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

Kevin Kelly has spent more time thinking about the future than almost anyone else. From VR in the 1980s to the blockchain in the 2000s—and now generative AI—Kevin has spent a lifetime journeying to the frontiers of technology, only to return with rich stories about what’s next. Today, as Wired's senior maverick, his project for 2025 is to outline what the next century looks like in a world shaped by new technologies like AI and genetic engineering. He’s a personal hero of mine—not to mention a fellow Annie Dillard fan—and it was a privilege to have him on the show. We get into: How you can predict the future. According to Kevin, the draw of new frontiers—from the first edition of Burning Man and remote corners of Asia, to the early days of the internet and AI—isn’t staying at the edge forever; it's returning with a story to tell. Why history is so important to help you understand the future To stay grounded while exploring what’s new, Kevin balances the thrill of the future with the wisdom of the past. He pairs AI research with reading about history, and playing with an AI tool by retreating to his workshop to make something with his hands. From 1,000 true fans to an audience of one. Rather than creating for an audience, Kevin has been using LLMs to explore his own imagination. After realizing that da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Columbus were alive at the same time, he asked ChatGPT to imagine them snowed in at a hotel together, and the prompt spiraled into an epic saga, co-written with AI. But he has no plans to publish it because the joy was in creating something just for himself. What the history of electricity can teach us about AI. Kevin draws a parallel between AI and the early days of electricity. We could produce electric sparks long before we understood the forces that created them, and now we’re building intelligent machines without really understanding what intelligence is. Why Kevin sees intelligence as a mosaic—not a monolith. Kevin believes intelligence isn’t a single force, but a compound of many cognitive elements. He draws from Marvin Minsky’s “society of mind”—the theory that the mind is made up of smaller agents working together—and sees echoes of this in the Mixture of Experts architecture used in some models today. Your competitive advantage is being yourself. Don’t aim to be the best—aim to be the only. Kevin realized that the stories no one else at Wired wanted to write were often the ones he was suited for, and trusting that instinct led to some of his best work. This is a must-watch for anyone who wants to make sense of AI through the lens of history, learn how to spot the future before it arrives, or grew up reading Wired. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Sponsors: Vanta: Get $1,000 off Vanta at ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.vanta.com/every⁠⁠⁠⁠ and automate up to 90% of the work for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more. Attio: Go to⁠⁠ https://www.⁠⁠⁠⁠attio.com/every⁠⁠⁠ and get 15% off your first year on your AI-powered CRM. Timestamps: Introduction: 00:00:50 Why Kevin and I love Annie Dillard: 00:01:10 Learn how to predict the future like Kevin: 00:12:50 What the history of electricity can teach us about AI: 00:16:08 How Kevin thinks about the nature of intelligence: 00:20:11 Kevin’s advice on discovering your competitive advantage: 00:27:21 The story of how Kevin assembled a bench of star writers for Wired: 00:31:07 How Kevin used ChatGPT to co-create a book: 00:36:17 Using AI as a mirror for your mind: 00:40:45 What Kevin learned from betting on VR in the 1980s: 00:45:16 Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Kevin Kelly: @kevin2kelly Kelly’s books: https://kk.org/books Annie Dillard books that Kelly and Dan discuss: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Holy the Firm, The Writing Life Dillard’s account of the total eclipse: "Total Eclipse"

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true. Jared Lanier showed me VR in eighty seven. I was completely blown away and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the future. The VR that we had back then is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that was multimillion dollars and it's now a hundred dollars. I've been very, very surprised about how slow that has been. You could say VR is still waiting for its L M moment. AI is a fifty year overnight success.

• 0:50Dan Shipper?

  Kevin, welcome to the show.

• 0:52Speaker 00

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

• 0:55Dan Shipper?

  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 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.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  We do.

• 1:16Dan Shipper?

