who actually do use it somewhere are gonna be the ones steering it because we can only steer it through using it, finding out how it works.

59:23And the idea of artificial general intelligence, I think, is, again, it's a myth. It's not even real. We have no evidence of such a thing because so far the kinds of intelligence that we make are very, very specific, very, very narrow, and we have really no idea how our own brains work. We're just projecting all kinds of things about us. And I think one of the greatest things that the AI are going to help us is to help us become more human and better human. And I'll give you an example, the simplest one, which is we train these generative AIs on all the stuff that all humans have written, all the content, all the books, all the writing, all the literature, and it's sort of like the average of humans.

1:00:20and it turns out that the average human behavior is sort of sexist and mean and we're outraged we won't accept that it has to be better than us okay we can put in ethical moral guidance into these because it's just code that's pretty easy so we can easily code in ethics to these AIs and we can actually give them better than us. But the problem is is that we humans don't know what that looks like. Does it mean like you're woke? Is it like being super woke? Is it something else? Is it, what does that look like to behave better than us or at our best? Where do we get that consensus? Who is the who?

1:01:10Who is the us in this? Who decides who the us is? There are all these questions. But if we can arise and come there. So this is what the best human or the better human would look like. And then we can code that into it. We could make them. And then that would help us ourselves become better because it's like our children would make us better people. Okay, we want our children to be better than us. And so we articulate the best behavior and they can maybe help us change our behavior. So in the effort to actually try and come up with ethics that are consistent and deep moral guidance that is elevated for us, we have a chance to become better humans.

1:02:02Sure, but that is a larger problem than I think people understand, because there is no one, in the same way that there is no monolithic AI, there is no monolithic ethic ethic. There is no one singular value set that should drive this. And the ethics or the values that are important to the creators of a particular AI, it may not very well match up against the value set or ethics of another group. So that's a difficult problem to solve, of course. It is, it's a huge problem. And those, whatever is instilled into that AI in terms of values and ethics is gonna dictate results. So that's a sticky wicket for sure.

1:02:45So you may have people favoring one over the other. So it's like the old trolley problem for the self-driving car. I'm gonna use this AI for this and this for this. Well, no, it's like, okay, you have a car. So should the car prioritize the safety of the driver or the pedestrians? Right, I mean, we get down to thought experiments that are, you know. Those are all philosophical problems. Like trolley problem. But now we have to answer them. We can't just wave our arms and say, we don't answer it. We actually have to answer it. And so people will say, no, I'm going to buy the car that prioritizes the safety of the driver over the passenger.

1:03:18They'll make an answer. The answer is we're going to favor the safety of the passenger over the pedestrians. And you can buy that one because that's our ethics here. So we don't, again, we have given ourselves a pass. The kind of inconsistent ethics and morality that we have when we're driving because we don't know who we favor. We don't have that luxury with the AIs. We actually have to make a decision, which will force us to understand that our own ethics are very shallow and consistent. So we have to better one. And there'll be, as you said, there'll be competing ones and which ones do people favor?

1:03:56Right, and there are regulatory and legal issues that are implied by that, right? Like, are you really enabled to make that decision that your car gets to favor you over the pedestrian? who gets to make that decision, right? That's a problem. I think the other wrinkle here is, that makes people a little unsettled, and maybe you can speak to this, is this notion that the AIs, even as they currently exist, the creators of them can't tell you how the decisions are being arrived at. And I think that that freaks out a lot of people. It does, it does. And if we can't understand that, and we're only at the inception in terms of the power and capacity of what these tools are gonna be able to avail us in the coming years, that's disturbing as we tiptoe towards a more general AI version of what we're now seeing.

1:04:52Yeah, I think you're right. This sort of unexplainability of the AIs is disturbing. It's interesting that we aren't as disturbed that the humans that we deal with can't explain things either for some reason. We accept that, right? We accept that's perfectly fine, but I demand, this is again, we demand our creations to be better than us. Okay. But secondly, to that point is there are efforts right now, it's a whole field of AI study called explainable AI to actually have it explain it. And what it does is you use another AI that's built to reach in and to try to explain what the AI is doing. Interesting.

1:05:29And that is of course the genesis of consciousness. But isn't it so complicated that even should that secondary AI succeed at that, the manner in which it would communicate to a human being would be so reductive as to be not necessarily even accurate. Right, and that's exactly the same problem that humans have. Why did you do that? Right, well, we're all clouded by our emotions. Of course, and we're gonna add, by the way, just wait till we add emotions to this, which is in the next couple of years, because a lot of people think you can't really have emotions until you have consciousness and awareness and stuff.

1:06:09No. Again, emotions is something that's very primitive like the other things we're discovering. You don't need very much. Our pets have emotions. We can put lovingness and being loved and all these things into very elementary machines and they're going to really spook people because it would be like her. There would be people who bond to these things in an emotional way. Like Megan. Like Megan. And so it's like, it's gonna be very, very complicated. But the thing - And yet the optimism within you remains undaunted. Because they are like our children. It's like, yes. And we are like gods. Okay, we're gonna make these beings that have free will and choices.

1:06:56And we hope that they surprise us with amazingly good stuff. But the price that we're willing to pay is that they may do something harmful. Okay, you can't generate anything really great without that possibility of going the other way. And so are we willing to pay the price to unleash these kinds of entities that can actually generate new things? And I think we want to minimize that harm. And so how do we do that with children? We train them. We instill them with values. We try to move forward our own values into it. And so we are going to train them, but we don't want to restrain them and say, no, no, the fact that you could do something wrong means that I'm not going to let you make a choice.

1:07:50I'm not going to let you create anything new. And so that's what we're doing with these machines. In order for them to generate new things that would be useful to us with us, we want to train them. And so we want to minimize it. We're not gonna eliminate it. I got you. But on this idea that we are the gods, we are unleashing this new technology and we are training it and it is learning. What happens when what it is learning is how to self-improve itself. And to do that with extreme exponential rapidity to the point that almost instantaneously it becomes the God and we become the subject and the notion that we can simply unplug it becomes an impossibility.

1:08:38So I'm with you all the way, except for the exponential part. As I said, there's zero evidence of that. And in fact, it's the other way around. It can have thinkism, it can work in its brain, but it doesn't have what it needs, which is what we are gifted with, which is a body to interact with the world and have impact. So yes, it could work in this little mind and go round and round and get a little smarter, but it's stuck inside a circuit somewhere to actually have impact, to actually take control, to actually have effect on the world. It actually has to be connected to the world in some ways.

