The future of Human-AI coexistence, according to Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired, futurist, author)

Kevin Kelly is a co-founder of Wired Magazine and a renowned author and futurist. Decades ago, Kevin predicted much of today's technological and cultural landscape. In this discussion, he presents his new bold vision for what’s coming next: The Handoff to Bots.

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

• 0:00Azeem Azhar?

  Kevin, you just formed this compelling theory about our future. The economic handoff to bots. It all starts from human population decline.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Every year, you have a smaller audience, a smaller marketplace, a smaller workforce. That's got to be a different kind of capitalism than we've had. I think it's kind of no coincidence at the very moment when the number of species of humans on the planet plunges that we actually are creating artificial species and AI.

• 0:29Azeem Azhar?

  We're going to want to have an autonomous economy populated by millions, billions, trillions of bots. We will soon be outnumbered.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  So there might be a way in which the AIs are actually consumers as well as producers. You make a robot and it needs a room. So we're expanding the possibility space to include other kinds of entities.

• 0:50Azeem Azhar?

  And then the question is, what will motivate them, right? What are the incentive signals?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  It's not hard to program in values and judgment and stuff because it's almost like software. It's like code. The difficulty is for us to come to some consensus about what it is that we want to give them. We're trying to make them better than us.

• 1:08Azeem Azhar?

  A lot of our experiences are about struggle. What does a bot-to-bot economy feel like for us?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  We don't struggle about surviving and starving. We have other kinds of struggles about who we are and what we're here for. And I think AIs can help us with that because they're going to answer, what are we here for? Why are we doing this? And help us elevate to a greater purpose.

• 1:28Azeem Azhar?

  Hey, everyone, it's Azim. You've just heard highlights from my discussion with Kevin Kelly. Kevin is a co-founder of Wired Magazine and a renowned author and futurist. Decades ago, Kevin predicted much of today's technological and cultural landscape. Now, he presents his new bold vision for what's coming next. We originally recorded this for Friday with Azim Azar. It's a new live video format we're running every Friday at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. If you're on the East Coast, it's at noon, and 5:00 PM if you're in the UK. I'd love your feedback, so feel free to comment or email my team at [email protected]. We read every single day.

• 2:10Azeem Azhar?

  Single response. Thanks for being here and now enjoy this deeply thought provoking glimpse into the coming decades.

• 2:17Azeem Azhar?

  You point out that there are going to be fewer and fewer humans alive to contribute labour and to consume what is being made. What do you think is that fundamental driver of this baby black hole?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  You know, we don't really know. It's very, very correlated with modernity, with high education, increased living standards, increased higher child survival and birth control. There's a thousand different factors, which has reduced the desire for having a lot of children. And the issue is, is that whatever the multiple causes of it are,

• 3:03Speaker 01

  we haven't seen anywhere in the world that's been able to reverse it once the fertility level lowers beyond replacement level.

• 3:13Azeem Azhar?

  Yeah.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  Governments are trying different things. And so we don't, so we don't really know. There are a lot of theories about it. And there are some natalist movements that are

• 3:26Azeem Azhar?

  Of course.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Pro changing that. And they have different dimensions. In fact, just, just the other day, there was something weird happening in China, which now China apparently now has the three child policy versus one child policy. And they were trying to, somewhere a company was trying to mandate them children. So, so I think we're at the beginning of that. And I don't, I don't really have a theory about why. My, my analysis is only saying that I think this is where we're headed to. And it would change the economy. And that's my argument is that

• 4:06Speaker 01

  for all of the recent human history and progress has always been associated with increasing population. We have no experience as a species of increasing living standards and decreasing population.

• 4:20Azeem Azhar?

  I think it is a common pattern of of modernity because we see it happening uh across cultures in rich and developed uh countries and you see it within strata of emerging economies as they get richer and richer and there is some, one of the things that surprised me about the the population question was that it's such an important one. I mean, we literally, population is literally the temperature of humanity. And it hasn't really been uh something that I I think has been part of the mainstream debate for uh uh a while. In the last year or so, places like the Financial Times have started to talk about this a little bit. One of their their journalists, John Bern Murdoch, had done some good work on this.

• 5:05Azeem Azhar?

