Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I don't know about other people, but I find that I actually don't know why I do things, and I don't know exactly how I would describe what I'm doing or whatever. And that this process required me to articulate things, and it brought more understanding of what my path is and where I'm going. And so it didn't really change it as much as it illuminated it, and that illumination is valuable. And so I have a better idea about what it is I'm doing than before I started. [00:00:00] S0: I'd like to spend a minute or two just having the benefit of having you on the call to ask about your conception of technology. Before reading this book, like I said, I've been preparing this for a long time because I read all your other books about technology. Your notion of The Technium has been very influential on me and how I think about how I spend my time and how I invest and everything else. How do you think about the history of technology and the stock of -- you call it The Technium, the stock of technology that exists in the world and why that's such a natural extension of human beings?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: In brief, the main insight about The Technium, which is my term for the systems of all the technologies in the world, is the understanding that they don't stand alone, that they're a web that you can't make a hammer without a saw. Saw cuts the handle, and the hammer is needed to make the saw. And so they're all codependent. And we use computers to make everything, and we need plumbing and the farmers to make the computers. And so there is this web, this ecosystem of technologies all codependent on each other and that the bigger this ecosystem gets, the more it adapts the same things that any system of that complexity has, which it has its own internal biases and tendencies. All systems, whether it's living systems or even mechanical systems that are complex enough, will exhibit recurring tendencies independent of all the parts. So this Technium that we have, this ecosystem, all the technologies in the world, has certain behaviors that are independent of us humans, the creators, and independent of the parts. And so the question is, what are those general tendencies? What are those ones in the sense of -- the tendency of a plant is to lean towards the light and Wonderful idea. Do you think that if you were to draw the time line of technology, it seems like we harnessed information with the printing press, we've sort of harnessed energy with oil and fossil fuels and that maybe we're about to harness intelligence with AI. Is that a clean progression? And is it fair to put AI on the same scale as those other two? Yes. I mean I think ultimately, it will be even bigger than those other two. Intelligence is not the only thing necessary to get things done. But in fact, evolution itself is a kind of learning. If you abstract it out, the topography of things that learn are similar to the things that evolve. Evolution is learning. Our brains are doing similar kinds of -- mathematically, abstractly, they are very, very related. Learning and evolution are very, very analogous. So a mind is an accelerated version of evolution. It's learning much, much faster than evolution can itself. So we're accelerating evolution with the mind. And so that's very, very powerful when you can accelerate evolution.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So all the things we see, all the good things that we've seen evolve on this planet, we're accelerating those processes now and making things that are dry in silicon or other materials. And so that's very exciting. That's a huge, huge powerful force that we're unleashing for the first time on the planet, okay? And so I think it's way beyond fire and even our own invention of language in the long term. We're just at the very, very beginning. We haven't really done very much comparatively to what we'll be doing, but it is momentous moment where for the first time, we're figuring out what it is. And as humans, this is big because we evolved with other sentient beings. There are a lot of other -- Neanderthals and beyond when we were evolving. But at least for the past 50,000 years, we've been the sole sentient being on the planet. [00:00:00] S0: The hegemons.
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: We're now going to go back to having other sentient beings, and we don't know today why we're the only ones. Was it deliberate? Or was it accidental? We don't know. But we're going to have to share the world with other sentient beings in certain ways, and we don't even know what that looks like or feels like. But that's another momentous threshold in our planet. But again, that's very long term. In the short term, we have AI of a very, very narrow sense of pattern recognition and pattern generation. We've synthesized one type of cognition, which is pattern recognition, pattern generation. And all the things we're seeing today, only because we've synthesized that one single kind of cognition, we haven't been able to synthesize deduction, symbolic reasoning, all the other kinds of things that we do in our own brain, we haven't been able to synthesize yet. So we're still at the very beginnings of this. And I think one of the things that affects us in the long term, say, the next century is that we're going to be undergoing a century-long identity crisis as a species, going back to the individual of like, what is it that you want to be, why you're here, what do you do that nobody else can do? Now we're going to ask that at a species level. What are humans for? Why are we here? What are we good for? What can we do that others can't? And then we have genetic engineering where we can actually change our own bodies. And so what is it that we want to become? And one of the things that AIs are going to force us to answer is because we make these AIs, we train them on humans. And humans are on average sexist and ageist and racist and mean, and so the AIs are like average humans, but we say, no, no, no, you have to be better than us. So what does it look like? What does a better human look like? We don't have a good model for that. We don't have a consensus on that. And yet we're going to demand that our AIs be better than us. So that's going to force us in some ways to be competitive humans ourselves.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Is there anything else that you think is over or underestimated about what's happening in this technological change?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. I mean the idea of existential threat is completely overrated. It's a fantasy. Intelligence itself is overrated. It's overrated by guys who like to think, who think that thinking is the most important thing in the universe. To get things done, it's not necessarily the most important. But take Einstein and a tiger and put them in a cage. Who wins? It's not the smartest guy. Why is that? Because it takes other things besides intelligence to get things done in the world. It's not the company with the smartest people that will dominate. It's not the smartest person in the room that necessarily knows what to do. Intelligence is necessary but not sufficient to get things done in the world. And the people who imagine this smart, genius AI thing are what I -- guilty of thinkism in the sense that they think that thinking trumps everything else, and it doesn't. There are so many other things that you need to accomplish something, to have effect on actually making things happen, including empathy, including perseverance, like all kinds of things. And so a lot of the fears of the existential threat of the AIs taking over and killing us all are based on the idea that if you have AI genius level thing, that it will overwhelm anything else in the world. But what we know is that the will to survive will always overwhelm the will to predate. I mean this is why only 1 out of 10 relations work because the will to survive is much more powerful than the will to kill. And so it would be really tough. Intelligence alone is not enough.