1:09:12It has to interact. But isn't it connected to the world by dint of being wired into the internet? What's it gonna do? I don't know. What couldn't it do at that point? It's connected. Right now, it's impacted the fact that other people are reading it. Humans are translating that into the world. They're doing it. They're putting out whatever it is. So, in the sense that it needs us. It still needs us. The idea that it can be independent is an abstraction. It's a fantasy that we can imagine, but it doesn't have any bearing in the actual real world. and the same thing with exponential. We can imagine exponential growth, but there's no evidence at all of anything being exponential in the real world right now.

1:10:02And to have something that gets smarter and smarter through his own training, to have some effect on the world, it has to do something in the world. Like what's it going to do? What's this brain going to do? Is it going to take over the drones? Well, how does it take over the drones? What's that mechanism? I mean, it's gonna like put itself somewhere. I mean, it's all, it's a fantasy. Right, I mean, it reminds me of, I think it's, is it Nick Bostrom who has - The paperclip. The paperclip thought experiment. It's just, it's actually like, it is a religious fantasy, this belief that the thing could become like our God.

1:10:45It's like the cargo coat. It's like, well, it's gonna solve all our problems. That's the Ray Kurzweil idea. and then we can solve cancer. Well, the thing about it, that's thinkism. This idea that you could solve cancer by thinking about it, just by reading papers. You could have the most genius AI in the world right now and if it read all the papers about cancer that has been published so far, it would not be able to cure cancer. It still needs to do experiments. There's still stuff we don't know. This idea of, so Ray and people like to think and they think, well, if you have a really lot of thinking, then it can solve problems.

1:11:22Thinking is one part of solving a problem. And it's probably not the most important part. This idea that you call dumb smarting, right? It's another problem, which is that these AIs can be really, really intelligent in one area and completely idiotic in another. And I think our frustration is going to be, like we see with chat GPT already, is like, how can you be so dumb while you're so smart at the same time in another direction. And that's because the engineering maxim is we can't optimize everything. There's always trade-offs. Every organism alive today, there's no general purpose superior organism.

1:12:03There's no organism that's better than any other organism because they're all being trade-offs from particular jobs. And so if you're really, really fast, then you're probably not very nimble. If you're really powerful, you're not going to really be efficient. And so there's just trade-offs. And the same thing in intelligence. There are a lot of dimensions to it. It's not just a single one. And there's going to be like, to be really, really good at translating or image generating, you're probably not going to be good, as good as something else that's made for it over here. And so this idea of a general intelligence, it's ignorance of the fact that we have no idea how our own minds work.

1:12:44We don't have access. We can't explain ourselves. And yet we've come to understand that we can, things can still be useful even though we don't understand them. It's interesting because as somebody who is a techno optimist, I would think that you would anticipate or expect that general artificial intelligence is an inevitability, but you seem to be saying like, this is not possible or in the event that it arises, it's not gonna come in the form that we fear. I think the picture you wanna have in your head of thousands of different species of AIs, plural, many of them being created to perform certain functions, like say doing mathematical proofs, which will be amazing to help us do proofs of scientific stuff.

1:13:37Okay, they're gonna be engineered to do that and we'll work with them to do that. But the picture of rather than and a kind of a superhuman godlike thing is to think about these as artificial aliens, like Spock. They may even be conscious at some level. But although most times consciousness is a liability, we don't want your self-driving car to be conscious because it's a distraction. You don't wanna be worried about whether it's - That consciousness is a liability. It's a liability. You want it to be like a binary functioning machine. And yeah, and these things are also not binary. They're gradations.

1:14:12or there's little bits of things, including consciousness and intelligence. But the way to think of them is like Spock, which is meaning that they can be very, very bright about certain things, but they're not human-like because they're built on different kind of substrate. And that's their benefit, is that they don't think like us. And that's true of the generative ones we see right now. They can imitate us in a bland way, but that's not useful to us. And we detect it. We are already sensitized to it. It's like, no, that sounds like a GPT. So I call them the universal personal intern. Right. And it's embarrassing to release the intern's work.

1:14:52You want to check their work. You want to work with them. They're going to always be available for doing all kinds of things. But it's a cooperation. It's a partnership. They're co-pilots. They're interns. They're assistants. And we're going to use them like we navigate with a GPS assistant, And the navigator, we have assistant librarian who searches the web for us. Now we have the interns who help us create things. And that's the current state. But what we're going to is these artificial aliens, which are really smart, but they aren't... If they're really, really smart in some dimension, they're unlikely to be smart in another dimension at the same time because it's a trade-off.

1:15:34Because it's engineering. You can't opt, like what would be like the, what's the super organism on the planet? Organism to beat all the other organisms. It's like, that's the nonsensical question. You were saying, what's the intelligence that would be superior to all intelligences? It's a nonsensical question. Right, I mean, we like to think as human beings that we are the most, you know, advanced, It's not the center. Advanced, but are we any more adapted to our environment than the cockroach? You've spoken about this, right? Like we need to recalibrate how we think about these things and then apply that mentality to how we're thinking about AI.

1:16:17So in that kind of strain of thought, would you say that this is a base level like emergent life form or intelligence? Like, how are you thinking about that in the more kind of like sci-fi sensibility? Sure, sure. Like, there is this idea that we as human beings, like the caterpillar to the butterfly are here to evolve and the evolution will ultimately be to transform into this new life form at some point, which will not necessarily be carbon-based and maybe silicon-based. So I wrote a book called What Technology Wants, which was primarily trying to ask this question of what are the general directions in the evolution of technology?

1:17:08And just as a spoiler, my theory of technology is that it's an extension of the same forces that run through evolution in life. The same self-organizing forces are working through evolution. and evolution is basically biological life accelerated that is kind of like attempting to create forms that you could not get to with wet tissue. So this space of all possible things that you need to have a mind help you make. The mind came from wet biology but it can make these things that we could not get to, that the biological evolution would not get to by itself. And so what's the general directions and one of the general directions is that we constantly will specialize, that we make the first life as a general purpose cell and now in our own bodies we have like 52 different specialty cells, we have skeletal cells, heart muscle cells, we've specialized and that's the general pattern is you have the first camera that did everything, now you have specialized cameras, high-speed cameras, underwater cameras, infrared cameras, high-speed underwater infrared cameras.

