How To Predict The Future With Kevin Kelly - Ep. 57

[00:00] What I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true. Jaron Lanier showed me VR in 87. I was completely blown away and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the future. The VR that we had back then is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that it was multi-million dollars and it was now $100. [00:27] $100. I've been very, very surprised about how slow that has been. You could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment. AI's a 50-year overnight success. [00:50] - Kevin, welcome to the show. [00:52] It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to be seen. [00:55] I am very excited to have you. In addition to being a personal hero of mine, I am a longtime Wired reader. I had like a gigantic... [01:05] shelf of magazines growing up. So it's sort of crazy to get to chat with you. There's a lot of things I want to talk to you about. But I want to start with, we have a mutual love of Annie Dillard. [01:15] We do. She's my favorite writer, and I know she's your favorite writer as well. [01:22] Tell me why you like her. [01:25] For those who aren't familiar with Annie, she burst onto the scene with...

[01:37] a [01:38] meteorite of a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that for some [01:45] reason, it's [01:47] account of her spending some year on musing, kind of like a Henry David Thoreau [01:55] intimate [01:56] investigation of a creek in Virginia or West Virginia. I don't remember. And so it was just the writing [02:05] And the style and the ideas... [02:08] And her... [02:10] blazing brilliance in being able to capture this into a few words. It was almost like [02:15] Poetry. [02:16] those pros, it somehow just worked on my brain. And I don't know enough about [02:26] literature to describe her in relation to other writers and why it doesn't work for me as much. But there was something about her spirit as well as her writing, which was very... [02:39] expansive, cosmic, enthusiastic questioning. She talked about feeling as if [02:48] at one point in the story, that she was a bell that someone else had rung. And I felt exactly the same in response to her writing. It was like she was ringing my bell in a curious way. Yeah, lifted and struck. There's another part in the early part of the book where she talks about the tree with the lights in it. Yeah. Yeah.

[03:07] And that moment is so very evocative of like one of her big themes, which is [03:12] you can just be sort of walking around in, in ordinary life and ordinary nature. And somehow like the veil is lifted from your eyes and, um, you can experience these, um, [03:24] moments of transcendence where everything feels like it's glowing from within. [03:29] Yeah. So there was this, her kind of cosmic poetic, you know, ability to kind of take these moments, but then... [03:38] interstitial with that were these findings, these weird little trivia bits that you'd find in some obscure book that [03:50] you would be grounded and [03:54] before the next jump. It was a very distinctive way of kind of wrapping rhapsodic ecstasy with [04:04] very concrete science trivia or oddities and that combination just somehow appealed to me. Yeah, the thing I remember is she spends a long time talking about Henley's loops, which are like this little part of the kidney. And it's just like, where does that even come from? And yeah, I think like she sort of zooms out to the biggest stuff and then zooms into the [04:34] And I'm curious how you've thought about this in your own work.

[04:38] is [04:39] she spends a lot of time talking about [04:42] the beauty of the world, but she also spends a lot of time talking about [04:46] the worst of the world. Like there's an entire... [04:49] chapter on insects and how gross insects are. She's also angry about it and not afraid to be angry about it, you know? And I think a lot of writers are usually either one or the other, either you're like really angry or you're really, everything's beautiful and awesome. And she does both pretty well. [05:06] That's true. I think either she said in the book or elsewhere that she wrote the book. [05:13] as if there was a [05:14] patient of cancer dying in her room. Oh, wow. And she's talking to them. So yeah, that was, yeah, it's not just saccharine. It's not just sweet kumbaya. It's, yeah, she can be pretty harsh too. And that is part of the attraction of the sweet sour flavor. How has she, if at all, influenced how you write or edit? Well, [05:42] In some ways, it's why I won't write at all, because I came across that book in the weirdest of all places. It was in an American library in Kandy, Sri Lanka. [05:57] Wow. And I... [05:59] walked in because there was air conditioning and there was a book book [06:04] Why they had the book there, I don't know. But there was a book that opened up and from the first immediate

[06:10] paragraph. I once had a Tomcat, you know, I was caught and I didn't put it down and it was like, [06:19] I don't know what she's doing, but I want to do that. If I could do that. [06:24] I would admit, I'm golden. - I feel the same way. Have you read any of her other stuff? - Yeah, yeah. I didn't read her fiction book, but the other books of essay, "Teaching a Stone to Talk" and-- - "Holy of the Firm," "The Writing Life." - Yeah, "Holy of the Firm" and all those, yes. [06:44] In her account of the eclipse, [06:47] has the total eclipse. It's sort of never to be equaled. Anybody who writes about eclipse [06:58] It has to start with Annie's version of it. [07:01] *laughter* [07:03] Yeah, it's so funny because the reason I started with Annie is, um, [07:08] I love her so much and she evokes all the same kind of feelings in me that I think she evokes for you and gives me that same kind of energy to... [07:17] write stuff if i write stuff after i've read something that she's written it just [07:21] It brings something out in me that I just love. [07:24] Um, [07:26] and also no one else I know likes her or even really has heard about her. Like, I feel like a lot of her work is, it's maybe taught in school, but it's like kind of the thing that you're assigned, but people don't like as much. Well, they probably also don't read the whole thing. They probably would have understood is they only get the excerpt. Yeah. You know, it's probably some one passage about the lights in the trees or whatever.

