Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· 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.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: When you were running WIRED, and WIRED obviously was like the expression of your taste and personality, what practices or what did you do to protect that, that seems incredibly desirable in any publication that it's like the taste of the person magnified or something?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. We projected about owning more than 50% of which we lost to a very terrible, terrible story. We lost control, and that's why we had to sell, and that's when we all left, okay? We left, not because it wasn't fun anymore but because we lost control of it. We weren't having to report to anybody. We were just trying to make the magazine that we wanted to read. And it was totally fun because we could say anything. That was one of the ways I would say is you have to retain control, the ownership of it. And this goes back to what I was talking about articulating, for me, there was something that we were very slow to see it wire, but I did learn that. There's a bit of advice in my book about what we learned from the advertising people, which is to get your message across, you have to simplify, simplify, simplify and then exaggerate. There was a sense of like us coming to understand what it was that we're doing in our role and being able to, again, articulate that to the people. So this idea of the optimistic view was not something that was so evident at the very beginning, but it became evident that, that was our role, that, that was what we were doing in part, that, that was sort of what we were about. And that helped tremendously in terms of deciding whether this is a wire story or not. There's tons and tons of direction to go. And so being able to brand it in that sense was us being partly enabled by articulating it ourselves and being able to do that.