1:18:24We just kind of go and same thing with IQs and AIs. We're gonna have a general kind of general purpose thing and they will make these specialized versions of them over time. Right, like the general or the AI as it exists now being a single-celled organism as opposed to a nerve cell. Yeah, exactly. And so, and then the question is, the big question that I have really no opinion about is, whether we humans will speciate. And it's very possible that with genetic engineering that there will be people, say the Amish, my friends, the Amish who will decide under no circumstances will I or any of my descendants ever modify their genes.

1:19:08And then you have other people, it's like, yeah, tomorrow I'm gonna - Get me into that thing. Take away the Alzheimer's gene from my and all my descendants. The Brian Johnsons out there who are quantifying themselves to the nth degree. Right, but I'm removing, you know, really, you know, Parkinson's gene. I don't want to have it in me or my kids. Just take it out. And so over time, we might have two different or more species. We don't know. And then the AIs are, again, as I said, artificial aliens. And we'll make more of them and they'll work alongside of us. And that's, to me, the reason why I'm optimistic because I believe that there are problems that we have right now, both in science and in business or culture that our own minds may not be able to solve.

1:19:56It's like quantum gravity, whatever it is. Maybe our human minds by themselves can't solve that. But working with minds that we make, we may be able to solve - Sophisticated interns. Sophisticated interns and co-pilots. we together, we can figure out some of these things to solve. And that's, so I look at a future that's filled with thousands of different kinds of AIs. Maybe we speciate or not, who knows. And that world is, so there's not this sort of one big God-like AI that's kind of afraid of, but instead we have this, they're like machines. We don't have one big machine, we've got a lot of machines.

1:20:40and it's like, how do you feel about machines? Well, which machine do you need? My dishwasher. The dishwasher or the car, whatever it is. The laptop. How do you feel about AI? It'll be completely ridiculous. It's like, well, which AIs are you talking about? So I think, and that kind of a, that's a protopia. Yeah. Not utopia, it's a protopia. Right, protopia, the product of human agency and innovation with a optimistic bent to it towards progress and a positive, better world. The pro comes from proceeding forward, the progress prototyping and the pro versus the con. So there's lots of that. And the idea is that, yeah, it's like now, but a little bit tiny better.

1:21:33Right, a little bit. I think there's a misguided sense that people could get that your perspective on technology is steely and cold, but in fact, it's quite the contrary. I think you have a very profoundly spiritual relationship to all of this that I think is fascinating that I'd like to explore. And maybe a way into that is something you mentioned earlier, which is the fallacy of the heroic single inventor. This idea that the Einsteins of the world or these singular people that we look to who pioneered certain technologies and kind of putting the lie to that myth and understanding that there are kind of tectonic plates at play here where if that person hadn't done it, there was somebody right on their heels that could have done it.

1:22:30And the idea that these sorts of ideas are kind of percolating in the collective super consciousness of humanity and maybe even broader than that. So talk a little bit about that because I think this is super interesting. Yeah, so there is scientific evidence and academic evidence that this idea that most inventions, the norm is to be invented at the same time independently by a number of people. And when you look at it, it's kind of shocking the numbers that will come up with of simultaneous inventions in the past. And of course, that's why we have patent office today is to kind of adjudicate that because multiple people, even today, are inventing the same things.

1:23:15And of course, the other thing that's happened recently, I'd say in the last 150 years, is that there's very few single inventors. Almost all great things have teams of people necessary at this point. And so... Solo genius idea is... Solo genius and even the solo villain is a Hollywood trope. This idea of the person in the cave or atop of the mountain who's got all this technology that works on the first time and it's like they're by themselves. It's like, come on, right here, you've got five guys just trying to keep the IT going for this place. And so that solo thing is just wrong. We're a very communal thing and we're becoming more mutualistic as we go along as a society.

1:24:00We're much more dependent on each other for everything. And that's my idea of the technium, which is that even technologies require other technologies to live and operate and that that system of all the technologies connected together has an agenda itself, has an impulse or a tendency. That's the technium. And I think that this idea that it is where a much more mutualistic society and technologies are is important for us to understand. And then one of the, I think it works against one of the worries that people have of the rogue villain, the individual who can unleash smallpox or bioengineered weapon or other things.

1:24:47and it's the fact that these technologies are becoming more complicated that that actually is even beyond an individual to do. Again, it's kind of a fantasy idea but in my research, the power of individuals to do harm has actually not increased through technology because the technologies constrain that because they're much more mutualistic and social. You just need a lot more people to get things done. So that's, again, another reason for optimism. But I do want to say one thing about the, we'll call it the spiritual component of technology. My understanding of both the origins of life and going through the unveiling and unrolling of life on this planet and this creation of minds, I think first of all that it's happened a zillion times throughout the universe.

1:25:44I take it for granted that there are other planetary civilizations and they have something kind of a similar origins and growth. But that the basic trend, the basic arc that we're going through, that we're following, we, that we're part of, so that we're part of something that began at the Big Bang and is running through us and would go on beyond us. and technology is the kind of current form of that that we're involved in. And what it does, what it gives us, what technology gives us is cosmic technology from the Big Bang through us is increasing choices and possibilities. I mentioned earlier that, you know, a farmer, until a couple of hundred years ago, most people didn't have much of a choice about what they did with their lives.

1:26:38They were constrained by the undevelopment to be farmers or maybe a farmer's wife and to be a mother. And those were the only choices that most people from most of human history have had. But we have discovered this new invention called the scientific method which unleashed a whole bunch of new possibilities that did not exist before. And we're the benefit of that today, you and I. We're doing things that 100 years ago nobody would think would be a job. no one would think you could survive on doing. And in the future, there'll be people doing things that we would not believe would be possible today.

1:27:16And I think what that means is that the story I like to tell is to imagine Mozart having been born before anyone had invented the piano or the symphony or anything like that. Say he was born 2 ,000 years ago. His musical genius would be totally lost on us. We would never get to share it. And that's a shame to us and to him. And then there's imagining Van Gogh being born before we invented oil paints or Hitchcock or Lucas before we invented the cinema. So each one of these, our inventions have enabled that genius to flower and to be shared, benefiting both us and them. and that means that today somewhere in the world there's a Shakespeare who has been born and she's waiting for us to develop the technologies that would allow her genius to be shared and enjoyed and benefiting us.

1:28:20So we have a moral obligation to keep inventing these things and the moral obligation to get the primary technologies of clean water and education and everything else that will also enable that. And so for me, we're on a grand journey of trying to open up the possibilities to allow that every person born and yet unborn would have a chance to develop their genius, to become the only, and to share that with us as a benefit. And that's the big story that I think we're about. And then in that process, when people were making things, they're making something new, and they can seem like they're just worked into the capitalistic consumer business of making something new that doesn't work.