  Stubbsacker called Alice Evans, who has asked the question, you know, why do, why are we seeing this happening? And she breaks it down a little bit. She says that you know, it's economically and socially easier to be a single now than it ever has been. You know, you get services from DoorDash rather than your partner. Uh, and you can have sort of economic security through your work. It's expensive to have children, especially as countries get get wealthier and wealthier, the relative cost of having a child goes up. And there are other forms of entertainment now. You know, there's there's Netflix and there's online gaming and and you know, swiping on on different pieces. And these seem to me to be quite

• 5:49Azeem Azhar?

  you know, fundamental. And you rightly point out that pronatal policies have not succeeded anywhere at all. But I'm quite curious about why it's taken some time for the mainstream to to wake up to this. You know, the United Nations still has this view that twenty eighty six is the peak for uh human populations. My view is aligned much closer to yours that it's more like in the next three decades. But where does, where do you think that mismatch comes from?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Partly is because historically, when birth rates have lowered, they've bounced back. And so there was some sense that that was a natural oscillation. So the idea that we're kind of on a one-way plunge is very radical. And then secondly, is I think our own estimates of the population in the world by country is also plus or minus at least 10% or more, just because there's a lot of political incentive for having those numbers, particularly in developing countries. And then I think also the pace at which it's plunging right now was sort of so unexpected

• 7:00Speaker 01

  that there's a resistance to imagining that it keeps going. And people, you know, when I talk about it, people says, well, if I can go to zero, we don't know that. Again, we have done nothing to reverse it, other than we do know that in religious communities like the Mormons, the Amish, Hasidic, they do have high birth rates. And that's one possible scenario is that the Amish take over. Right, that's right. Right, but to do that, that's not going to happen very quickly because there are so few of them that it would take many, many, many generations for them to become a majority of the population. So that's not going to happen by the end of the century either.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And so, again, I'm agnostic about what actually is causing it. I'm looking very closely at the trials and I suspect that we may come to a very high number. So it may be a matter of money in this way, that there might be countries that do a calculation that says, well, the value of an additional citizen to our country over their lifetime is, say, worth $8 million. And so therefore, maybe it's worth $1 million to buy one, to get an additional one. And so then you can imagine that families could be given $1 million over the span of, say, 21 years to have children.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  And so if you have more than one, you might at that point actually have families. That are their business, their career is actually having a family, which would be kind of a weird trad thing, but also economically it might be feasible. And so that might make a difference where you actually are basically subsidizing families through the government because you want to have those additional people in your economy. So, but we don't know that. We haven't tried that. We South Korea offered seventy five thousand. It was not enough. I think that number has to be much higher to even make any dent, but even that we don't know if it is.

• 9:03Azeem Azhar?

  We don't know, right?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I'm assuming for the moment that we don't change that. So I'm not, I don't have any, any policy about advocating what would change it. I'm, I'm saying, let's assume that that's not going to happen. And what would that have an impact on the economy?

• 9:19Azeem Azhar?

  Well, let, let's get into that point, right? I mean, I think it is an incredibly seismic idea that human population doesn't, doesn't rise. Essentially, it's been rising consistently since there were a handful of us. There have been a few moments every century where cooling or a plague has reduced population. And, you know, I suppose most recently around the time of the Black Death across Europe, but they, they bounced, they bounced back globally. And what we're talking about now is really for the first time, a secular decline in, in our population. And a few months ago, I wrote an essay called Why Humanity Needs AI. And it was along the lines of your hand off to bots. I was saying, look, to be human,

• 10:04Azeem Azhar?

  certainly to be a modern human has been to live in a, a society that gets more complex with more people in it, more people producing things, consuming things, exchanging ideas, building complex social structures and, and also doing, undertaking scientific discovery, which is sort of function, has always been functionally related to the number of people we have and the number we can afford to allow to be scientists. And that at some point in the next thirty or forty years, we're going to see a peak of population and that will be. Almost a species level change, transformation that will require us to make use of AI for different reasons. And you've got there and you've made a very strong kind of economic

• 10:49Azeem Azhar?

  arguments. Just reprise what that argument is.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Yes. So the idea is, again, if you map out the curve of living standards and population, they're very highly correlated because we've had growth and that growth has come mostly from increased population. And if we had declining population every year, which is, we'll get to in a minute, that means that every year you have a smaller audience, a smaller marketplace, a smaller workforce, and that's got to be a different kind of capitalism than we've had.

