Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: What do you think explains the best -- I guess I'll just call it content media. What do you think unites the very best things that you've created and that you've appreciated that others have created?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: One thing I learned about magazines was that the best magazines at the best times, because magazines can outlive individuals like The New Yorker, say, is that they work best when they are an expression of the personality of the editor. The more idiosyncratic creations are -- to me, that's one of the commonalities. If you unleash the creators to really give them that room to create unencumbered or unconstrained by the lawyers, by the bureaucracy, by committees, by the thought police, whatever it is, the more that there can actually be an expression of idiosyncratic -- to me, the stronger it is. We have that with novels because it's the sole person usually -- if they have any kind of clout, they can demand certain things. It's much harder to do with other media like a movie because there's just so many people involved. And that's one of the reasons why I think AI is going to be hugely transformative because we'll be able to have a 90-minute movie made by a single person, auto-generating all these other characters and stuff at their command, their direction, the director. That will be true for games, true now in newsletters. The newsletters I follow are by people with very strong personalities. And we own books that you like, there's somebody with a very strong point of view that we don't see that as much in the screen that's now the center of our lives. And I think we missed that, and I think AI will help us regain that by actually enabling individuals or very, very small partner teams to create works in this medium with the screen.