1:29:07But in fact, they're taking part in this great arc of trying to open up the possibilities of the universe to the people on this planet. Yeah, it's a beautiful sentiment. You can't help but think, well, I have two thoughts. You can't help but think of what genius was lost or squandered because we had not done it. developed the appropriate outlet for the expression of that particular genius over the course of human history. And then secondarily to that, this notion of collective consciousness of almost a hive mind, right? Like we're all participating on some level in the gestalt of forward motion in the generation of these new technologies without really understanding the context or the broader kind of macro role that we're playing.

1:30:05We're like ants, like, you know, moving, you know, along as we're digging our ant, you know, ant hill or whatever, but we have no awareness of, you know, the broader game at play. And yet it is sort of unfolding naturally as if there was some sort of divine plan at play or greater intelligence that we're, you know, consciously unaware of. Absolutely. And I would like to add one other spiritual dimension to that, maybe coming back to the advice book. And that is that I think at the heart of my advice is the fact that this long arc, this generative thing of increasing possibilities of the self-organizing dynamic, that it has another attribute, which is a paradox at its heart.

1:30:51and that for whatever reason, the way the universe kind of works is that it's generous at its foundation in terms of producing things and its abundance and its improbability. And that generosity is captured in this paradox of our own human situation, which is that the more you give away, the more you get, which makes no logical sense whatsoever, but it's so reliable that you can live your life based on that. And that sense of being able to give away, knowing that you'll get it is the foundation of all artistic creation and the best habit to have because you need to produce a lot. You need to give away a lot and keep making things in order to make something great.

1:31:41You have to make a lot of bad stuff. And if you are confident, excuse me, that there's more where that's come from, that you can keep giving that away. And that's how you arrive. your understanding of yourself is that it's a generous outpouring and that you can rely on that, that you can rely on the fact that people are going to treat you well if you assume the best of them. You can rely on things getting better because we're trusting the future generations. So there's a sense in which a lot of my advice about how to behave is based on this premise that at the heart of this long arc in history of creating more possibilities is a generosity that we can count on.

1:32:27Sure. And I think that's beautifully articulated. And I'm certainly, you know, somebody who has experienced that myself and would agree with you wholeheartedly. I think with respect to the piece around innovation and technology, where it becomes sort of problematic or challenging is around the idea of whether these innovations are extractive or regenerative or sustainable, right? And we have a long history of producing innovations that seem to benefit us, but ultimately long-term are too extractive to be sustainable and are wreaking havoc on our planet. And it creates this tension between progress and this ticking clock where we are quickly depleting the resources of our planet and not respecting it adequately.

1:33:25And so the question becomes, can we pivot away from extractive technology to at a minimum sustainable technology or perhaps more laudably regenerative technology? So where does your mind sit around how we make that pivot? because I think we're living in a world in which the systems that we have created have erected a misalignment of incentives that drives us towards the extractive model. Yeah, this goes back to, I think we have allowed choice and particularly in the politics of things that is a choice that we can make or not make. And I think we have not yet made any technology that we can't make greener, more appropriate, but that's a political will choice.

1:34:14That's a choice. Political will is a big sticky wicket problem. Technologically, we know what a lot of the solutions are. There's two kinds of problems. In my mind, there's the tractable problems. Problems that we know how to solve but just have to choose to and then problems that we have no idea how to solve. Most of these climate ones are in the first category where we know what most of the solutions are And so that's a political will of choosing to do those. We know that if we electrify the current existing energy system, we can consume exactly the same amount of energy, but electrify it, we can reach 50 % of our climate goals by electrifying all the stoves, electrifying all vehicles, electrifying all heating, electrifying all transportation.

1:35:13electrifying everything, just that alone will get us halfway there to the current goals. And so we know how to do that. Electric cars, all kinds of heat pumps. And it's the will, the political will to do it. So I would say that that's a category one problem, which is good because it means that we know how to solve it. Right. We have the technology. We have the technology. We have the solutions, but it almost, it makes it more frustrating that we can't implement those technologies. Like we're in our own way. Right, exactly. Because of the systems that we ourselves have erected that are preventing us from taking advantage of knowledge that's accessible already.

1:36:01Right. And so one of my bits of advice from the book is that you can't reason someone out of a opinion that they didn't reason themselves into. So the thing about it that we're kind of confronting is that people, unlike say the AIs, are not just very logical. They're very emotional. They arrive at things for not logical reasons and they inherit views. They have cultural standards and norms that they absorb even unconsciously. It's just, so we're very, very, very complicated and we have to kind of operate at other levels to change our minds. And people who like me, who like to think, think that if we can change how people think, they'll change their minds, but that doesn't work very well.

1:36:59No, and we have the added problem of people being motivated by their own self-interest. So again, incentives. Yeah, and that's true. That's human nature. So you have to make it work. And we're seeing some change in electric cars. And so electric cars, the reason is that they're just better cars. Forget about everything else. They're just superior cars in every way. And that alone may help them come about and become the norm. Right, but then we have the downstream extractive practices in terms of mining and minerals, et cetera, to create these batteries that, you know, it's sort of like for every new solution, there's a new problem that we have to address.

1:37:47Absolutely. And my protopian viewpoint acknowledges that, that most of the problems we have today are caused by the technologies of the past. All the problems that we're gonna make in the future are gonna be made by the technological solutions that we have today. And so you say, what's the point? Well, the point is that actually we keep increasing the possibilities and choices that we have. That's what we get out of it. So I agree with the technological critics who say that we keep increasing the number of problems. But where I differ is I think the solutions to the problems made by technology is not just personal virtue, it's actually new technologies who themselves will have new problems.

1:38:41But that is the problems that propel, their problems are just opportunities in disguise. Right, I mean, theoretically I'm in agreement with you. I get tripped up a little bit by the ticking clock of environmental degradation. Like how much time do we actually have to solve these problems before we eclipse a certain point at which the global kind of climate crisis becomes so untenable as to be irreversible. Like that's, we really are up against that right now. And so there's a certain urgency to this that I think needs to cattle prod us out of the theoretical mindset into the truly practical application mindset.

