How to Predict the Future With Kevin Kelly, WIRED's Cofounder

Kevin Kelly
To visit the frontier. I’d spend a lot of my adult life in the very remote parts of Asia where there is very little infrastructure. I’d spend an early 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 there year round. And, you know, being at the frontier of the internet or AI, my understanding is that, you know, it’s a moving frontier. It’s going to move. I can keep going up to the edge to see what’s happening, but I don’t need to stay there, and I’m going to actually come back and report anyway. So I have the liberty of being a nomad in that sense, of occupying it. So for me,

Dan 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.
Kevin Kelly
Yeah, it does.
Dan Shipper
How has that worked for you?
Kevin Kelly
It’s been great because I can get over that big hump, just kind of helping get something

Kevin Kelly
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 and bigger, bigger thing, world building. And I started, I got 10 different novels from it. And then I had them, had it 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 that a lot of the 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 pleasure will be in the generating of the movie the co-generating of the movie that you’re directing You’ll be directing the movie for yourself and um anyway

Kevin Kelly
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. This is 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, it’s closer to entertainment than it is to actually, you know, a career.
Dan Shipper
It reminds me a little bit of, um, have you, are you familiar with active imagination? No, it’s a, um, uh, it’s part of like union psychotherapy. Um, the idea being, um, you can do active imagination where you, um, you take a dream that you’ve had recently and you sort of like reenter the dream world while you’re waking and you explore Some of the archetypes and themes, um, either by writing them out or just like exploring them to, to, to, and with yourself. And in doing that, um, it kind of reflects back to you things that might be like a little bit more latent in, 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