Digital visionary, bestselling author, founder of the popular Cool Tools website, and Co-Founder and Senior Maverick of Wired magazine—Kevin Kelly joins to talk about his career, his new book, and his radical optimism about the future of our world and humanity.
Debbie Millman:
Kevin Kelly is radically optimistic about the future. What about climate change, you might ask? Well, Kevin Kelly thinks that new technologies can foster a more favorable trajectory. What about artificial intelligence? He says, “It will usher in a new era of services and products and occupations.” In short, Kevin Kelly is betting on humanity and our extraordinary ability to adapt and innovate. Kevin Kelly is also a person who thinks a lot about the future. Almost 30 years ago, he helped co-found and was the executive editor of Wired Magazine where he currently holds the title of senior maverick. His many books include The New York Times bestseller, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. His most recent is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.
He’s here today to talk about his life, his career, his new book and why he’s so optimistic when so many of us are busy pulling our hair out. Kevin Kelly, welcome to Design Matters.
Kevin Kelly:
Oh my gosh, it’s such a delight to be here. Thank you so much and what a wonderful introduction. I feel like I don’t deserve it, but I am so glad to be chatting with you finally.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, absolutely, me too. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Kevin, in your brand new book, Excellent Advice for Living, you state that a balcony or a porch needs to be at least six feet deep or it won’t be used. How did you figure this out?
Kevin Kelly:
I was told this by Christopher Alexander, which is one of his patterns in his pattern language. And once I understood that and learned it, I checked that many times in my own experiences traveling around the world and it was absolutely true. I felt very confident to say, “This is the way.”
Debbie Millman:
Well, I want you to know that several years ago I decided to build a balcony off of my bedroom in a brownstone that I own. Now, doing that meant that I might be in some way inhibiting some of the sunlight coming in on the floor below. I didn’t want to make it so wide that it might inhibit any sunlight from coming in. And so I can tell you well beyond anecdotally, because my porch, my balcony is not at least six feet deep, we never use it.
Kevin Kelly:
Never use it, right? Exactly.
Debbie Millman:
We never use it. So when I saw that, I thought, “Oh my God, I wish I had known that earlier,” because I actually think that the way that the sun comes in, the angle that it comes in through the windows, it would not have been in any way …
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.
Debbie Millman:
… impeded by a slightly longer …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… patio or balcony, so there you have it.
Kevin Kelly:
Design matters.
Debbie Millman:
If only I could take my own advice. Kevin, you were born in Pennsylvania in 1952 and I read that it just so happens that this was the first year that the word technology appeared in the president’s State of the Union Address. When did you realize that?
Kevin Kelly:
I was doing research. I didn’t realize it growing up. I actually didn’t really have much of an interest in technology growing up, but when I was researching a book called What Technology Wants, I was really curious about where the concept of technology even arrived because the ancients didn’t talk about it and it was like, “When did we started to become aware of it?” And it was actually a fairly recent word that was rediscovered, so to speak, in the 1800s, but never really entered into the vernacular until my lifetime basically. And that’s when people started to talk about it or understand its significance.
Of course, now, it’s the main event in many ways, but that’s been a journey where when I was growing up people talked about the future and it was glorious, but they didn’t even talk about technology. They talked about flying cars, they talked about laser guidance, but they didn’t have this idea that it was a class of something, that it was a category like technology. That’s actually pretty recent.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I really wanted to understand the context in which the word was used in the State of the Union Address, what was that about, so I went back and I looked. It was President Truman. He actually says the word technical, but he says it several times. And in speaking about our potential, he states, “Our technical missionaries are out there. We need more of them. We need more funds to speed their efforts because there is nothing of greater importance in all our foreign policy. There is nothing that shows more clearly what we stand for and what we want to achieve.”
And then he goes on to say, “Our task will not be easy, but if we go at it with a will, we can look forward to steady progress. On our side are all the great resources of freedom, the ideals of religion and democracy, the aspiration of people for a better life and the industrial and technical power of a free civilization.”
Kevin Kelly:
Wow, there you go. I could not have said that better. I think he summarizes my own sentiments about the future and progress. It’s interesting that he mentions progress because that’s not a word that you hear very often these days. And It’s amazing to me that we still need to make a case for progress that you have to convince people that progress is real. In 2023, is that really something that we need to do? Because for me, part of my own journey is understanding the reality of progress, that progress is real and that came partly from a lot of time in the developing world in places like Asia as it was coming of age and seeing firsthand that, “Oh my gosh, progress is definitely real.”