[07:51] Yeah, it is true because she didn't really... [07:56] I mean, she wrote a couple other books, but she didn't really go on to have a huge amount of work and a huge amount of output for whatever reason. [08:05] They actually sent her... [08:08] a book that I did when I was riding my bicycle across the country. I did a haiku and a sketch every day. And I sent her the book, the original. And because I thought I was inspired by her. I just thought that she would enjoy it. And she actually sent some nice words in response to the book and sent it back. Yeah. [08:28] Yeah. [08:29] So that was kind of my one-- it was the one time when I kind of [08:33] wrote to [08:36] a hero. [08:38] That's really nice. Yeah, she did reply. I bet a reply from Annie is probably pretty rare. So that's pretty great. I think I still have it. I think it's right behind me. I should dig it up and see. There was one little drawing. She said she really liked that little drawing. So that was good. Yeah. Another thing... [08:59] To move on from Annie for a second... [09:02] One thing that you wrote in your book, The Inevitable, that I really loved and thought was interesting is, after living online for the past three decades, first as pioneer in a rather wild, empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes.

[09:22] I really love the sort of like pioneer to builder transition. I've been watching this show. It's an old HBO show called Deadwood. I don't know if you've seen it. I haven't seen it. [09:32] But it's basically about Deadwood. I think now it's South Dakota, but it was a mining town in Indian territory. [09:39] before it was annexed into a state and so it had no law and the whole show is kind of about that transition from pioneer to [09:48] like order out of chaos. I think there's a lot of resonance with what was sort of what you wrote and, and this, um, [09:56] Yeah, the transition from Pioneer to, to, [10:00] builder feels like something that's deeply embedded into tech, even with every single wave, like in this new AI wave, there's this whole movement of pioneers, like kind of figuring out the whole new landscape and then [10:11] the builders kind of move in. Tell me about what that's been like for you to participate in and watch over the last couple decades. Yeah, there are a lot, you know, there are always feelings of loss as the kind of the freedom of no laws, the unvarnished, the unconstrained ability to do what you want without having to ask permission. [10:32] That goes away. And actually, I had another experience that was like that, which was Burning Man. Yeah. And I was reminded because I did a podcast with Burning Man today and they were reminiscing about, you know, the first 96 or so, the first time I was at Burning Man when there were no streets.

[10:53] There were no, there's no adult supervision at all. There was no sense of order. There was, it was, it was crazy and chaotic and wonderful, but, you know, [11:09] There was a second year, I think, there was somebody who died because they got run over by a car and they were just sleeping on the sleeping bag. And so it was like, oh, we need streets. Okay. And so, um, [11:25] And over years and years of Burning Man, they have more and more of the layering of law and order. And they have tons and tons of police and sheriffs and whatnot and laws and the bureaucratic stuff that I had to go through. I did artwork last year. It was unbelievable. It was like dealing with somebody in India. And so, but at the same time, I think Burning Man is better than ever. And so you lose something, but actually I think... [11:53] Um, [11:54] And [11:55] There's... [11:56] more to be gained by adding that [12:00] layer of organization and structure and governance. And so what you want to have is though you still want to have those zones where there's a frontier. You want to keep making new territory. [12:13] that generates new frontiers. And some people [12:18] or better on the frontier than... [12:21] back at the center. And I think that's a wonderful

[12:25] way the world would work. And so for me, I want to maintain both of constantly new frontiers where those are suited to not having to have many rules. [12:38] Um, [12:39] are able to thrive. And then those who... [12:42] prefer to have the discipline of working within rules also can thrive. [12:50] What about in your own life? Because, um, [12:53] You know, as someone who's interested in new technology that requires being on the frontier, [12:59] And the interesting thing about the frontier is if you're a little bit of a restless spirit, it's pretty cool. [13:05] That's it. Um, but being a restless spirit is, um, [13:09] It can be hard. It can be lonely. How have you balanced that in your own life or dealt with in your own life? [13:15] So I tend to visit the frontier. I spend a lot of my adult life in the very remote parts of Asia, where there is very little infrastructure. I spend a lot of time. [13:28] early portion of my adulthood for many years, [13:32] extended time in areas where there was very little modern era. [13:37] infrastructure. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it, but I would have died if I had [13:43] needed to live there. [13:45] I mean, so it was a great place to visit, but it was only great because I was going to leave. I have the same kind of things with the frontiers. It's like, yeah, Burning Man's fantastic for two weeks, but...