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

• 1:29Speaker 00

  For those who aren't familiar with Annie, she burst onto the scene with a meteorite of a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that for some reason, it's a count of her spending some year on musing, kind of like a Henry David Thoreau intimate investigation of a creek in Virginia or West Virginia, I don't remember. And so it was just the writing and the style and the ideas.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  And her blazing brilliance in being able to capture this into a few words, it was almost like poetry, those prose. It somehow just worked on my brain. And I don't know enough about literature to describe her in relation to other writers and what doesn't work for me as much. But there was something about her spirit, as well as her writing, which was very expansive, cosmic, enthusiastic, questioning. She talked about feeling as if, at one point in the story, that she was a bell that someone else had rung.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  And I felt exactly the same in response to her writing. It was like she was ringing my bell in a curious way.

• 3:01Dan Shipper?

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

• 3:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:07Dan Shipper?

  And that moment is so very evocative of like one of her big themes, which is 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 you can experience these moments of transcendence where everything feels like it's glowing from within.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there was this, her kind of cosmic poetic, you know, ability to kind of take these moments. But then interstitial with that were these findings, these weird little trivia bits that you'd find in some obscure book that you would be grounded in before the next jump. It was, it was a very distinctive way of kind of wrapping rhapsodic ecstasy with.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  Very concrete science trivia or oddities and that combination just somehow appealed to me.

• 4:14Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, the the thing I remember is she spends a long time talking about Henley's loops, which are like this little part of the kidney.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:23Dan Shipper?

  And it's just like, where does that even come from? And yeah, I think like she sort of zooms out to the biggest stuff and then zooms into the smallest stuff.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:32Dan Shipper?

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

• 5:07Speaker 00

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

• 5:18Dan Shipper?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  And she's talking to them. So, yeah, that was

• 5:24Speaker 00

  that, yeah, it is not just saccharine. It's not just sweet kumbaya. It's, yeah, she's she can be pretty harsh, too. And and that is part of the attraction of, you know, the sweet sour flavor.

• 5:36Dan Shipper?

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

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Well,

• 5:42Speaker 00

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

• 5:57Dan Shipper?

  Wow.

• 5:58Speaker 00

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

• 6:27Dan Shipper?

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

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I didn't, I didn't write, read her fiction book, but the other essay, books of essay, Teaching Us Don't Talk and

• 6:41Dan Shipper?

  Holy the Firm, The Writing Life.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, Holy Firm and all those, yes. And her, and her account of the eclipse has, uh, the total eclipse, it's sort of never to be equaled. Anybody who writes about eclipse has to start with Annie's version.

• 7:04Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, it's so funny because the reason I started with Annie is, um, I love her so much and I, and she evokes all the same kind of feelings in me that I think she evokes for you and, and gives me that same kind of energy to write stuff. If I write stuff after I've read something that she's written, it just, it brings something out in me that I just love. Um, 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, um, uh, 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.

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Well, they probably also don't read the whole thing. They probably would have understood is they only get the excerpt.

• 7:44Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  You know, it's probably some one passage about the lights in the trees or whatever.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is true because, because she didn't really, I mean, she wrote a couple of 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. I actually sent her 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.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  So that was my kind of my one, it was the one time when I kind of wrote to

• 8:36Speaker 00

  a hero.

• 8:39Dan Shipper?

  That's really nice.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, she did reply.

• 8:41Dan Shipper?

  I bet a reply, a reply from Annie is probably pretty rare. So that's, that's pretty great.

• 8:47Speaker 00

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

• 8:56Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. Another thing, um, to move on from Annie for a second, one thing that you wrote in your book, The Inevitable, that I really loved and thought was interesting is, um, after living online for the past three decades, first as pioneer in a rather wild, empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent. My confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes. I really love the, 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.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it.

• 9:32Dan Shipper?

  But it's, it's basically about Deadwood. Uh, I think now it's South Dakota, but it was like a, it was a mining town in Indian Territory before it was annexed into a state. And so it had no law and the whole show is kind of about that transition from pioneer to like or order out of chaos. And I think there's a lot of resonance with what was sort of what you wrote and, and this, um, yeah, the transition from pioneer to, to builder feels like something that's deeply embedded into tech, even with every single wave, like in the, in this new AI wave. There's this whole movement of pioneers, like kind of figuring out the whole new landscape and then

• 10:12Dan Shipper?

  the builders kind of move in. Tell me about what that's been like for you to participate in and watch over the last couple of decades.