Debbie Millman:
Now you mentioned as you were growing up, you really didn’t have much of an interest in technology. Your father worked in systems analysis for Time Magazine and I read that, in 1965, he took you to a computer show, but you said that you were totally bored by what you saw …
Kevin Kelly:
Oh my God.
Debbie Millman:
… and considered it pollution. And so-
Kevin Kelly:
It was … Yeah, they’re just cabinets and there was no screens, right? They’re just cabinets like refrigerators with tapes that were moving. And the output, the total output was a typewriter typing lines on sheets of paper and that was it. It was like … I’d read science fiction and I knew what computers were and these were not computers. So it was like, “No, I’m not. I have no affinity for these things and no interest in them,” and they were also very huge. They were room size and bigger and not very smart in that way. And they were literally hardly any smarter than your calculator. And it’s like, “No, I think there’s more interesting things in the world than computers.”
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written about how, when you were in high school, you don’t recall having a lot of ideas and stated that there were a lot of other kids in your school that you were very impressed with because they seemed to know what they thought. They were very glib and articulate. How would you describe yourself at that time?
Kevin Kelly:
Well, I have a bit of advice in my book that being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points and I’m describing myself because I was a kid that sat in the first row and asked questions the entire time and was very enthusiastic about learning and material. However, the moment I left the classroom that was done. That was over. I hardly did any homework. I did the minimal amount of homework. I was like, “No, I’m present in class and that’s what you get and then the rest of the time is my time.” So I was enthusiastic and interested and curious and that kind of curiosity is also worth a lot in terms of today’s world and that became my job as professionally curious.
Debbie Millman:
I actually think that’s one of the most important attributes to have in life, just to be curious and open-minded.
Kevin Kelly:
Right. I have another bit of advice, which is, if at all, you want to be curious about things that You’re not interested in.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. I spent many decades actually, and it’s embarrassing to say this, especially to you, but I think it’s important for people to hear that most of the time up until, because I’m 62 now, I would say up until I was about 40, if I didn’t know of something, I assumed it wasn’t important. How arrogant, right? How ridiculously arrogant. And if I hadn’t heard of it, I just assumed it wasn’t important enough for me to have known. Oh, so humiliating.
Kevin Kelly:
So I’m the other way around. Now if I haven’t heard of it, I’m incredibly curious about. It’s like, “How have I not heard about that?” And I have found that one of the best remedies for this kind of curious of things you’re not interested in is YouTube. So I’ll see some weird thing recommended to me that I have no idea It’s like, “Well, if they’re recommending it, there must be some kind of a following. There must be some momentum there. Let me see what it is.” And there’ll be entire worlds connected to it and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, and now I’m interested in this. I had no idea and now I have an idea,” and that’s very, very powerful.
Debbie Millman:
It’s really amazing how much you can learn from YouTube. It is astonishing. Whenever my wife needs to fix something in the house, rather than call someone, now she goes to YouTube, she gets the directions and does it herself because there are directions to do everything.
Kevin Kelly:
Everything
Debbie Millman:
On everything, everything.
Kevin Kelly:
The combination of YouTube plus Amazon is the solution to life, right? It’s like you get on YouTube, they’ll say, “You’ll need this weird little kind of bolt to do something. Okay, well, here’s the Amazon. You’ll order it there tomorrow and you fix it and it’s like magic.”
Debbie Millman:
So after high school, you were trying to decide whether to go to art school or to MIT and you ended up going to the University of Rhode Island, but dropped out after one year and you’ve said that your one big regret in life is that you even went for one year.
Kevin Kelly:
It’s true. It’s true.
Debbie Millman:
Was it that bad?
Kevin Kelly:
It was. First of all, I shouldn’t have gone to the University of Rhode Island, but here’s the thing, is, again, this is 1969-1970, I applied to colleges having never set foot on any college whatsoever. I was just looking at a book, taking things. I’d never visited a college even for any reason. I knew nothing about the ones I’m really applying to. University of Rhode Island was a little tiny state school where most of the students were commuting and I was out of state and it was grade 13. It was literally like high school, but grade 13. And it was like, “I just need to do something. I can’t sit in a classroom anymore. I need to make something. I need to do something.”
Had there been a gap year, had there been internships, I’d probably have finished, but I needed to do something and so I dropped out and I did stuff and that was the only option I had at that time.
Debbie Millman:
You first became the resident photographer at a photography workshop in Millerton, New York and what inspired you to pursue photography and to work as a photographer?