• 11:26Azeem Azhar?

  Right.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So we'd have to kind of shift a little bit away from our ideas of what growth entailed and having growth more like maturity rather than gaining weight, you know, just getting bigger.

• 11:36Azeem Azhar?

  You're going to actually drink, like not drink more wine, but drink better wine? I like that idea. Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Right. So that's one thing. But I think it's kind of no coincidence in the cosmic view, at the very moment, when the number of species of humans on the planet plunges, that we actually are creating artificial species in AI. And so there might be a way in which the new economy is based around the fact that the AIs are actually consumers as well as producers, that they are in some ways, an integral part of the economy and the way humans are, that not only do we generate stuff, but we actually consume it. And that's a large part of this whole big engine where people make things and other people use those

• 12:23Speaker 01

  and buy those. And so it may be that the handoff is to AI agents, bots, robots, AIs, that are in some ways. Doing what a lot of the humans were doing, meaning that they were consuming a lot of the stuff that we produced. And again, you make a robot and it needs a room. You have a car, it needs a garage. It goes, it has a garage, it has a car hospital. You have an AI, a robot hospital. There may be ways in which we're not imagining that they're handing off the economy to billions of agents and robots instead of billions of humans.

• 13:03Azeem Azhar?

  Right.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And they, they take more part in this new kind of economy that we're going to construct. And that's the thesis.

• 13:09Azeem Azhar?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a fascinating, fascinating idea. The idea that essentially we continue to have sufficient number of economic entities in the, in the economy to keep things turning over. I mean, in a way, we have these artificial entities in the economy already. We call them corporations. And we're talking about, you know, many, many more of them in order to maintain enough vibrancy. And there's a great line from a legal scholar, markets and capitalism is the comedy of the commons because of the intersections and interactions and the emergent properties of that mixing. And, and there is this, this notion perhaps that that's

• 13:50Azeem Azhar?

  that the vibrancy that you need. One of the questions that I have is, what is that, what does that path to that future look like? You, you once described, you know, humans as the reproductive organs of, of technology. But where do the, you know, market forces fit in with that mental model?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so again, I, I think we were in the process of kind of revising the standard model of capitalism, which was based on growth. And it's clear that, that, that we have to have a different kind of growth. And I, and again, I, I call it more like maturing, where you, where you have an evolution, not in terms of.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Making it bigger, but you have evolution in terms of making things better. And so that's a big step that would take some adjustment in terms of our models, taxation, regulation, all these other things. And, you know, including again, all the issues we have with AI is who's responsible for them? If they do something that is harmful, who's accountable? And so those are kind of the basic infrastructure changes that I think we'll make as basically our population declines. And the aha moment for me was to realize that this moment is actually much closer than we think.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  The official UN figures was that what's going to happen? You know, the peak was going to happen around, you know, 2070 or something. When I look at the figures and also the rate at which the UN keeps changing, it looked like it's going to happen in 2040.

• 15:32Azeem Azhar?

  Right.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  So in 2040, which is 15 years from now, the number, the total number of deaths on the planet will outweigh or outnumber the number of births on the entire planet. So, so, so this is fairly soon. That's only 15 years away when we are actually going to reach this peak. So I think this issue of thinking about what that looks like, where we're headed into in 15 years, within lifetime, the people who are listening, no matter your age, we need to think about, what does that look like? And I don't have, I don't have a policy. I don't have a program. I'm just saying, yeah, this is where we're headed.

• 16:13Azeem Azhar?