• 10:18Speaker 00

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

• 10:39Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  And, um, I was reminded because I did a podcast with Burning Man today and they, we were reminiscing about, you know, my, the first ninety six or so, the first time I was a Burning Man, when there were no streets, there were no.

• 10:55Speaker 00

  Uh, there's no adult supervision at all. There was no sense of order. There's, it was, it was crazy and chaotic and wonderful, but

• 11:09Speaker 00

  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, and over, over years and years of Burning Man, they have more and more of the layering of law and order and they have tons and tons of police and sheriffs and whatnot and laws and 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, um, so, but at the same time, I think Burning Man is better than ever. And so you lose something, but actually I think, um,

• 11:55Speaker 00

  there's more to be gained by adding that layer of organization and structure and governance. And so, um, what you want to have is though you still want to have those zones where there's a frontier, you want to keep making new territory that generates new frontiers. And some people are better on the frontier than back at the center. And I think that's a wonderful way the world would work. And so for me, I want to maintain both of constantly new frontiers where those are suited

• 12:35Speaker 00

  to not having to have many rules, um, are able to thrive. And then those who prefer to have the discipline of working within rules also can thrive.

• 12:50Dan Shipper?

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

• 13:15Speaker 00

  So I tend to visit the frontier.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  I'd spend a lot of my adult life in the very remote parts of Asia where there is very little infrastructure. I spent a really portion of my adulthood for many extended time in areas where there was very little modern infrastructure. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it, but I would have died if I needed to live there. I mean, so it was a great place to visit, but it was only great because I was going to leave. I have the same kind of things with the frontiers. It's like, yeah, Burning Man's fantastic for two weeks, but it'd be horrible. I have to live

• 13:58Speaker 00

  there year round. And, you know, being the frontier of the internet and AI, my understanding is that, you know, it's a moving, it's a moving frontier. It's going to move. I can keep going up to the, to the edge to see what's happening, but I don't need to stay there. And I'm going to actually come back and report anyway. So I have the liberty of being a nomad in that sense of occupying it. So for me, it's a fantastic place to spend the time in, but not a place that I want to spend all my time in.

• 14:39Dan Shipper?

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

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. So one of the things I discovered over time is the, all the, my favorite people who were best about the future were actually great historians too. So I would balance reading something about AI with trying to read something historical in the past. And 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 what it is. Jeff Bezos said, you know, he was trying to build a business on the things that didn't change.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  And so the Long Now Foundation, which had been very central to is trying to take a long-term view and not just to forward, but also the past. And so for me, I would spend time on this ephemeral frontier, but also then try to think about the next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years.

• 16:05Dan Shipper?

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

• 16:14Speaker 00

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

• 16:57Dan Shipper?

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

• 17:01Speaker 00

  He was one of the people who kind of thought that there was this either Flog, Flog, Flogistan? Have you heard of Flogistan?

• 17:09Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, Flogestin. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  So it was, it was.

• 17:12Dan Shipper?

  The thing that creates fire.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was just kind of, well, no, it was just this kind of element. And there was another element. And this, and the, 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, we're almost discovering stuff about electricity weekly. And the origins of the Royal Academy came out of the weekly meetings that they would have, where they would sell tickets and do demos with electricity and make sparks

• 17:52Speaker 00

  and stuff. And one of the biggest news items in the shocks was when they, and I forget who it was, maybe Faraday proved that electricity would happen in a vacuum.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Because there goes the ether. You don't need ether. It's like, well, then what is it? Okay, and um, and there was, you know, some of the earliest beliefs electricity was that it was primarily a biological phenomenon. And there's all those um, all those

• 18:28Dan Shipper?

  Reflexes and

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Reflexes and stuff. And so there were just endless theories about what is, and they all reminded me of all the theories we have about what intelligence is. Because we don't really know what it is. And I have been saying, I suspect that intelligence is not an element, but a compound. That it is made up of a complex of different cognitive elements. And we haven't even identified yet. In the same way that salt's not a element. Salt is actually a compound of some elements that they had not yet identified. So you can think of the kind of the current AI is we're making some kind of salt. We don't even know what it's made from.