1:39:28Right, yes. And that unfortunately is going to be a very hand wavy deadline because of our ignorance, particularly at the planetary scale. One of the things we discovered, not just through climate, but if you ask any question of the Earth, of our society, at the level of the planet, the answer is we don't know. And I was involved in trying, it was a failed attempt to try and do a survey of all the species on our planet because we don't know. We don't know to, I don't know, I would say to maybe 50 % of what the actual numbers. We haven't even identified all the living species on this planet, which is like crazy.

1:40:14And so if you ask any kind of question, the one we know about the most is population. And even that, I think we're 10 % off either direction. and we're constantly revising even now the projections of our own human population and one of the things I am concerned about is the coming population implosion after we reach our peak and we don't have agreement on when that is but it's probably within less than 50 years and that's the thing we know the most about at the planetary scale and so our ignorance about our own planet what's going on and what's happening right now is phenomenally great. And that's one of the first places that we should be working on to stabilize the climate.

1:41:04Not to mention all of that being exacerbated by a denigration in the global conversation and a sense of decorum in how we problem solve as we move towards what many consider to be this post-truth world that's being exacerbated by social media algorithms and information silos that are making communication and problem solving more difficult, which is of course another unintended consequence of technological innovation. That's right. And so, yeah, I mean, we're moving, whether we want to or not, whether we acknowledge or not to becoming a more planetary society. and that disturbs people both on the left and the right.

1:41:54They go crazy with this idea of a global governance and yet we have a global planetary problem that requires global cooperation. It's not going to happen otherwise. And so that, to me, that's a new phase of our civilization that we're moving into, this planetary wide level of whatever it is that we're making. We don't even have names for it. And that is truly a frontier for us as a species. It only happens once in a planet's life when you have this knitting together of a planetary civilization. It only happens for the first time once. And so that's what we're moving into. And I think we don't have good language, good vocabulary.

1:42:40We don't have good notions. We don't have a good role model. It's a truly a frontier. Yeah, but unbridled optimist that you are. Right. Undaunted. It's gonna be fantastic. It's gonna be amazing, right? Yes. Okay. Because the alternative is what? Right, okay. But, I don't know, maybe I'm injecting a little, try to a little realism into this, I don't know. I don't wanna like rain on your parade. I wanna be an optimist. I'm like, Kevin. Not everybody can be an optimist, okay? Because we're in a speeding car, as you mentioned earlier. And in order to turn, you have to have brakes. There have to be some people who are braking it to be able to turn.

1:43:26So you're the guy saying it's gonna be amazing. I'm the engine and I think we need to have a really, the engine has to be more powerful than the brakes to keep going forward. So I'm glad that there are people who are trying to brake it because we need them, okay? But my role is to keep making the engine go more powerful as we can go forward. I got you. Okay. I got you. All right, so you're talking about the global sort of conversation that we need to have to solve these big problems. I wanna take that down to the very local. You mentioned the Amish earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a community of people that you've spent quite a bit of time with.

1:44:07You're sporting an Amish beard. Did the Amish beard come before your immersion in the community? Yes, before. It did. Why is that? I just, when I grew a beard right after high school. Just style? The mustache just drove me crazy. I just could stand it. So I shaved it off and then I discovered, oh, the Amish do that. Maybe they're my brethren. And that's your thing. But then later on, when I became more interested in technology, I became more interested in technology, I mean, the Amish, and I went to start to visit them. The first time when I rode my bicycle across the US, I would visit them and I had one major question, which is how do they decide what technologies to use or not?

1:44:47And it's a very interesting conversation because they have trouble articulating that. It's so culturally kind of embedded that they haven't really thought about it in kind of a curious way. But that was my main question. And I decided that they had some lessons for us outside about our own use of technology. So that's a culture that's a mystery box to most people. We look at it and we're curious, we sort of glance at it like we're glancing at a car accident as we're driving down the freeway without really understanding what's actually going on. But you have spent a lot of time with these people.

1:45:31And what's fascinating is you've extracted certain principles around living that are instructive. So talk a little bit about that. From the Amish, you mean? So the Amish, okay, so there's a stereotype of the Amish is they don't use technology, which is incorrect. They use technology, but they're very careful in selecting which ones they use. And they're always, not always, but they are gradually changing that mix. and then thirdly, the mix of what the Amish used is really governed parish by parish, sect by sect. Decentralized. So it's not uniform. And the ones that are most liberal, we say, about their use of technology are the ones in the heartland where the Amish kind of were centered and began and some of the more stricter ones are at the outer edges of that upstate New York and Indiana.

1:46:32And so it varies. But the general principle that they use is they have two main criteria for deciding whether to adopt technology in their lives. The first one is, will this technology help me to strengthen my family? And the goal or the evidence for that is they want to be able to spend breakfast, lunch, and dinner, every meal with their children until they leave. That's their goal. So that means they have one-room schoolhouse nearby and the kids come back for lunch. It means that they do business in their farm in the backyard or they have a little shop in their backyard. That's their ideal. And if they have technologies that helps them do that, they'll use it.

1:47:16So I have some old order Mennonite friends with a horse and buggy, bonnets, suspenders, the whole thing. But they have in their barn in the back, they have a CNC milling machine. Computer controlled milling machine running electricity from a diesel. And the 14 year old girl in the bonnet is running the CNC machine. Okay? Because it keeps them on their family. And the second criteria is, does it help breed our community as a community? So the reason why they have a horse and buggy is that the horse can only go 15 miles in any direction. So all their shopping, doctors, whatever it is, it has to happen within 15 miles.

1:48:01So they keep everything in that community. The priority, the real focus, the locus of that decision-making is, is it making our community stronger, more interconnected, more intimate, or is it fracturing it? Exactly. And so when a new technology comes along, they have Amish early adopters. And they're usually guys and they'll have like cell phones. They're like beta testers. I need a cell phone for my business. And so the bishop says, okay, Ivan. Interesting. Okay, Ivan, you can have a cell phone, but you've got to keep it in the shed. You can't have it in your house. And you have to solar charge it.

1:48:44And we're going to be watching you and your family to see if this is making you stronger as a family man. And if you're actually more contributing into the community. And if you're not, you have to be willing to give it up. And so Ivan tries it out and they discover something about the phone is that his wife wants one because her sister has now been moved away to a place in Indiana and they want to keep the family in touch. So basically the Amish are adopting the flip cell phone. Interesting. Because all the evidence so far has been that it strengthens their ability to have communities move apart and live in different areas because the land gets too expensive in one area.