  Well, we can play about with that in our, in this conversation for a few minutes. One of the things I think that is also interesting is that even if population doesn't decline until 2060 or 2070 or 2080 as a UN, you used to think it would. The thesis is actually is still true because we will, we can manufacture AI system extremely cheaply. You know, the first version of GPT-4 cost a lot and then you get the end version in DeepSeek V3 and it's, you know, much, much cheaper and we will. Soon be outnumbered. We all choose choose to be supported by many more synths, AIs,

• 16:57Azeem Azhar?

  whatever we call them than there are people. I mean, if you just look at how you you might work today or how I work today, I have five or six L L M's. I've got a whole bunch of other tools that keep me company and and help me with my work and through my day. So we're already, you know, heading in a sense in in that direction. And I suppose the thing to play around with is, why is that beneficial? I think it's beneficial because the world gets more and more complex. And I actually, as a human, really like the fact that when I turn the tap on the faucet in my kitchen, I know clean drinking water will come out of it. Behind that is a whole load of really complicated stuff that involves machinery

• 17:38Azeem Azhar?

  and pipes and hygiene systems. I mean, I don't even know the words, but I can actually just trust that that to work. And as our world gets more complicated, we actually, I think, do want to abstract away from that that complexity. So even independent, frankly, of of population decline, we're going to want to have an autonomous economy populated by millions, billions, trillions of of bots. And then the question is, you know, what what will what will motivate them, right? What are the incentive signals that that that they get? And of course, how do we govern that sort of sea of entities for our own own benefit? And, you know, I think that that is a really interesting infrastructure

• 18:20Azeem Azhar?

  question, and it's a kind of a governance question, right? What is what does a bot to bot economy need to need to look like?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I did a calculation a couple of years ago about the amount of energy used on the planet. And I think it was three quarters of the energy that we were now producing or consuming was being used not for the benefits directly of us, not to move us, not to heat us. It was being already devoted to the tech name. It was it was moving other physical things. It was heating other physical things. So so in a certain sense, already, a large portion of our economy is machine to machine to begin with. And we're just kind of making it even further where Your agents will interact with other agents.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  They will consume the information generated by those agents and then they will send it to other agents. And so if there's, there could be an economy built on that all behind the scenes. As you said, it's kind of infrastructural like. And by the way, you know, 95% of the AI that's going to be ever generated, you will never see. You will never be aware of it. It's going to be in the back offices and it'll be this kind of agent to agent contact. And so the question is, is sort of, you know, everybody asks, what's the role of humans? I'm very, very optimistic about this. And I think the reason is, is because what I think technology gives us, you mentioned complexity. I have another term. I use the, I use the word options, possibilities and opportunities.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  That's what we get with technology. It's not just complexity. It's, it's the fact that we have more options, more choices about what we want to do in life. And by the way, if we want to be an Amish farmer, farming the old way, that's still a possibility. And that is there. If you want to be a mathematician, if you want to be a ballerina, if you want to be a mortgage broker or a web designer, you now have that possibility and we have even new ones in the, in the future. And so that's what technology gives us is this spanning possibilities and options that you don't have growing up in a little village with organic food and strong families. Is you have only one choice when you're going to be a farmer.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Now we have, you come to the city, which is a possibility factory. And you come to modernity, which is increasingly options. And that's what this, these agents are going to do is they're going to give us even more possibilities of things that we can do, ways to be creative, how we can spend our time. If you still choose to, you know, farm organically by hand and go to the opera, those are still choices. And so we.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  What we're doing is, is we're making a new economy that's going to have even more possibilities and choices. And a lot of those possibilities are for the AIs.

• 21:15Azeem Azhar?

  Absolutely.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Not just for us. So we're expanding the possibility space to include other kinds of entities.

• 21:24Azeem Azhar?

  I, I, I would definitely want to touch on that and explore that idea because there's a lot that you raised around, you know, choices and, and options. But before we get there, I, I'm, I would love your, you've been part of the, I think, the sort of deep, deep creation and, and narration of Silicon Valley culture for 40 plus years. This technology right now is largely being built by certain class of, of companies. Of course, there is the sort of open source movement alongside. And how comfortable are you with the ways in which tho- those choices that will, will define this world that you see coming in 10 to 15 years will, will be made in, in a way that you would feel comfortable with? And I'm thinking,

• 22:09Azeem Azhar?

  you know, OpenAI and Meta and Microsoft and the rest.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  First of all, one of the, one of the, the, the principles that happens in this kind of technology is that there is a tendency to a winner take all. There is, there is a tendency of network effects to kick in because of the communication technology. And we see these monopolies happen. And, and that makes a lot of people nervous. And a lot of the concern about the AI where we're going is that there are a few companies that seem to be running big. And there are several things to say about that. One is that I think these are natural monopolies, but they're always very, very temporary.