Kevin Kelly:
I had two parts of my brain. I was a complete science geek and then I love science and I took every single science and math class that our college prep high school offered. So I doubled up in physics, biology, physical sciences, geology and all the mathematics, calculus, algebra, geometry and all that kind of stuff, but I also took every single art course and I loved art and drawing and painting and making art. And I discovered photography basically in my junior year of high school and photography was this combination of both of those. Because at that time, the only way you could do photography was to do the chemical processing yourself. You had to know chemistry to some extent. You had to know optics. It was a very technical art, but it was also art at the same time.
So photography for me was this nice melding, this nice convergence of my interest in science and art. And this was at a time when having a camera, owning a camera was very unusual. I saved some money to buy a used camera. I learned how to do photography by going to the library and getting books. It was just at the beginning when photography was coming of age and the single lens reflex was starting to happen. And so I got involved in this thing and I wanted to learn more and I read about this place in Millerton, New York where you were residents and I went there and I did photography all day every day and I learned a huge amount and that was my university.
Debbie Millman:
You then spent seven years as an independent photographer …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… in the remotest parts of Asia. You lived on $2,500 a year. You traveled with a Nikkormat Camera and a bag filled with Kodachrome film through Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. And I read that before you left, you called the National Geographic Magazine photo editor whose number you found in a phone book and asked if they needed any photographs. What did he say?
Kevin Kelly:
I remember his name Bruce McElfresh and I was maybe 20 years old and I called him up and I said, this was my first trip, “I’m going to Taiwan and Japan. Do you need any photographs?” And he says, “Well, that’s not how it works here, but when you return, show me your work.” That was amazing. That was amazing. So I did that. I went down, took a train. When I returned, my parents lived in New Jersey and I went to show my work and he was kind of, “Hmm, that’s interesting. Keep going. Show me more work next time,” and I did. And on the second time, they, being National Geographic, was interested in some of the pictures I had taken in the Himalayas and they were considering them for one of the stories.
They, in the end, didn’t use it, but what I understood and was true, was had I kept going back, had I kept doing it, had I do it a third time, I would’ve eventually had gotten some assignment. But along the way, I changed my mind about wanting to be a professional photographer because I, by that time, had started to meet some of them and I decided that I didn’t want that job. I wanted to do that as a passion on my own terms and what I wanted to photograph and I didn’t actually really want to photograph what other people wanted to be photographed.
Debbie Millman:
During that first trip, you shot over 36,000 slides.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
You were taking about two rolls of film, which is 70 pictures a day.
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right, right, right.
Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that when you tell people that, they’re absolutely gobsmacked, astounded and incredulous because they didn’t understand how you could take 70 pictures a day. And this was at a time in our culture before everybody had a camera and you’ve written about how in order to take a photo, and this I, of course, remember as well, you had to previsualize what a photograph was going to look like before you shot it. And back then, did you have any sense of how much the discipline of photography was going to evolve?
Kevin Kelly:
No, I did not. So not only did I was shooting two rolls a day, which again was considered insane at the time … My family, we had a Brownie camera and my parents would do one 24-exposure roll a year. So you’d develop at the end of the year and there’d be some pictures from the 4th of July and Halloween and a birthday party and that was for the year. And the idea of two rolls a day was considered some degree of madness and-
Debbie Millman:
It was expensive.
Kevin Kelly:
It was expensive.
Debbie Millman:
Really expensive.
Kevin Kelly:
That’s the whole point. It was equivalent of like $5 today for each time you hit the shutter. And as a kid with no money, that was a lot of money. And so you had to previsualize because there was also no screen, so you don’t even know if you’re capturing and all the other adjustments like the exposure, shutter speeds were all set by hand, by manual. So you have to get it exactly right and get it focused and you don’t know if you’ve got it right until a year later when I was developing the film. And so that previsualization, which is also a term that Ansel Adams used about pre-imagining the image to the point where you see what it would look like on a paper, you imagine the whole scene in all its complexity onto the paper. That was something that I became good at.
It was something that I think is lost often now with the screens, but I had no idea that digital photography would come along. That would seem completely science fiction, and again, I wasn’t really thinking about the future that much when I was 22.
Debbie Millman:
How has the evolution of photographic technology changed the way you take photos?