1:49:36And so in the family business is better for that, so they can keep in the backyard. So they're saying yes to the cell phone, flip cell phone. Now, Ivan has a new smartphone he's wondering about. Right, like that becomes very sort of challenging quickly because obviously you can go on the internet and perhaps learn more efficient ways of farming that will increase your yields or other tools that could help make the community stronger. Or you can go down a Twitter rabbit hole and spend all your time staring at your screen all of a sudden. And the bishop has heard these arguments. And so they have Amish computers now, which are computers that just do spreadsheets.

1:50:29They don't connect to the internet because they discovered that spreadsheets are really handy if you're running a business. And then they do have some of them are experimenting with online where they have parental controls that are public and shared and whatnot. So they can go to certain sites. Or they've been using it as public libraries. So this guy gave me his card for his website. And it's like, if he's making barbecue, metal barbecue stuff, I said, an Amish website? Well, I just get it at the library. I go to the library to pick up my mail, whatever it is. So it's out of our home. and it's at the public library.

1:51:13So that's one solution. Right, that's fascinating. You know, and what comes to mind for me in thinking about this is again, another tension, the tension between the solutions to our biggest problems lying in technological innovations and really investing in that. And on the flip side of that, a hearkening back to a simpler time. And when you think about food systems and the impact of factory farming and monocropping and soil degradation, et cetera, we're seeing this emergent movement around regenerative agriculture, right? Which is in some ways a throwback, right? It is a recognition of a more ancient practice that is more beneficial for the planet that is kind of exciting in terms of how we're rethinking, how we feed the planet, et cetera.

1:52:15I'm not sure it's something that can scale to the level of feeding everybody on the planet, but I can't help but think how cultures like the Amish, the Mennonites, et cetera, could participate and be at the kind of forefront of these types of movements. I feel like they have a lot to contribute in that regard. The Amish are really big in dairy farming because no ordinary English farmer, they call them, wants to bother with. It's just too much effort, too much hand labor. And the Amish still have a lot of big families and the young kids are instrumental in their workforce. And they're still doing dairy.

1:52:51But I joke with them that I think they're going to be among, I think eventually they're going to accept the robot milker, which are amazing and would enable them to continue expanding their dairy business as the other English farmers to give it up one by one which is happening very fast because it is very, very labor intensive. So I think that might be, again, kind of a weird little thing where some high-tech stuff in AI robotics can help the Amish. There's a thing called precision agriculture that's enabled by AI. So if you imagine kind of like a big tractor with outstretched arms. It goes down the rows and rows of lettuces and there's camera eyes in all the little rows.

1:53:37And using AI, the tractor, we'll call it, can identify individual lettuce seedlings by number. It can recognize it. Oh, this is, you're 2152A. I was here yesterday and it can give the exact, it can appraise its health, give you the exact amount of water and nutrients or whatever it needs based on that individual seedling. Using GPS and everything, it remembers it. And so it has millions of these that is tending individually. Wow. That is something that human farming would love to be able to do, but can't. And yet this precision agriculture machine, which is being driven by AI, and that reduces the amount of pesticide or fertilizers and water needed per plant because it's just giving exactly what that plant needs.

1:54:32Interesting. That's how AI can transform this kind of agricultural revolution that we want. Yeah, wow. And did you say that that's something that the Amish are interested in? I can't imagine. The Amish are not interested in that. The Amish are interested in this milker, the robotic milker. I see, okay. Because that's their main cash right now for most Amish farmers is the dairy business because it is very labor intensive. It's working with animals which they love and it needs the kind of hands-on stuff. But the thing about milking cows twice a day, so here's the cows actually decide when they get milked.

1:55:09That's the beauty of it. They're not being forced. It's the cows are happier because they decide when they want to relieve and they come in and get milked automatically and move out. that's like, that's, everybody's happy. How's a happier? There's more milk and the farmer doesn't have to get up at 5 a.m. and go on vacation every once in a while. That's huge. You know what would be better? If we just all stop drinking milk. We don't need to. Well, yeah. That's another, that's another thing, yeah. Switching gears a little bit. You're somebody, and again, going from local now back up to global, you're somebody who spent a tremendous amount of time in China, kind of we're coming full circle here.

1:55:49in Asia and in particular China. You visited China many, many times. My wife is Chinese. Your wife is Chinese. China is very interesting right now what's happening there. And I feel like it's a culture and a place that the Western world doesn't fully understand. So help me understand what we need to know about China. maybe where our thinking is sideways on this, what we should be focused on, what we shouldn't be worried about, et cetera. Wow. I mean, it's a big question, obviously. But like, you know, China is, you know, is - What should we think about the US? So, first of all, I would say several things.

1:56:36One is I would have had a more confident answer just three years ago before COVID when I was going living there constantly, I felt I had a pulse on the country and I felt that right now I feel blind because I haven't been there and things are changing very fast. Since before COVID. Before COVID. I was there right before COVID my last time. And so something has shifted and I don't have a good sense of what that is right now. So I would say, I would kind of preempt with that, that I feel less confident about it. But the thing I would say, and it's still true, is that almost anything you can say about China is true somewhere in China.

1:57:17I mean, it is so vast. There is more diversity in China than within the U.S. between California and Maine. I mean, it's really vast. But one of the things that people don't appreciate that I will mention is that part of the genius and greatness of the U.S. was it's built on an immigrant experience of people coming from all over the world, bringing together that mix-up and mash-up, that kind of hybrid vigor produced by having people from many different backgrounds try to contribute and make and be unleashed. And that is happening in China and it has been happening. But the immigration is all internal.

1:57:57So you have people from very dispart, from Yunnan, from Qinghai, from Guilin, coming together and they speak indecipherable languages to each other. except they have this common language, not English, but Mandarin. But at home, there are languages and backgrounds and traditions that are completely foreign to each other. And so they're all coming into cities, the young people, mixing it up and having this immigrant hybrid vigor that we have experienced in the US. And that was really what was going on for a very long time, I mean, for the past 10 years. And that has been really very, very productive and tremendously energetic.

1:58:39And you have cities like Shenzhen, where most of the stuff that we're using for electronics is made. Shenzhen in the 80s, okay, so that's maybe 40 years ago, 40 years ago, was a fishing village. And now it's a city bigger than New York City. And it means every single person in that city, nobody was born there. None of the people in Shenzhen, 13 million, 15 million people were born in Shenzhen. They're all immigrants. They're all coming people out. And it's the youngest city in the world because everybody's young there. So it's the youngest, hippest city in the world and they've built a brand new opera house and library.