[13:57] It'd be horrible to have to live there year round. And, you know, being at the frontier of the Internet or AI, my understanding is that... [14:08] You know, it's a moving frontier. It's going to move. I can keep going up to the edge to see what's happening, but I don't need to stay there. And I'm going to actually come back and report anyway. [14:24] I have the liberty of... [14:27] being a nomad in that sense of, um, [14:30] occupying it. So for me, it's [14:33] a fantastic place to spend some time in but not a [14:37] a place that I want to spend all my time in. [14:39] And how does that work? Because I understand sort of the frontier of going to another country and be able to come home. But with technology, [14:46] um [14:48] you can be at the frontier in your house. [14:50] um and so is that is that structured for you like there are there are periods in your life or periods in your day where you're sort of immersing yourself in what's new and then periods where you're kind of in this sort of stability of whatever you're familiar with or how does it work yeah right so [15:06] One of the things that I discovered over time is that all my favorite people who... [15:12] We're best about the future. We're actually great historians too. So, I would balance reading something about AI with trying to read something historical in the past. And, um, a balance, you know, wrestling with the latest AI stuff with working in my workshop and using my hands. So for me, yes, that's exactly.

[15:36] what it is. Jeff Bezos said, you know, he was trying to build a business on the things [15:43] that didn't change. [15:44] And so the Long Now Foundation, which I've been very central to, [15:52] is trying to take a long-term view, and not just forward, but also the path. And so for me, I would spend time on [16:00] this ephemeral frontier, but also then [16:02] try to think about the next 10,000 years or last 10,000 years. As you're digging into the current AI wave, what are the [16:09] historical periods that you're thinking about or diving into? Yeah, actually, I spent a good amount of time recently reading about the [16:19] Yeah. [16:20] Discovery. [16:22] or invention of electricity. [16:26] Because my contention right now is we have no idea what intelligence is. [16:32] that we're as ignorant of it as [16:35] Um, [16:37] Isaac Newton and others were of electricity when it was first encountered. And Isaac Newton, one of the smartest humans ever, [16:48] was totally wrong. [16:50] about electricity. [16:52] All right. He had this wrong weird ideas about it that were just they were just wrong. What did you think about it? I have not heard anything about Isaac Newton and electricity. That's really interesting. It was one of the people who kind of thought that there was this either flock, flock, flogaston. Have you heard of flogaston? Yeah, flogaston. Yeah, yeah. So it was it was the thing that creates fire.

[17:13] Yeah, it was just kind of, well, no, it was just this kind of element. There was another element. And the discovery of electricity was happening at the same time that basically we were understanding what elements and atoms and compounds were. So Davies and Faraday and those guys... [17:35] We were almost discovering stuff about electricity weekly. And the origins of the Royal Academy came out of the weekly meetings that they would have where they would sell tickets to, [17:47] and do demos. [17:50] with electricity, we make sparks and stuff. And one of the biggest... [17:57] news items in the shocks was when they [18:02] and I forget who it was, maybe Faraday, proved that electricity... [18:08] would happen in a vacuum. [18:11] Because... [18:12] There goes the ether. You don't need ether. It's like, well, then what is it? Okay? And there was, you know, some of the earliest beliefs, electricity, was that it was primarily a biological phenomenon. And there's all those... Reflexes and frogs. Reflexes and stuff. And so there were just... [18:33] endless theories about what is and they all reminded me of all the theories we have about what intelligence is. [18:40] Because we don't really know what it is. [18:42] And I have been saying, I suspect that intelligence is not an element, but a compound. That it is made up of a complex of different

[18:53] cognitive elements and we haven't even identified yet. [18:58] In the same way that salt's not an element... [19:01] Salt is actually a compound of some elements that they had not yet identified. So you can think of the current AI as we're making some kind of salt, and we don't even know what it's made from. [19:13] Yeah. [19:15] I think that's true. Where it makes my mind go, and I'm curious how you would respond to this, is [19:20] um [19:22] We actually do know what it is, but we don't know it in the same way that we know what electricity is. [19:27] So we don't have a explicit exact mathematical theory in the same way that we can talk about electricity. And we don't have a way to decompose it into parts that reduce down and then recombine into it. [19:43] But we do know what it is in a different way. Like I'm talking to you and I know... [19:48] that you're intelligent. Um, and that's harder to grasp. That's not, it's not the same kind of graspy, um, [19:55] I can pin it down to the wall kind of thing. But I think that... [19:59] that just may be a property of intelligence that it is sort of like this fuzzy thing. [20:05] How do you think about that? Well, I don't know. You may be confusing recognizing something with knowing it. So I think we can recognize it. But I actually don't think we know what it is. And in fact, I think our brains are incredibly opaque to introspection deliberately. I think we have these complex things that