• 22:48Azeem Azhar?

  Mm hmm.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Okay. You'll notice that despite the strong efforts of the incumbents, Amazon, Google, Meta, they were not the ones to dominate the conversation with what's happening. It's startups.

• 23:04Azeem Azhar?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Because

• 23:05Azeem Azhar?

  Right.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  that is the general trend, you know, you had IBM. Who could compete against IBM with making computers? Nobody could. Well, it was a software company, Microsoft, that came along that displaced them. And then who could compete against Microsoft? Nobody. Then it was a search engine. It was always outside of the current regime. And so these monopolies are very, very temporary. And I think they're good while they're there. And then they're going to be displaced by something else. And so right now, it's the startups, it's DeepSeek. It's all the outsiders that where the real disruption comes from. So I'm not that concerned about the fact that there's this dynamic of the increasing returns. That's just part of the landscape.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  The second question is, what are the values? What's being embedded in it? And I find that the people who are working on this right now, which are my friends and my family, very, very consciously trying to think about what it is they're doing. What is the values? How do we align it with humans? I find them really trying very hard, but it's a very difficult prospect. It's the thing about the values is that we can put them in. That's not hard. It's not hard to program in values and judgment and stuff because it's almost like software. It's like code.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  The difficulty is for us to come to some consensus about what it is that we want to give them. And so that's the difficult part. It's almost very philosophical. It's like, yes, we can put values into these machines, but our morality system is very shallow and very inconsistent. We're horrible with this. So here's the thing, we're trying to make them better than us. And that is really challenging and beautiful. We are actually trying to make the morality of the AI self-driving cars better than we drive, better than us. And so that making it better is a beautiful moment, I think.

• 25:09Azeem Azhar?

  Well, I think we've got a rare opportunity here where we have two optimists on a call like this. So let's have this kind of virtuous circle that's going to build out. So I have a thesis that I have, maybe it's intuitions rather than a thesis, which is that the LLMs of today are trained on everything that's out there. And some of it, they've got in ways that might make a copyright lawyer uncomfortable. And yet, they all behave reasonably similarly despite their fine tuning. They are, they are pretty enlightenment, J S Mill, a small liberal. I don't mean in American political sense, I mean in a political theory sense.

• 25:52Azeem Azhar?

  Types of people, systems that embed a sense of fairness and kind of morality. And you see it eat across Grok, you see it across running DeepSeek. If you run it locally, you see it in Claude and OpenAI. They all express it in slightly different ways. But what they've got in them is a sense of the rationality that started to emerge. And after the scientific revolution of the 18th, 19th and 20th century. It's really hard to get your L L M to persuade you or persuade itself that the earth is flat. It's really easy to have DeepSeek run locally and talk about things that happened in, in Channeman Square in June, 1989.

• 26:36Azeem Azhar?

  And to evaluate them from some kind of ethical or moral standpoint. So there's the optimist in me has this intuition that of course they're trained on how to make bombs and so on. But in reality, for them to be useful, they have to reflect some underlying rational truths about the world. And in embedded in there are some moral truths, perhaps.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And by the way, you know, you, you said the right thing is that they're trained on every, all the documents. This is say to, to, to the first approximation, including the best and the worst of the writing and the ideas. But in general, the way that their system works is they can't put out the sort of the average. Right. The average human view, the average human consensus, the average human morality. However, in their latent space, they are capable of actually producing the best. But you have to nudge them in that direction. That's one of the skills of working with these L L Ms is that you're constantly trying to nudge them into the latent space of the professional,

• 27:36Speaker 01

  of the highest level, of, of the highest caliber, thinking of the highest morality, which they don't. They tend to want to come to the average. And so part of the skills of working with these agents, these aliens, is nudging them to their best. And so that's the. That's basically the prompting engineer's task and the skill that we're all gonna learn is how do we get these to be on their best behavior, to give you the best answer, to take that extra time to do not just the average, they're kind of lazy in that way. You you want to go, no, no, I know that you could, I know that you can do better. Behave the best you possibly can. All right, I'll do that.