• 19:13Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. I think that's true. Where it makes my mind go, and I'm curious how you would respond to this is.

• 19:22Dan Shipper?

  We actually do know what it is, but we don't know it in the same way that we know what electricity is. Um, so we don't have a explicit, exact mathematical theory in the same way that we can talk about, talk about electricity, and we don't have a way to decompose it into parts that um, that that reduce down and then recombine into it. But we do know what it is on a, in a different way. Like I'm talking to you and I know that you're intelligent. Um, and that's harder to grasp. It's not, it's not the same kind of graspy.

• 19:56Dan Shipper?

  I can pin it down to the wall kind of thing, but I think that that just may be a property of of intelligence, that it is sort of like this fuzzy thing. How do you think about that?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, I don't know. You may be confusing recognizing something with 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 on deliberately. I I I I think we have this complex things that that deliberately does not allow the organism to interfere and meddle with it. Could you imagine if we had access to the source code, we'd be? We would be completely wrecking ourselves. And what it is, again, I, I, I think we humans have a very peculiar complex of things that if we map it out in the possibility space of all possible minds,

• 20:50Speaker 00

  which is a very high dimensional space, that we're going to be our compounds way at the edge. We're an edge species. We're not at the center of anything. The, the galaxy or the solar system or evolution. We are an edge. Our kind of intelligence will be revealed to be a very peculiar mixture. That's evolved for us. And then what we're going to be doing with AIs is making hundreds of various other kinds and filling out that possibility space with many types of thinking. And so we'll look back and, you know, we, we won't even recognize maybe some of these

• 21:32Speaker 00

  other things as intelligence right now, because it doesn't, we don't have a very good definition. You know, it's like, what are the definitions or what are the marks for something that doesn't like a human like intelligence? The, some people say, well, there isn't anything. There's only universal intelligence and that we're just going to make more of it. That there's only one thing and I, that's possible, but I suspect that's wrong. I suspect that there is many compounds and that they will be engineered to do different things. And to some degree, we won't understand even how they work, but that's because they're

• 22:11Speaker 00

  different. And so, um, uh, I, I, I think we are very much like the early days of electricity where we simply didn't have a clue about what it was, even though we could use it, even though we could recognize it.

• 22:25Dan Shipper?

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

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Well, and several wins. One is Marvin Minsky was the first to suggested it called the society of mind. And then these days, the AIs have mixture of experts. Where they are already doing that, where they already are taking different kinds of cognition and making them into compounds. And so I think we'll have various layers of this like tissues, where you have cells and or molecules made from elements. And so we're going to make some very high chain, heavy compounds of intelligence at some level, made up from lots of little bits

• 23:09Speaker 00

  of elemental cognition. What we haven't done yet is done the chemistry of identifying what some of the basic cognitive units are, or the cognitive elements. And we may be starting to do

• 23:27Dan Shipper?

  that. Thinking about the way neural networks work, a way to look at them is they learn many, many thousands or millions of rules for what to do in particular situations that they can partially apply and run many, many of those rules in parallel to find the right set that sort of applies to a particular situation. So in that case, like, intelligence is a compound of rules that are about like little micro correlations that are applied depending on how relevant they are to a particular situation. But it's interesting to think about

• 24:09Dan Shipper?

  how much of those rules are contingent, like they're just situational versus they're they're sort of your universal. 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 to no matter the the the simple components you use.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:37Dan Shipper?

  So there's something like, always hard to understand in between the simple components and the like outward behavior that we observe.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, Danny Hill has made a computer with Tinkerjoys. So you can make computers out of all kinds of elements, logic gates and stuff like that.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  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 of reasoning or learning or something that happens with the neural nets that we haven't quite identified yet. That I would say that that that would be the the element is is what is that process of pattern matching? Or if that is what it is, or deduction, or it's a logic? Or what's the workflow for doing deduction? And it could be, you know, it could be agnostic to the actual platform.

• 25:36Dan Shipper?

  It seems like it must be in some way. But yeah, that's interesting. My first business was a B two B software company, and the bane of my existence was compliance, specifically certifications like SOC two, ISO and HIPAA, which we needed in order to sell to enterprises. 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 SOC two, 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, Cora and Ramp, to streamline risk management and effortlessly demonstrate security to customers.