[20:24] deliberately does not allow... [20:27] the organism to interfere and meddle with it. Could you imagine if we had access to the source code, we'd be, we would be completely wrecking ourselves. And what the it is, again, I think... [20:40] We humans have a very peculiar complex of things that if we map it out in the possibility space of all possible minds, which is a very high dimensional space, that we're going to be, our compound is way at the edge. [20:55] We're an edge species. We're not at the center of anything. [20:59] the galaxy or the solar system or evolution. We are an edge. Our kind of intelligence will be revealed to be a very peculiar mixture [21:10] that's evolved for us. And then what we're going to be doing with AIs is making hundreds of various other kinds and filling out that possibility space with many types of thinking. And so, [21:27] We'll look back and... [21:29] We won't even recognize maybe some of these other things as intelligence right now because... [21:35] We don't have a very good definition. It's like, what are the definitions or what are the marks for something that doesn't like a human-like intelligence? [21:45] Some people say, "Well, there isn't anything. There's only universal intelligence." [21:50] And we're just going to make more of it. [21:52] that there's only one thing.

[21:55] I... [21:56] That's possible, but I suspect that's wrong. I suspect that there is many compounds and that they will... [22:02] be engineered to do different things and [22:05] to some degree we won't understand even how they work, but that's because they're different. And so, um, uh, [22:15] I think we are very much like the early days of electricity where we simply didn't have a clue about what it was, even though we could use it, even though we couldn't recognize it. [22:25] Where does your intuition that it's made up of compounds come from? [22:28] Well, and several reasons. One is Marvin Minsky was the first who suggested it called the Society of Mind. And then these days, the AIs have mixture of experts, where they are already doing that, where they already are taking different kinds of cognition and making them into compounds. [22:58] we're going to make some very high chain things. [23:02] heavy... [23:04] compounds of intelligence at some level, made up from lots of little bits of elemental cognition. What we haven't done yet is... [23:14] done the chemistry of identifying what some of the basic cognitive units are, the cognitive elements. And, um, um, we may be starting to do that.

[23:27] Thinking about the way neural networks work, [23:31] a way to look at them is [23:34] They learn many, many thousands or millions of rules for what to do in particular situations that they can partially apply. [23:40] and run many, many of those rules in parallel to find the right set that sort of applies to a particular situation. [23:48] So in that case, like... [23:51] intelligence is a compound of rules that are about like little micro correlations, um, [23:57] that are applied depending on how relevant they are to a particular situation. [24:03] Um, [24:04] But it's interesting to think about [24:07] Um, [24:09] How much of those rules are... [24:12] uh contingent like they're just situational versus they're they're sort of your universal [24:18] Because we do know, for example, how neural networks function at a low level. Like we know the atomic units. And in fact, like the specific architecture, the specific set of atomic units that you use doesn't really matter for the high level behavior. It does to some extent, but you can get basically the same behavior no matter the simple components you use. [24:39] always hard to understand in between the simple... [24:42] components and the like outward behavior that we observe. [24:45] I mean, you know, Danny Hill has made a computer with Tinker Doys. So you can make computers... [24:51] out of all kinds of elements, logic gates and stuff like that. So I don't want to confuse sort of like your neural nets. I don't think that is the basic unit. I think there is a type...

[25:02] of [25:03] reasoning or [25:05] learning or something that happens [25:07] with the narrow nets [25:10] that we haven't quite identified yet. [25:13] Thank you. [25:14] I would say that would be the element, is what is that process of [25:22] pattern matching, or if that is what it is, or deduction, or it's the logic, or what's the workflow for doing deduction. And it could be, you know, it could be agnostic to the actual platform. [25:36] It seems like it must be in some way, but yeah, that's interesting. My first business was a B2B software company, and the bane of my existence was compliance. Specifically, certifications like SOC2, ISO, and HIPAA, which we needed in order to sell to enterprises. [25:52] I spent hours and hours on those certifications. But if I was building that company today, I would use Vanta. Vanta automates up to 90% of the tedious compliance tasks involved in achieving SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, and more. By simplifying compliance, Vanta frees your team to focus on what truly matters: innovation, strategic thinking, and real growth. It's trusted by over 10,000 ambitious companies, including Atlassian, Quora, and Ramp, to streamline risk management and effortlessly demonstrate security to customers. [26:20] Sirius? Every listeners can get $1,000 off of Vanta at vanta.com slash every. That's Vanta, V-A-N-T-A dot com slash every for $1,000 off. This episode is brought to you by Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio is built to scale with your business from day one. Connect your email and calendar and Adio instantly builds a CRM that matches your business model with all of your

[26:50] isn't just a feature, it's the foundation. You can do things like instantly prospect and route leads with research agents, get real-time insights from AI during customer conversations, and build powerful AI automations for your most complex workflows. Industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate, and Modal are already experiencing what's next for CRM. Go to adio.com slash every [27:20] One of the things I love about [27:23] the way that you've set up your career. And I think probably also the way that you think about just creative work in general is it's about being honest and authentic to who you are instead of what you think you should be doing. [27:34] And I found that over and over again, like, [27:38] Especially at the beginning of a career, it's really easy to be like, [27:42] I need to do things in this particular way. And then at some point you're like, [27:47] I don't know, at least for me, you're like, this isn't working as well as it should, and this kind of sucks. And I guess I have to do the thing that's like, [27:54] more honest to who I am and more shaped to who I am. And it removes all of this like daily friction, um, [28:02] Um... [28:04] So like, [28:05] Honestly, like hearing you talk about that in various forms over the years has been like quite helpful for me. [28:12] How does that look now after many years of thinking that way? Is that still something that's that's on your mind that's difficult that you have to like unstick yourself from or are you kind of do you get used to living that way after a while?