• 28:18Azeem Azhar?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, confession, that's that's how I use them as well. You know, if I've got a difficult email to write, it's normally about, you know, getting my pocket ticket, parking ticket overturned. I I really nudge them to like write the most persuasive, humbling and but effective email you possibly can. And you kind of run up with this idea, which I really love, you you build off some of the ideas from Robin Hanson and his book, The Age of M. This notion that you'll have these kind of more empathetic systems that are out there that will be working for us. And this idea that, you know what, you'll you'll, there's going to be lots of content out there. There are going to be lots of things to do. And our sea of agents can be consuming all of it for us, figuring out what we need better than we might might otherwise

• 29:02Azeem Azhar?

  need. And then I guess the challenge that that raises is that, you know, a lot of our experiences are about are about struggle, right? A lot of the things that grow and develop us, the things that we remember are about challenges, being able to make choices, recognizing that things don't always have to be perfect. And one could argue that some aspect of the Western condition and, you know, any sense that there's a malaise, perhaps may come from a an excess of comfort, right? Culturally and economically than we we've had. So the appeal of being sort of super served by a a network of thought also sits counter to something that has also

• 29:45Azeem Azhar?

  been inherently human, which is, we have to struggle. And we often do struggle and struggle forms a part of the creation of our moral virtues. So how do you bring those together?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  So so I don't I don't believe in utopias. I think they're they're a bad idea, even if you can make one. I believe in protopia, which is this incremental move to slight betterment, even if it's only 1% improvement over time, and that you accumulate goodness over time. And that's what civilization is, is, you know, if we can create 1% more than we destroy each year.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  We can accumulate a civilization. I think the struggles are never going to go away. I think most of the problems that we're going to have in the future are going to be created by the technologies that we're making today. But I believe that the solution to those problems are more and better technology, which will produce new problems. So for me, problems are the source of progress. Okay, so we're not going to eliminate the struggle. The struggle is the process. And so we may change the kinds of things that we are occupied and struggled with. But I see that again as progress. What we don't struggle about surviving and starving, that that's behind us.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  We have other kinds of struggles about who we are and what we're here for and what our purpose is. And I think AIs again can help us with that because they're going to answer some of the questions about what are we here for? Why, why are we doing this? And help us elevate to a greater purpose. I think we'll look back and say there was an utter waste of human life to be mining, collecting coal and a dirty thing. That was not a thing that humans should be doing. A lot of the jobs that people are trying to protect, our jobs, I think we should, will be embarrassed that humans were doing it all.

• 31:36Azeem Azhar?

  Of course, kids are now mining, but in Minecraft. So it was that.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Or crypto.

• 31:42Azeem Azhar?

  Or crypto mining. Yeah, I was wondering whether you were going to to suggest that. But turn to the question of, you know, how it would actually feel? How's it going to feel over that 15 to 20 year period? Now, this is an unfair question for me to put to you. And if you put it to me, I would feel it unfair as well.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 32:01Azeem Azhar?

  Because it's, it's the wrong timeframe. We don't think in that timeframe. But, but I was thinking about what it is like in places which have had 30 years of population decline. There's a fantastic essay in the New Yorker in the last couple of weeks about Korea.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:17Azeem Azhar?

  And focuses on a school which hasn't had a new student in a few years and has all these facilities. And, and you know, what you see are adaptations in, in other places. So in Japan, for example, there are these adaptations where the 70 year olds look after the 80 year olds to look after the 90 year old. But I'm curious about, about what you think it might look like across different cultures over that next 15 to 20 years.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I actually, I was in the village in Japan that had mannequins set out in the bus stops and stuff to give a sense of more people being there. It was a little creepy. I don't think that's the solution, but I think what we're going to have, this is my hope. This is not a prediction. This is a positive scenario that I hope will happen, which is that people, countries begin to compete for population. I mean, basically, if we don't have any more in a global total, then you can kind of like, you can win some to come to you, your country and say, "Look, we have fantastic healthcare.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  We've got a great language program. We've got a free education. Come to our country and work." And so that competition, I think, would be really great for policies and nations around the world, competing to attract people to their country. And so I'm imagining even places like China or Japan. Japan right now has finally turned around a little bit, and they are trying to, for the first time ever, have foreigners come and work. And so my last visit there, just this last year, for the first time, I saw Bengalis and Nepalis in the 7-Elevens, who were speaking pretty good, pretty good Japanese.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And so these were the first foreign immigrants, because they needed the workers. And so I think this idea of having places here to welcoming people to come in. And so if that worked, then we might have the universal right of mobility. The universal right of mobility was says, "If you're born on this planet, you have a right to live anywhere on the planet if you follow the local laws and pay taxes and all that." And so that universal right of mobility would be a huge factor in general peace on the planet,