• 26:20Dan Shipper?

  Serious? Every listeners can get $1,000 off of Vanta at vanta.com/evry. That's Vanta, V A N T A dot com slash every for $1,000 off. This episode is brought to you by Atio, the AI native CRM. Atio is built to scale with your business from day one. Connect your email and calendar and Atio instantly builds a CRM that matches your business model with all of your companies, contacts and interactions enriched with actionable insights. With Atio, AI 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.

• 27:04Dan Shipper?

  Industry leaders like Flatfile, Replicate and Modal are already experiencing what's next for CRM. Go to attio.com/evry and get 15% off your first year. That's atio, A T T I O dot com slash every. And now, back to the show. One of the things I love about the way that you've set up your career, and I think probably also the way that you think about just creative work in general, is it's about being honest and authentic to who you are, instead of what you think you should be doing. And I found that over and over again, like, especially like at the beginning of a career, it's like really easy to be like, I need to do things in this particular way. And then at some point, you're like, I don't know,

• 27:48Dan Shipper?

  this kind of, at least for me, you're like, this isn't working as well as it should, and this kind of sucks. And like, I guess I have to like, do the thing that's like, more honest to who I am and more shaped to who I am. And it removes all of this like daily friction.

• 28:04Dan Shipper?

  So like, honestly, like hearing you talk about that in various forums over the years has been like quite helpful for me. How does that look now after many years of thinking that way? Is that still something that's, that's on your mind? That's difficult, that you have to like unstick yourself from? Or are you kind of, do you get used to living that way after a while?

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, my own life was never very planned or deliberate in that sense. I had, I had more directions than destinies or destinations. A phrase that I like or advice that I like to give these days is about, don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only, be the only. But that was not something that I was doing consciously when I was younger. That was something that I only realized I was doing much later. And it's, it's part of the book about wisdom I wish I'd known earlier. Is I really did wish that someone had told me that earlier.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  And so I think I did some, 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, this idea of being the only.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Was made clear to me first at Wired, where I was trying to assign stories that I had to other writers and often not getting any traction with a great idea that I couldn't sell to anybody. And after years of kind of trying to kill it, I would wind up doing it myself and then realizing, oh, that's because only I can do it. And that's what I should be focusing on to begin with. And so that was...

• 30:14Speaker 00

  So I think the clarity of it, I think I have more clarity of it, but I'm still kind of doing what I've always done, but maybe being a little bit more aware of the actual process of doing it.

• 30:28Dan Shipper?

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

• 31:04Speaker 00

  That actually wasn't, that actually wasn't my experience. My experience was that the writers were even better. So, you know, I assigned, I had, I discovered reading IEEE spectrum that they were laying the fiber or fiber optic cables around the globe. And I thought, hmm, they're wiring up, you know, the newsphere. That'd be a great story. So I signed Neil Stephenson to that. He, you know, he does this masterpiece that I could never, ever have done. And Bruce Sterling and the other great writers,

• 31:42Speaker 00

  they did a much better job of writing it than I ever could have.

• 31:47Dan Shipper?

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

• 31:51Speaker 00

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

• 32:09Dan Shipper?

  I think that's the key thing and, and what I'm more talking about rather than like, it's, it's, 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, it's never going to be that good, in my experience.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but yeah, so, so you have, you have to match it to something that they're interested in. So, yeah, that's, that's the, that's the trick. I wasn't giving them, I wasn't making them write something they weren't interested in, but I was, and sometimes that's how the conversation would start, you know? Okay, what's something you're really interested in?

• 32:49Speaker 00

  That we can help make happen, that we can pay you to educate yourself in? And, you know, we could jointly come up with an idea. And, I mean, if, again, if I was running a magazine, that's the first thing I would start doing is finding the youngest science fiction writers and giving them assignments.

• 33:09Dan Shipper?

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

• 33:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fine. That's a good way too, but,

• 33:22Speaker 00

  find someone who can tell a good story and has a little bit of a

• 33:28Speaker 00

  ability to kind of fantasize or, you know, whatever. So, you know, and Neal was not Neal when we were first starting. You know, he, he, he was still at the beginning of his career, which is of course why he agreed to it.