[28:25] Um, yeah, I mean... [28:29] My own life was never very planned or deliberate in that sense. I had... [28:36] More directions than destinies or destinations. [28:40] A phrase that I like or advice that I like to give these days is about [28:46] don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only, be the only. [28:52] But that was not something that I was doing consciously when I was younger. That was something that I only realized I was doing much later. [29:01] And it's part of the book about... [29:04] wisdom I wish I had known earlier is that I really did wish that someone had told me that earlier. [29:11] And... [29:12] So... [29:14] I think I did a bunch of things very intuitively without necessarily having a grand plan about it. And so I kind of naturally move in that direction. And this idea of... [29:27] being the only [29:31] was made clear to me first at Wired, where I was trying to assign [29:39] stories that I had to other writers and often not getting any traction [29:46] with [29:47] a great idea. [29:50] that I couldn't sell to anybody. [29:54] And after years of kind of trying to kill it, I would wind up doing it myself and then realizing, oh, that's because...

[30:04] Only I can do it. And that's what I should be focusing on to begin with. [30:11] So that was... [30:14] So I think the clarity of it, I think I have more clarity of it, but I'm still kind of doing what I've always done, but maybe being a little bit more aware. [30:24] of the actual process of doing it. [30:28] Yeah. [30:29] Um, I, I resonate very much with this, like trying to get writers to, to do an idea. Um, so every, the company that I run, it's a media company and, um, yeah. [30:39] It's so different from any other business because I come from the software world and [30:45] If you have a product idea and you build a little bit of it, you can have someone else like build a lot, build most of the product and it's totally, it can be great. But getting a writer to. [30:55] write your idea it's never any good almost almost never there's like the people who are good ghost writers are like such a small portion of writers that actually wasn't that actually wasn't my experience my experience was that the writers were even better so you know i assigned uh [31:11] I discovered reading IEEE Spectrum that they were laying the fiber... [31:17] or [31:18] You know. [31:18] fiber optic cables around the globe and I thought, hmm, they're wiring up, you know, the new sphere. Uh, [31:25] That would be a great story. So I signed Neil Stevenson to that. [31:29] He, you know, he just did this masterpiece that I could never, ever have done. Um...

[31:37] and Bruce Sterling and the other great writers, um, [31:42] They did a much better job of writing it. [31:45] than I ever could have. Well, I wish I had Neal Stephenson writing for me. Okay, here's the thing. This is what I tell every aspiringist. [31:55] Get the young science fiction writers of today and give them journalistic assignments. [32:00] They love it. [32:01] Because they're born storytellers. You're paying them to go learn something they want to learn. And they'll come back with something amazing. [32:09] I think that's the key thing. And, and what I, what I'm more talking about rather than like, it's, it's, I, I've, I've worked with a lot of like really talented writers. Everyone that I work with, I think is super talented, but trying to get someone to write about something they don't really want to write about. [32:23] It's never going to be that good, in my experience. [32:27] Well, yeah, but yeah, so you have to match it to something that they're interested in. So... [32:33] Yeah, that's the trick. I wasn't making them write something they weren't interested in, but I was... [32:41] And sometimes that's how the conversation would start, you know, okay, what's, [32:46] something you're really interested in that we can help make happen, that we can pay you to educate yourself in. [32:54] And [32:56] You know, we could jointly come up with an idea. [33:00] And... [33:01] I mean, again, if I was running a magazine, that's the first thing I would start doing is finding the youngest science fiction writers and giving them assignments.