• 34:49Speaker 01

  but I think is one way in which we could work to accommodate. And so there might be countries that says, "Come, we have a great taxation. We have great schools, and we'll try to have healthcare, and we'll try to encourage you to have a family here. We'll have more kids."

• 35:06Speaker 01

  That would be something where where people are moving to the place where they want to have good lives and have kids.

• 35:13Azeem Azhar?

  I I agree that it's likely to be quite heterogeneous. It feels like this is a place where different countries, because of different, you know, sort of cultural paths, these things are often very path-dependent, will make different, different choices. And you can imagine some countries saying, listen, we want to preserve, we're gonna extend life as far as we can, we're gonna use automation and labor to maintain the quality of life for a small number of people, but we're gonna, you know, keep that, keep that sort of sense of cultural purity, others who may say, actually, we'll, we'll follow the, the roots that Kevin, you've just described now. And, and that creates quite a sort of interesting, you know, mottled, yeah, picture, sort of this jigsaw as it, as it comes together.

• 35:58Azeem Azhar?

  And I, I, one of the things that I think also happens over this period of time is a sense of the relative scarcity of human connection and human interaction. So there's often this argument that says, which I, you know, I think has a lot of scientific and engineering validity, which is that machines will get better and better and better, and then you won't be able to teleport a synthetic video from a, a real video. But it won't be the real video. And, and so I imagine also that as we go through this period, there'll be a, a, a point in time, maybe the last for longer, where the sense of something having been touched by a human

• 36:38Azeem Azhar?

  will increase its, maybe its value or just signify it, right? It's a sense that, you know, it's artisanal cheese rather than shop-made cheese. Perhaps it has a price premium to it, perhaps it doesn't. Perhaps there will be an entire product where the promise is not touched by machine or not touched by machine intelligence. And how long that, that lasts, I, I, I don't know. But it, we already again start to see hints of that. It's not, it's not luxury goods, but it is artisanal wine and microbrewing and, you know, the sense that people go for, you know, what's fascinating for, for me, having grown up alongside mass tourism, is that

• 37:22Azeem Azhar?

  we've gone through a phase where if you weren't very affluent, your holiday involved a kind of cold, rickety.

• 37:30Azeem Azhar?

  Chalet, and if you're rich, you've got some five-star treatment and a butler. And now, fifty years gone, wealthier you are, the nest kick for your creature comfort.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:40Azeem Azhar?

  You take, right? These things are sort of relative in their sense. I mean, how do you, do you think that there is that sort of interplay between what we will value as humans in the economy and how it gets valued?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, I think that ideally, if the bots are doing most of the work that we don't want to do, then we can do the work that we like to do, which is sit around and chit chat and to hold hands of someone who's ill or to play around. And so, and that becomes more valuable. And so, I think you're absolutely right, that something made without the touch of a robot, where a human, and maybe there's documentation, there's video, whatever, showing that the entire process.

• 38:21Azeem Azhar?

  It's on the blockchain.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, right. So, but while that's there, I don't think that's going to be how most things are made. I mean, I think, again, this will be a premium product, whereas most things are going to be made by automation of some sort. And that's sort of effective what we have right now, where you can get a very high-end meal, but most of it's kind of like, most of the food consumed is processed. And so, that will continue again, because humans will be a minority of the workers of the world, most of them will be bots. And so, we can spend our time paying for this special human attention, because our human attention becomes ever more valuable.

• 39:06Azeem Azhar?

  Right.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  When there's fewer of us. And so, getting attention from a human will become, I mean, and your attention will become the most valuable thing that you have to give away. And so, don't.