• 33:44Dan Shipper?

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

• 33:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does.

• 33:59Dan Shipper?

  How has that worked for you?

• 34:01Speaker 00

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

• 34:23Dan Shipper?

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

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Um, well, I use it for, I use some of them for research too. And that's another way. While you're researching, you're summarizing stuff and synthesizing. So there are these elements that begin to, to take place. It's, the L I L M's are really good at organizing things. And that's another, see, I'm not that organized normally. I don't, I don't, I kind of, I'm a gardener rather than architect in terms of things. And so I can get a little bit more further along in thinking about it in an architectural way. So for me, it's a, yeah, it's a great way to start on things.

• 35:10Dan Shipper?

  What are you using day to day AI wise? Like which models?

• 35:13Speaker 00

  I'm using mostly OpenAI right now.

• 35:16Dan Shipper?

  Do you use any, like any particular one? Like are you using 4001, 03?

• 35:22Speaker 00

  I have the 01 Pro.

• 35:25Dan Shipper?

  Do you like it?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I've done some of, you know, for very deep research and it's, it's, it's astounding. I'm just reminded again, again, that this is a skill. Using him, getting the most of 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.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  I need to spend a lot more time whispering and understanding how it is and what is, how to use it. And so my needs right this moment are not so that I'm using that level of research every day.

• 36:17Dan Shipper?

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

• 36:22Speaker 00

  I did something, and this is a little bit of something I've been meaning to write about, which is I had this fantasy, I had some observation that I realized that Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Christopher Columbus were all alive at the same time.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  And I said, this is my conversation with the AI. I said, imagine it's a snowy evening and all three are stuck in the same hotel together and they have a conversation, you know, give me the conversation based on, you know, based on your writings and their interests and their personalities. And so they did the conversation. I said, that was amazing. But they got along so well, they decided to collaborate on a project. What would that project be? And this was the AI's idea. The AI's idea was that they would want to start a new city in the new world that was based around science and religious freedom.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  And I said, okay, you know, start writing Wikipedia articles about this city and start, we'll start filling it in. And then we had characters and peoples and histories. And then I was going on with, so I need to tell, actually to tell research stories based on these characters. And then I introduced other things like other contemporaries, like Queen Victoria, who was alive at the same time, she was the main rival. Trying to take down the city. There was, they reached China 10 years before the Portuguese, and then they would bring all the books from China. And so I was just making this bigger

• 38:09Speaker 00

  and bigger, bigger thing, world building. And I started, I got 10 different novels from it. And then I had them, had synthesized and iron out all the contradictions between the novels and make a big epic saga. And then I had it write the, making book covers and writing the marketing materials. And the point of all this is that I'm not going to show it to anybody because the, I don't need to. The joy of creating it was better than reading it. It was, it was the audience of one. And so what I'm hypothesizing is a lot of the

• 38:50Speaker 00

  generative stuff, the 50 million images that are generated each day with AI, 99.999% have the audience of one. They're generated for the pleasure of the co-creator. And this idea of people will be making feature-length movies for themselves. And the, the, the pleasure will be in the generating of the movie, the code generating of the movie that you're directing. You'll be directing the movie for yourself. And, um, anyway, so that

• 39:32Speaker 00

  was a project I was using because the, the, the degree of historical realism and fantasy was mind-bending.

• 39:41Dan Shipper?

  That's really cool. I love that. It seems like there's an interesting line from 1,000 true fans to an audience of one.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:49Dan Shipper?

  How have you thought about that?

• 39:52Speaker 00

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

• 39:58Dan Shipper?

  There is for OpenAI.

• 40:01Speaker 00

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

• 40:46Dan Shipper?

  It reminds me a little bit of, have you, are you familiar with active imagination?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  No.

• 40:52Dan Shipper?

  It's a, it's part of like Jungian psychotherapy. The idea being you can do active imagination where you, you take a dream that you've had recently and you sort of like re-enter the dream world while you're waking and you explore some of the archetypes and themes, either by writing them out or just like exploring them to and with yourself. And in doing that, it kind of reflects back to you things that might be like a little bit more latent in your psyche. So the fact that you're playing around with these characters and you're, and these novels are going in different directions or whatever, and the decisions that you're making might say something to you about what you're processing or like what you're, what you're currently thinking about that.