[33:09] I should look into that. Mostly I just find people who write good tweets that I find interesting. Yeah, that's fine. That's a good way too. [33:21] Uh... [33:22] find someone who can tell a good story and has a little bit of, uh, um, ability to kind of fantasize or, you know, whatever. So, um, [33:32] You know, and Neil was not Neil when we were first starting. You know, he was... [33:39] still at the beginning of his career, which is, of course, why he agreed to it. Yeah. [33:44] One of the things you talk about a lot is being a reluctant writer and born editor. And one of the, just getting into AI for a second, [33:53] One of the things that strikes me about AI is it puts you into editing mode much quicker. Yeah, it does. How has that worked for you? It's been great because I can get over that big hump, just kind of helping [34:07] get something on the page and starting to work with and kind of illuminating... [34:14] Thank you. [34:15] the spots that I'm most ignorant of. And, um, yeah, for me, it's a really great, [34:20] way to start [34:22] Is there anything that has worked particularly well like, um, [34:27] as part of your workflow to like to get it started. [34:31] Well, I use some of them for research too, and that's another way. [34:37] while you're researching, you're summarizing stuff and synthesizing. So there are these elements that begin to

[34:44] to take place. It's the LILMs are really good at organizing things. And that's another, see, I'm not that organized. Normally I don't, I don't, [34:53] I kind of, I'm a gardener rather than architect in terms of things. And so I can get a little bit more further along and thinking about it in an architectural way. So for me, it's a, yeah, it's a great, [35:08] way to start on things what are you using day-to-day ai wise like which models [35:13] I'm using mostly OpenAI right now. Do you use any particular one? Are you using 4.0, 0.01, 0.03? I have the 0.01 Pro. [35:25] Do you like it? Yeah, I mean, I've done some... [35:29] of, you know, for very deep research and it's [35:33] It's astounding. I'm just reminded again and again that [35:39] This is a skill. [35:42] Using him, getting the most from him is a skill that will take your 10,000 hours. And it's definitely not just pushing the buttons. It's not just clicking. And so it's very apparent to me that, you know, [36:00] I need to spend a lot more time [36:03] whispering and understanding how it is and what is how to use it and so um my needs right this moment are not so that i'm using that level of research every day do you have specific examples of like when you've used it for research that it has like blown you away

[36:22] I did something, and this is a little bit of something I've been meaning to write about, which is I had this fantasy... [36:31] I had some observation about [36:35] that I realized that Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Christopher Columbus were all alive at the same time. [36:44] And I said, this is my conversation with the... [36:48] I said, imagine it's a snowy evening and all three are stuck in the same hotel together and they have a conversation, you know, give me the conversation based on, you know, based on your writings and their interests and their personalities. And so they did the conversation and I said, that was amazing. But they got along so well, they decided to collaborate on a project. [37:12] What would that project be? And this was the AI's idea. The AI's idea was that they would want to start a new city in the new world that was based around science and religious freedom. [37:26] And I said, okay, you know, start writing Wikipedia articles about this and start writing. [37:34] we'll start filling it in. And then we had characters and peoples and histories. And then I was going on with, um, [37:42] So I need to tell actually to tell research stories based on these characters. And then I introduce other things like, uh, [37:52] Other contemporaries like Queen Victoria, who was alive at the same time, she was the main rival, trying to take down the city.

[38:00] They reached China 10 years before the Portuguese, and then they would bring all the books from China. And so I was just making this bigger and bigger and bigger thing, world building. [38:11] and [38:13] I got 10 different novels from it, and then I had them synthesized. [38:18] and iron out all the contradictions between the novels and make a big epic saga. And then I had it write the, um, making book covers and writing the marketing materials. And, um, [38:33] The point of all this is that I'm not going to show it to anybody because I don't need to. The joy of creating it. [38:41] was... [38:43] better than reading it. It was [38:46] It was the audience of one. And so what I'm hypothesizing is that a lot of the genitive stuff, the 50 million... [38:54] images that are generated each day with AI, 99.999% have the audience of one. [39:01] they're generated for the [39:03] pleasure of the co-creator and this idea of people will be [39:09] making... [39:10] feature length movies. [39:13] for themselves. And the pleasure will be in the generating of the movie, the co-generating of the movie that you're directing. You'll be directing the movie for yourself. And... [39:29] Um,

[39:31] Anyway, so that was a project I was using because the degree of historical realism and fantasy was mind-bending. [39:41] That's really cool. I love that. It seems like there's an interesting line from a thousand true fans to an audience of one. [39:48] Yeah. How have you thought about that? Well, of course, there's no economic model for the [39:55] audience of one. There is for open AI. Right, exactly. I think this is the abundance mindset where you have the time to do this. So I think this is not so much a business or someone's career. I think this is a [40:14] kind of a different form of entertainment or [40:18] Self-expression is just like Sunday painting or keeping a journal or... [40:24] you know, someone doing ice skating. It's a form of... [40:32] of self-expression and relaxation and enjoyment, entertainment. So it's closer to entertainment than it is to actually... [40:43] you know, a career. [40:45] It reminds me a little bit of... [40:48] Are you familiar with active imagination? [40:50] No. [40:52] It's a... [40:54] It's part of like Jungian psychotherapy. [40:57] The idea being... [41:00] You can do active imagination where you