• 39:19Azeem Azhar?

  So, that's a really, yeah, sorry, I want to jump in there, because that's a really important part of the equation. And it does connect to, you know, another point that we've learned, you know, so fundamentally, the thing that is gated right now is the amount of attention we have. Call it eight hours a day, call it 12 hours a day. And the amount of attention in the world is 12 hours times eight billion people. That number will start to, um, you know, drop and but our attention per human is going to stay fixed. And and it is interesting because right now, companies compete for our attention in particular ways and ways I think in in decades to come, we'll think of as dark patterns, you know, that the the the dopamine device to get us to stay on.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:02Azeem Azhar?

  What what is a mechanism by which that flips, right? By which we start to respect uh attention?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I I did a calculation some years ago about the average cost of our attention, how we give it away. And if you take all the the total volume of television or even online and the total revenue, the total hours hours that we give it revenue is that we're working for coolly wages. I mean, basically, we're selling our attention for a couple bucks an hour.

• 40:29Azeem Azhar?

  Right.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Which is ridiculous. Okay. And so part of it is is that we haven't yet learned to to value that we're we're not yet being paid, we're we're compensated for at at the it's true value. And I think that may be coming as we have more and more agents is will understand that that, for instance, the people who are watching right now, thank you for your attention. You're giving us millions of dollars worth of attention right now, even though it's not valued at that. But um, keep that it keep that in mind.

• 41:01Azeem Azhar?

  That's one of the things, by the way, Kevin, that I think about with my writing, I think about uh with with my team as we write things, we say, this is going to go in the inboxes of a couple hundred thousand people. It's got to be worth their time. Like, they are giving us their attention. This has got to be well written. It's got to be well researched. It's got to say something that helps them move their thinking forward.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:21Azeem Azhar?

  And I think it's one of our values because, of course, the time and attention that we all have is the the one thing that we can really not manufacture more of.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I mean, I I I propose that there that there might be versions of this where you are being paid to watch them. You're being paid to read an email someone sends you, right? So you take out the advertisers, which are intermediaries, and you say, no, no, no, we'll pay you to watch this ad. We will pay you to um to to read something. And so you're you're actually getting paid for that kind of attention. And so that's one way that we that we could shift things is is that you have a publication and and they're actually um paying you to look at the ads.

• 42:08Azeem Azhar?

  Kevin, we have covered so much ground. I've got one last question for you and I'm gonna make it a personal one for me and for you. So I first came across your work in thirty-two years ago, actually, to the week. Thirty-two, my math is terrible. Thirty-one years ago. Wired Edition 2.03, Laurie Anderson on the cover, America's Multimedia Tricks.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  This is Wired Magazine, yeah.

• 42:31Azeem Azhar?

  Wired Magazine, absolutely. If 1994 Kevin could read 2025 Kevin's blog, what thing would most blow his mind?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. That's, um, I think the thing that would blow his mind is that he's probably writing about the same stuff and he would have hoped that I would broaden out beyond what I've been writing about all along. Yeah, so I think that would be the thing. It's like, you're still writing about this? Come on. But here's the thing I've learned, and that is you have to repeat yourself in a certain sense. Because I wrote my first book in 1990s, a chapter on crypto, and it had all kinds of things about AI. I said it, but nobody

• 43:27Speaker 01

  was listening. I said it, nobody understood it. And it just takes a long time to absorb some of these ideas. And the ideas of bottom-up architecture, the idea of decentralization as a very robust thing, the way that, the idea that you have to let go of things in order to get the best from them. Amazingly, people don't understand it the first time you tell them. And so I have sort of kind of come back to these because it's necessary to kind of explain them again in a different way for a new crowd of people. And so, for better or worse, that's what I'm trying to do.

• 44:08Azeem Azhar?

  It's, well, it's fantastic. Your blog is at KK.org. You have a Substack as well, I guess, if people look that up. And mine is, of course, Exponential View. Thank you to the 700 or so people who've tuned in live. And of course, thank you, Kevin, for joining me with Friday with Azim Azar. Thank you.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  My pleasure. It was a delight, a lot of fun. Thank you for asking some great questions. I know that you're a human because you're asking good questions.