1:59:25It's a brand new city. The size of New York and the scale of New York that's brand new. So there is, no matter what happens in China politically, there is a momentum and a hustle and an ambition that I don't think is going to be squashed by no matter what happens. Whether they overthrow things, I don't know. But I'm just saying that there is a huge desire, a huge collective moving forward that's not going to be stopped. And I don't know where it's going, but I'm saying the pressure, the volume, the intensity of that is hard to appreciate, but it's not going to be stopped by whoever's president or whatever the party's in power.

2:00:15It can certainly be diminished or demodified, whatever, but it's really a billion people on the march. And we have to kind of acknowledge that. And so I think that's one thing I would say. The other thing is I asked a lot of the young people in China constantly who their heroes are, what their dream was besides getting rich. And the answer was zero, zero. No heroes and no dreams of what they're going to do. So they're racing at a thousand miles an hour forward, but they don't really know where they're going. That's very strange. What do you make of that? So I would go into dorm rooms, which in the US would at least have posters of things.

2:01:03something that they like, that they're hoping for, bands or something cool, whatever, something that would give some idea of what their interests were. They're none of those in China. It means that they're ripe for a new religion. There's no holy scripture, there's no constitution, there's no sacred texts, there's nothing to guide them. So that means one, it's a possibility that could be some weird thing, a belief thing that would go through that many people would follow. It means that I think they're hungry for a vision of where they want to go. There's been a whole thing of the China dream now, trying to get it going.

2:01:47But I don't know what it is and no one else does either. So I would say that they're ripe for a belief in something bigger than themselves. but they hasn't been articulated yet. Right, and is it your sense that that belief when it arises would sort of challenge the governmental structure or create a situation that pits the people against? That's, we'd have to make a bunch of different scenarios and that could be certainly one of them. here's one thing I would say about that I would ask these young people in the big banquets and stuff maybe they'll be drinking a lot so let's get some honesty what's one thing that you all agree here on what's one belief, what's one thing you could all agree on that you want and they said almost in unison stability the cultural revolution and the crazy, the insanity of that is still close to their parents went through it and all kinds of stories, all different ways.

2:03:07That is so vivid. It's like, we'll take almost anything, but we don't want another revolution. Right, give me a job, something stable, an income. They don't want a revolution. So... they're not having a revolution. No revolution. No revolution. Yeah, fascinating. Yes, it's so interesting. And I appreciate what you had to say about the complexity and diversity of this massive landscape of a billion people. But I can't help but think of the implications of a talent pool, 1 billion people deep in a culture in which they've already outpaced the rest of the world in terms of manufacturing quality, of course, and what comes next with that and where we're gonna be in 10, 20, 30 years.

2:04:03Yeah, so they have great power and they don't yet have a great dream. I mean, yeah, so anyway, I mean, that's true for many countries, but China's moving so fast and has such a force and a momentum that could be dangerous or it could be wonderful. When you cast your gaze forward as a futurist, with finger quotes. What does the world look like 20 years from now? Oh my gosh. 10 years from now. Do you have a sense of that? Like this is your jam, Kevin. Yeah, yeah. So I would say several things. I would say it's gonna be more things will be the same than change. So I think 95 % of the world in 20 years now will look like today.

2:04:53and I think most of the changes are not gonna be in the physical world. That revolution has already kind of mostly been completed. It'll be much more an intangible thing of how we understand who we are, like this AI stuff, changing our beliefs about ourselves and how we connect with each other. So I think it'll be kind of more in a social realm. I think the thing after smartphones are the smart glasses, but I've been saying that for way too long. I mean, you were a big VR guy and you kind of, yeah, so your timeline on that. Yeah, exactly, I've been wrong for so long. You've been right about a lot of stuff.

2:05:30I would say you were wrong about that. Yeah, right, so take that, I'm just still wrong. And even lately with Meta's big bet on VR and AR and the metaverse and all of that. And then as soon as chat GPT hit, like nobody cared about it. Exactly, so I've been wrong before on that, but that's actually that's still my answer about what comes after the smartphone and I think that I'm hoping that most gas cars have been replaced and I'm hoping that we have electrified at least the developed countries by then and I hope that if we're lucky we may have the very first glimmers of fusion synthetic solar which is what it is and

2:06:24And other things, I'm hoping, again, the general trend to less violence in the world means that there's less conflicts overall on average and that continues in that direction. And then the wild card of China, but there's always India, which is going to exceed China in the number of people. and what we're seeing, India is the diaspora of India is gonna be a fundamental thing. As we can see, even tech companies in the US, the percentage of them being led by Indian Americans is phenomenal. And that may be one of the great exports of India is technical people around the world. Yeah. And so - I think there's a huge export of Indian culture as well.

2:07:12Yeah, exactly. Through movies, television, music. and we saw it at the Oscars this year. And I think that's gonna continue. Yeah, the three R's, the R-R-R. Yeah, R-R-R-R in the song. It's just an amazing, I watch these just to understand. Or the three idiots, if you haven't seen that, it's a must see, one of the biggest, all the Hindi Bollywood movies. So I would say that would be another thing. I'd say maybe more of a influence of India on the world stage. What's a pie in the sky idea though that you're playing around with? Like all of those predictions are fairly grounded, I think, but what's a more harebrained thought that might've occurred to you where you think things might go that?

2:07:55Well, this is, again, this is maybe a hope. I'm hoping that we really do have lab grown meat available, animal cell-based meat. Cellular, yeah. Cellular, whatever, clean meat. They keep changing the terminology. Whatever it is, you know what it is. I'm hoping that that is commercially available in many, many different varieties by then as someone who doesn't eat mammals. And so I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's an inevitability. It's just a cost thing right now. The technology exists, it's commercially available in restaurants in Singapore in a limited way. It's too expensive, but the technology, like they're continuing to iterate on that pretty rapidly.

2:08:41and it's just a matter of scale, I think. Well, in theory, but to me, that's a pie in the sky because I'm interested in not just replicating the existing animals, but actually making up whole new super meats. Out of extinct animals? Yeah, right, let's eat the mammoth. This goes back to your species project, right? Like you wanna have a woolly mammoth burger? Yeah, why not? Oh man, yeah. I'll stick to my plants. I do think it is interesting what's happening in that space. And there is a consumer acclimation phase that we have to go through because people are, I think they have a certain reaction to that.