[41:04] you take a dream that you've had recently and you sort of like re-enter the dream world while you're waking. [41:09] and you explore some of the archetypes and themes, either by writing them out or just like exploring them to and with yourself. And in doing that, it kind of reflects back to you things that might be like a little bit more latent in your psyche. So the fact that you're playing around with these characters and these novels are going in different directions or whatever, and the decisions that you're making, [41:30] might say something to you about what you're processing or like what you're [41:34] what you're currently thinking about that [41:37] Um, [41:38] in addition to just being really fun, [41:40] It might tell you something about yourself. [41:43] Mm-hmm. [41:44] yeah, so it may be something like that. In fact, you know, I mean, I think there will be very, very good AI therapists, right? [41:53] Um, [41:54] and [41:56] Maybe to the extent that we may not even make that distinction, maybe some particular AI companions, AI buddies, AI partners... [42:05] will perform some of that and people will use them in that capacity, even though they're not maybe nominated as that. And again, this is something else I've been saying is I think people are going to be shocked by the degree of emotion, emotional bonding that we will have as we put emotions into the AIs. [42:25] And some people will be very, very close to these on a always on basis and very dependent on them to do their best.

[42:35] Yeah, one thing that um [42:37] I don't know if you saw, but it just came out today, like a couple hours ago. No, I haven't seen there been podcasts. [42:44] You're in for a treat when you get off the podcast grind. But OpenAI released a new memory system for ChatGPT. So previously, ChatGPT, you could ask it to save memories, but it would do it when it was really explicitly told to. And when it really thought, okay, this is definitely something I need to store. [43:07] is it just, [43:08] It is able to access all the past history of all your chats that are relevant. [43:13] automatically. So you can ask things like, um, what do you know about me that from all of our chats that I might not know about it myself, and it will just go through all these historical chats and tell you a lot of really interesting things. I've been playing, I was playing around with it all day before we got on the show. Um, I think you'll really, uh, I think you'll really like it. And I think to that sort of emotional attachment point, I want to use something that feels like it knows me. Sure. Yeah. [43:39] I get more attached to it. I personally think that's really good, but there's trade-offs, obviously, and I'll be curious to see how that... [43:48] changes how we relate to each other too over the next couple years yeah yeah [43:55] That's cool. [43:56] I've noticed that you're also doing a lot of tweeting with... [43:59] it looks like AI generated images. Are you using, um, are using native image gen for that? I think they're mostly mid journey. Yeah. Yeah.

[44:07] which for me, I just have a habit of that. It's, it's comfortable. Um, [44:15] I know Dali, I mean, not Dali, the chat now has some, which I've tried and it's pretty good, but I just, um, [44:22] I actually like the public aspect of the mid-journey discord where you actually... [44:29] Thank you. [44:30] It was a huge, quick learning curve because you were seeing what the prompts other people were doing and how you could get there. And I like that public aspect of it. [44:38] Yeah. [44:40] I'm curious if we if we zoom back out. [44:43] um [44:46] You've seen a lot of different technology waves. [44:48] Um, [44:50] I think one of the interesting things about this particular one is, um, [44:55] how, how scared people are. [44:57] Um, and that's probably been true to some extent of previous ones. Uh, but I think in a lot of ways, like with mobile, it was like, you know, [45:07] People didn't even care. It just like wasn't even on their minds for a while. At least in my lifetime. [45:14] Um, and I'm curious. [45:17] what you've learned about like seeing all these different ways come and go, like what you've learned about the future. [45:22] and how to think about the future. [45:24] That's a pretty big question. I think... [45:29] The first thing I think about all the places that I was wrong [45:33] Where were you wrong? [45:34] Oh, yeah. [45:35] so many times. I was very wrong about VR.

[45:40] I saw Jaron Lanier showed me VR in 87, something like that in his lab. And... [45:51] I was completely blown away, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is... [45:57] This is... [45:58] this is the future, this is amazing. And to be clear, the VR that we had, [46:05] back then, which was [46:08] uh, [46:09] 30, 40 years ago? It's crazy. I can't remember. It's a lot of years ago, many decades. It's not that much different than the VR... [46:17] You're getting out. [46:19] The difference was that that was multi-million dollars. [46:23] $100. That's the main difference. It was not that it was actually that much better now. It is better, but it's not a million times better, but it's a million times cheaper. [46:34] And so, um, [46:37] I was, I've been very, very surprised about how... [46:42] resistant, how slow, how [46:46] how slow that has been. Cause I really expected that to take off. Um, [46:53] I was wrong about eBay. [46:57] Just as a trivial example, I thought, [47:00] I don't get it. [47:02] Who would use us? And I just didn't have the imagination to [47:09] to see it. I was early to blockchain, but I, I,

[47:13] Didn't think Bitcoin was really going to [47:17] be much. I didn't understand, I didn't foresee the way in which it became this, um, [47:24] store of value and, uh, I expect like everyone else that it could be used for micropayments. [47:32] um, [47:33] But... [47:35] It was I didn't understand or we didn't appreciate it. We didn't know how expensive it was going to be to do a processing and so so [47:45] my expectations about the role of blockchain, [47:50] I also thought that we would have more of a headway into [47:56] things that were not financial. And again, so blockchain became [48:01] completely overwhelmed by the amount of money in it, and it became about money and finance. And I was... thought that it would be used for things that had nothing to do with finance. And that really didn't happen. So, um... [48:15] So that's when I think about what I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true. [48:25] Well, if we go back to those specific cases, it seems like there is one case where you're like, this has definitely got a future. [48:32] And another and two other cases where you're like, this, not, I don't think these are really that, that great. Um, and what do you think you missed? Let's talk about the first one. You're like, this definitely has a future. What do you draw from that? What do you think you, you missed there?