• 41:38Dan Shipper?

  In addition to just being really fun, it might tell you something about yourself.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it may be something like that. In fact, you know, I mean, I think there will be very, very good AI therapists.

• 41:55Speaker 00

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

• 42:35Dan Shipper?

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

• 42:40Speaker 00

  No, I haven't seen it. I've been podcasting.

• 42:44Dan Shipper?

  You're in for a treat when you get off the, when you get off the podcast grind, but OpenAI released a new memory system for ChatGPT. So previously ChatGPT, you could ask it to save memories, but it would like do it when it was really explicitly told to. And, you know, when it like really thought, okay, this is definitely something I need to store. But what the new memory system does is it just, it is able to access all the past history of all your chats that are relevant automatically. So you can ask things like, what do you know about me that from all of our chats that I might not know about 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.

• 43:30Dan Shipper?

  I think you'll really, 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.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 43:39Dan Shipper?

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

• 43:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  That's cool.

• 43:56Dan Shipper?

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

• 44:04Speaker 00

  I think they're mostly Mid Journey.

• 44:06Dan Shipper?

  Mid Journey.

• 44:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which, for me, I just have a habit of that. It's, it's comfortable.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  I know Dolly, I mean, not Dolly, the chat now has some, which I've tried and it's pretty good, but I just, um, I actually like the public aspect of the Mid Journey Discord where you actually,

• 44:31Speaker 00

  it was a huge, quick learning curve because you're seeing what the prompts other people were doing and how you could get there. And I, and I like that public aspect of it.

• 44:39Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. I'm curious if we, if we zoom back out.

• 44:46Dan Shipper?

  You've seen a lot of different technology waves.

• 44:50Dan Shipper?

  I think one of the interesting things about this particular one is,

• 44:55Dan Shipper?

  how, how scared people are. And that's probably been true to some extent of, of previous ones. But I think in a lot of ways, like with mobile, it was like, people didn't even care. It just like wasn't even on their minds for a while.

• 45:12Dan Shipper?

  At least in my lifetime.

• 45:16Dan Shipper?

  And I'm curious what you've learned about, like seeing all these different waves come and go, like what you've learned about the future and how to think about the future.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  That's a pretty big question. I think, um,

• 45:30Speaker 00

  the first thing I think about all the places that I was wrong.

• 45:33Dan Shipper?

  Where were you wrong?

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Oh, so many, so many times. I was very wrong about VR. I saw Jaron Lanier showed me VR in eighty-seven, something like that, in his lab and. I was completely blown away and I thought, oh my gosh, this is, this is, this is the future. This is amazing. And to be clear, the, the VR that we had back then, which was

• 46:09Speaker 00

  thirty, forty years ago, it's crazy. I can't remember. It's a lot of years ago, many decades, is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that that was multi-million dollars and it's now a hundred dollars. That's the main difference was not that it was actually that much better now. It is, it is better, but it's not a million times better, but it's a million times cheaper. And so,

• 46:37Speaker 00

  I, I was, I've been very, very surprised about how resistant, how slow, how, how slow that has been because I really expected that to take off.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  I was wrong about eBay, just as a trivial example. I thought, I don't get, you know, what's, it's, who, who would use this? And I just didn't have the imagination to,

• 47:10Speaker 00

  to see it. I was early to blockchain, but I didn't think Bitcoin was really going to be much. I didn't understand. I didn't, I didn't foresee the way in which it became this

• 47:25Speaker 00

  store of value and I expected like everyone else that it could be used for micro payments.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  But

• 47:36Speaker 00

  it was, I didn't understand or we didn't appreciate it. We didn't know how expensive it was going to be to do a processing. And so, so my expectations about the role of blockchain, I also thought that we would have more of a headway into things that were not financial. And again, so blockchain became completely overwhelmed by the amount of money in it and it became about money and finance. And I was thought that it would be used for things that had nothing to do with finance. That really didn't happen. So,

• 48:15Speaker 00

  So that's when I think about what I've learned with the future is is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true.