2:09:26But I think over time we'll go away, but right now. Well, it has to be, I'm ready for it and I'll pay a little bit extra for it. So I'll be one of the first customers. and I have been trying them in the Silicon Valley ones. Have you tasted it? I've tasted several, but not actually the beef or the mammals. I've tasted fish and cheese, milk products, but not the actual meat. And hamburgers are easy to do because it doesn't have the structure, but to make a steak, to mix those two, it's really haven't been able to do so far, but they're working on it. And I'm looking forward to it. A lot of money and a lot of smart people are on that problem.

2:10:11What are the things on that note that you think we're gonna look back on, I don't know, 50 years from now, 100 years from now and just cringe? Yeah. It may be eating meat might be one of them. I have another idea which is kind of maybe trivial, but I thought it was very possible, which is that it may be embarrassing for us who have names assigned by your parents. Yes, I saw the New York Times article where you had a list of these things and that one definitely popped out to me. Because it's like arranged marriages. It's like, yeah, of course you're gonna choose your own name when you're 16 or whatever it is.

2:10:50I wish we all did that. And the idea that you have a name assigned by your parents, I think it's just gonna be embarrassing. Right, that's very interesting. I mean, I feel like that's a sort of progression or evolution beyond the gender conversation that we're having right now, like a natural extension of that. You added to that wrapping food in plastic, that's a no brainer. Getting off the summer from school, we're just gonna be educated around the clock. Why not? I went to this one school where the teachers were not allowed to teach you anything except how to learn. So yeah, I think that's, well, you should be taking your vacations when you want to rather than just in the summer.

2:11:36So it doesn't mean you have to go to school all year. It just means that you don't have to take all vacations together. Well, I think these technologies are so powerful and our education system is so lagging in terms of acknowledging the power and the capacity for these technologies to revolutionize how we learn and what we learn. Like we're learning the wrong things. We're not learning the things we should be learning. And we're not training young people to leverage the best of what technology has to offer in order to really, you know, kind of nourish their educations. Exactly, and I have one word, YouTube.

2:12:15YouTube is this - That can go both ways. It's phenomenal, under appreciated the way in which it's accelerating our culture and the role it's playing in education today. and it has great potential to be even more of an accelerant. And I don't think they even know, they being at YouTube, don't even realize what they have. And part of the problem is that unlike a bookstore or a newsstand where you can go in and see what's being covered, there's really no way for anybody encountering it to have any idea of its depth and breadth. And it's this vast ocean that is kind of subterranean and people don't even understand the way in which it's working on learning and accelerating every field from brain surgery to science is really incredible.

2:13:10Yeah, I think we're ripe to see tons more innovation in the space of education. Absolutely, absolutely. And kind of pivoting back to the advice piece before I let you go, I did wanna touch on one last thing, which is this thing that you did a while back where you lived your life for six months as if you were going to die. And this became the subject of This American Life podcast. So explain a little bit about like what you did, why you did it and kind of what you learned from that experience. Well, first of all, I told the story on one of the first This American Life and I'd never told it before.

2:13:51I've never told it as well since. So I would urge people to go look for it. We'll link it up in the show notes. I should have been dead. But the short version was that I got this assignment after religious conversion in Jerusalem to live as if I was going to die in six months and actually take it seriously. So I suspected, knew as a healthy 20-year-old, that I wasn't probably going to die, but I had to really take it and prepare to do it. And that's what I did. And it took six months, and I was riding my bicycle across to my end date. And I was surrendering the future the entire time, not taking pictures because who needs pictures in three months.

2:14:31And that stripping away of my future was really important because when I was reborn on the next day after the six months, I suddenly had my future before me and I realized how important it was to have a future forward. How necessary and humane and how inhumane and torturous it was to be stripped of a future. And that kind of instigated my interest in exploring the future and really trying to develop it because I think it's an essential part of being a human being is to have something in front of us. Yes, how we contemplate, how we think about the future, how we plan for the future and just conceptualize it really is part and parcel of what makes us human and is part of the motor or the motivation for getting up in the bed, out of bed in the morning and planning how we're gonna live.

2:15:33Exactly, right. And we have, in addition to being given these incredible bodies that we're given time and time only moves forward, that is the future. And so it's not only do we have this incredible blessing of being able to be put into things that have impact that we can actually have impact unlike being intangible beings of light. We have things that we can do and make and get hurt and hurt others and help others and build stuff. But we also get the time. We get the hour of time going forward knowing that we have time in a future. And that to me is the great ride that we're on. The angels in heaven are weeping to see us squander it.

2:16:18Yes. Take advantage of it. Yeah, on the subject of squandering it, I mean, I think the human mind is, you know, oriented around conceptualizing the future in the context of self-interest or optimizing self-interest. And also isn't great about pondering the future in a long-term sense, but more in a short-term sense. And long-termism is something you've thought a lot about, is something you care a lot about. and I think is something that's also percolating up in the culture and becoming a bit of a zeitgeist thing where more and more people are talking about the importance of thinking about and approaching our problems from an extremely long lens point of view.

2:17:04Right, it's taking the kind of a civilizational scale or a generational scale is what we like to put about it, thinking in terms of generations, maybe working on something that might not be finished in your own lifespan that might require generations to complete like a cathedral or a road system or something grand like that. But even beyond those kind of grand plans, what we want to do is to kind of help people like ourselves become good ancestors to actually do something so that in the future they may say, thank you, ancestor, for having started that or done that in the way that most of what we've surrounded ourselves here has been built by previous generations and we should thank them.

2:17:48So what can we do to be a good ancestor besides plant a tree? Right. And what is the answer to that for you?

2:18:00Trying to increase learning in the world so that we can unleash opportunities for the maximum number of people born and yet unborn so that they can share their genius with us and themselves. Beautiful. I think that's a great place to land the plane for today. I have a million other things I could have talked to you about today. I'd love to have you back. In the meantime, excellent advice for living wisdom. I wish I'd known earlier is your new book. Everybody check it out. This is like the perfect book to just, you know basically open to any page and have a thought for the day. I love it. And you're a national treasure.

2:18:43Thank you, a global treasure, international treasure. A cosmic treasure, okay, thank you. A cosmic treasure, yes. You're a gift, you're somebody, I've followed you for a very long time. And like I said, at the outset, I was nervous to meet you because I've been very invested in the work that you've done for many years. So it really was an honor and a gift to have you here to share with me today. It was my pleasure, I enjoyed every minute. You're a great interviewer. I just love your presence. Thank you for being you. I appreciate it. Thank you, Kevin. Cheers, peace. by Lance. Progress. Progress, there you go.

2:19:17Awesome.

2:19:28That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:21:40Thank you.