[48:47] that made it much harder than you expected to get people to adopt it. [48:51] I think it required a lot of biology and understanding or being able to work with biological things. [49:01] Rather than just our mind, you have-- [49:04] focusing on your eyes. You have... [49:09] just the weight of the thing on your head. There's just a lot of... [49:14] biological things in addition to the hardware things. You have hardware biology and that that is just going to go slower. And so one of the things I take from that is I think the arrival of robots is going to take a lot, lot, lot longer than people think because we have a 25 watt, [49:33] supercomputer and a [49:34] quarter horsepower, and [49:36] Engine, and there's no... [49:39] Thank you. [49:40] There's no way we can do all that kind of stuff with that kind of efficiency anywhere close to that. So the amount of... [49:46] power that we need to either compress or to eliminate by making more efficient things is is a huge huge huge gap and so that again that physicality of it particularly around our bodies and stuff or near scale of our bodies i think is is going to be a lot slower and that's what i've taken away from the [50:09] I think the way I've learned about VR is that it's going to take a lot more time than just making AI.

[50:17] Well, that's interesting because I was going to bring up AI as an interesting parallel example where it also took a lot longer to do AI than we thought it would. But then it just all seemed to suddenly happen in like. [50:27] 10 years. Um, and I'm curious what you think, uh, the leading indicators are for something like [50:36] Okay, so AI didn't work for 50 years and then like suddenly in like 2010 or so it started to like, there was some like glimmers of hope and then ChachiBT a couple years ago is like really wow, this is a thing. [50:48] In VR, like if we wanted to measure where we are in that, [50:52] cycle. [50:53] Do you have a thought for that? Yeah, I mean, you could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment, right? Where there's some... [51:01] technical breakthrough in the lenses [51:06] or focusing or something or projection that, um, [51:11] allows for that. So, [51:15] It's interesting, too, that the LMs were kind of... [51:19] not working on reasoning directly. They were, they were doing language translation. And that's, they noticed that there was some reasoning happening in language translation, which was completely unexpected. Um, [51:32] and maybe it's the key technology for [51:36] VR, AR will come from [51:39] somewhere else, but it hasn't [51:41] It doesn't look like it's happening right now. [51:47] So, yeah.

[51:49] And AI is a 50-year overnight success in technology. [51:54] What about going back to the other two examples? So eBay and blockchain of like, [52:01] Hey, like. [52:02] I don't, this isn't really that interesting. Right, right. So eBay, um... [52:09] I think with the auction stuff, and I think the only reason why eBay worked is that people moved beyond the auction. I use eBay all the time and I've never... [52:19] used auction. I just have no patience for it. And so I think the idea that it was this idea that it was auctions, [52:26] and that I didn't connect to and I was never really interested in. I could be wrong, but for me, eBay's ONI now succeeded. [52:34] because most people aren't using the auctions. But [52:39] I don't know if that's really true or not. Do you... [52:42] Use options on eBay. [52:43] I only I got really into eBay when I was like 10. And I was like, I want to sell everything in my dad's garage. You know, I didn't end up doing it because it just selling things online as 10 year old was it was a complicated situation. But I was really into it for that reason. But I've never really bought anything on eBay. I've never I've never I never bid. [53:13] of all the things that either [53:16] aren't officially for sale or...

[53:20] you know, the way out of stock or out of print, or they're totally obscure. And so for me, if you, if I can't find it on Amazon, Alibaba, and then you're, then you're onto eBay. [53:33] um etsy is another level which is like you know hand me stuff but there's ebay is really good for like [53:38] really obscure stuff. And then, [53:43] They do have the option of auctioning, but I never used it. Anyway, so for me, the thing was this idea of auctioning [53:52] for everything. Didn't seem like that was going to work. But for a while, it did. And that was just me, personally, just not... [53:59] being much of a [54:01] bargainer type. I guess you can't win them all. Um, um, I know you have a hard stop. [54:08] Uh, [54:09] Kevin, um, [54:10] It was really great to get a chance to chat. Thank you so much. [54:14] um [54:15] Would love to do this again soon. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Great things, and I'm glad there's another Andy Dillard fan. [54:23] Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI&I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard. But instead of gold, it's filled with pure unadulterated knowledge bombs about chat GPT.

[54:53] on the edge of your seat. [54:55] craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. [55:03] So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. [55:08] And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.