• 48:26Dan Shipper?

  Well, if we if we go back to the specific cases, it seems like there is one case where you're like, this has definitely got a future. And another and two other cases where you're like this, no, I don't think these are really that that great. And what do you think you missed? Let's talk about the first one. You're like, this definitely has a future. What do you draw from that? What do you think you you missed there that made it much harder than you expected to get people to adopt it?

• 48:52Speaker 00

  I think it required a lot of biology and uh uh understanding or or being able to work with biological things.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Rather than just our mind, you you have focusing on your eyes, you you have

• 49:09Speaker 00

  just the weight of the thing on your head. There's just a lot of biological things in addition to the hardware things. You have hardware biology and that that is just going to go slower. And so one of the things I take from it is I think the arrival of robots is going to take a lot, lot, lot longer. Then people think because we have a 25 watt supercomputer and a quarter horsepower engine and and there's no

• 49:40Speaker 00

  there's no way we can do all that kind of stuff with that kind of efficiency anywhere close to that. And so the amount of of power that we need to either compress or to eliminate by making more efficient things is is is a huge, huge, huge gap. And so that again, that physicality of it, particularly around our bodies and stuff or near it, scale of our bodies, I think, is is going to be a lot slower. And that's what I've taken away from the thing that what I've learned about VR is that it's going to take a lot more time than than just making AI.

• 50:17Dan Shipper?

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

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you could say VR is still waiting for its L M moment, right? Where where where there's some technical breakthrough um in the lenses

• 51:07Speaker 00

  or focusing or something or projection that um allows for that. So it's interesting, too, that the L M's were kind of not working on reasoning directly. They were they were doing language translation. And that's they noticed that there was some reasoning happening in language translation, which was completely unexpected. Um, and maybe it's uh the key technology for V R A R will come from somewhere else, but it hasn't happened yet and doesn't look like it's happening um right now. Um,

• 51:47Speaker 00

  so I, yeah, um, we, you know, A I's a, it's a fifty year overnight success.

• 51:55Dan Shipper?

  Um, what about uh, what about going back to the other two examples? Um, so eBay and blockchain of like, hey, like, I don't, this isn't really that interesting.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Right, right. So eBay, um,

• 52:10Speaker 00

  I think uh 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 used auction. I just have no patience for it. And so I think the idea that it was this idea that it was auctions. And that I didn't connect to and I was never really interested in I I could be wrong. But for me, eBay is only now succeeded because most people aren't using the auctions. But I don't know if that's really true or not. Do you use auctions on eBay?

• 52:44Dan Shipper?

  I I only I got really into eBay when I was like 10 and I was like, I want to sell everything in my dad's garage, you know?

• 52:51Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 52:52Dan Shipper?

  Uh, I didn't end up doing it because uh, it it just it selling things online as 10 year old was it was a complicated uh, situation.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:59Dan Shipper?

  Um, but I was really into it for that reason, but I I've never really bought anything on eBay. Never I've never I never bid.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  So so eBay is actually very, very useful. It's kind of like there's Amazon and then there's, you know, Alibaba and then there's eBay, which is sort of like all the things that either aren't officially for sale or, you know, they're way out of stock or out of print or they're totally obscure. And so for me, if you if I can't find it on Amazon, Alibaba, and then you're then you're onto eBay. Etsy is another level, which is like, you know, handmade stuff, but there's eBay is really good for like really obscure stuff. And then they do have the option of auction, but I never use it. But anyway, so for me, the the thing was this idea of auctioning

• 53:52Speaker 00

  for everything didn't seem like that was going to work. But for a while it it it did, and that was just me personally, just not being much of a bargainer type.

• 54:03Dan Shipper?

  I guess you can't win them all.

• 54:07Dan Shipper?

  I know you have a hard stop. Kevin, um, it was really great to get a chance to chat. Thank you so much.

• 54:15Dan Shipper?

  Would love to do this again soon.

• 54:16Speaker 00

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

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, folks. You absolutely, positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and 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 ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, 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. So do yourself a favor. Hit like, smash subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.