Kevin Kelly:
That’s a great question and I’ve been asking that at a higher level, not just me, but how does it change how everybody takes photos. And this is in the perspective of the AI coming in. One of the things I’ve noticed is that because photography has become ubiquitous and cheap that we take more trivial things. We take more of the things that are ephemeral and passing and not as monumental, don’t have to be heroic. They’re a little bit more like the Lee Friedlander thing of serendipitous. They’re much more whimsical in general, the photography that people post say. So there’s a little bit more of a … What’s the word? They’re easier. They’re more relaxed. That’s the word I want. It’s a more relaxed photography now than before in general. And people are willing to be riskier frankly. There’s a far more risk-taking and trying things in photography now that doing so doesn’t cost anything.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that we can’t influence the direction of technologies, but we can influence the character. How do you think we’ve done that in the discipline of photography?
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I mean, if I had seen where we’re going 50 years ago saying, “Well, photography is going to become something that everybody carries around some kind of camera with them at all times. Each exposure would be free,” the question would be like, “Well, who owns the pictures?” And you could imagine several different versions of this. You could imagine under a different political system where we had a different attitude about copyright and the recent Supreme Court decision with Andy Warhol and the photographer.
Debbie Millman:
Lynn Goldsmith, yeah.
Kevin Kelly:
Right. So we could have had a different system where there was much more lax copyright ideas and people could reuse or work upon other people’s photograph without having to ask permission and that would have made a different character to photography where it was much more like you take, it’s immediately in the common and anybody can work with it. And you could imagine other versions or even harsher, where maybe to even view a photograph, you needed permission, okay?
Debbie Millman:
Mm-hmm.
Kevin Kelly:
And so you limited who could see your work. That would also have changed photography. That’s the case of changing the character of a system in which that technology operates.
Debbie Millman:
As an aside, I worked in the Empire State Building for 12 years, and at one point, the artist and designer Stefan Sagmeister came to photograph something on the Empire State Building. And the Empire State Building forbid him …
Kevin Kelly:
Yes, right.
Debbie Millman:
… to do that because the Empire State Building is copyrighted.
Kevin Kelly:
Right, exactly.
Debbie Millman:
And so you can’t take a photo of the Empire State Building and use it for any commercial purpose.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
But you mentioned, you just said something that I discovered in researching your work that really, really intrigued me and it was the idea of technological inevitability. And in reading your books and many articles, I came across this about the way in which technology has evolved. And you state, “When looking at the order of technologies on different continents in prehistory when there wasn’t really much influence between the continents, they actually follow roughly the same sequence. You’ll have the domestication of dogs before pottery. You’ll have the mention of sewing after pottery. There is a natural sequence which suggests that there is a certain inevitability to technologies. Once you have the previous ones, the next ones are going to happen. And I would say once you invent electricity and copper wires and switches, you’re going to invent the telephone. And once you have the telephone, you’re going to invent the internet.” So the internet was inevitable.
Kevin Kelly:
The internet was inevitable, but the character of the internet was not inevitable. This goes back to our former conversations. We still have a choice about who owns the internet, who runs it. Is it national, international? Is it run by one country or not? Is it open or closed? Those are all things that we have a choice about and they make a huge difference. But the fact that the internet arrived, it’s going to arrive on probably any planet. Where they discover electricity and wiring, they’re going to have an internet, but the character of the internet is going to be different than ours because of those social dimensions that we get to choose about.
And I fast forward this into saying AI, AI is coming. Making minds is something that evolution wanted to do many, many times. It reinvented minds in many different lines of development that were all separate from each other. So minds and artificial minds are inevitable, but the character of those, the quality that we really choose about how it’s run, who has access to it, how much does it cost, is it open or closed, these are all things that we do have decisions and choices about and they make a big difference to us.
Debbie Millman:
Would you say that in addition to the internet being inevitable, it is a mutation of technology?
Kevin Kelly:
So I wrote a book, What Technology Wants, and the short answer about what it wants is that it wants the same things that evolution wants, meaning I use the word want not consciously, but the way that a plant wants the light, it leans to the light. So these are-
Debbie Millman:
What technology seeks.
Kevin Kelly:
These are urges, tendencies. So the tendency of technologies are the same tendencies we see in evolution because it is, in fact, an extension of evolution, as evolution accelerated. And so when we look at it that way, where it’s going is towards increasing possibilities, increasing forms. So I say that the evolution of technology follows the same thing, the evolution of life, and it’s aimed in the same directions in which are towards greater complexity, greater specialization, greater mutualism. And so technology will become more complex and technology also becomes more specialized.
And so my prediction would be that, in AI, we’re going to see increasing numbers of specialized AIs to do different things, whether it’s images or language or music or equations or math proofs, that there’ll be increasing specialized versions of them just like we have specialized cameras and that there’ll be more mutualism, meaning that a lot of technology comes to depend on other technologies or may only be used by other technologies, meaning that there’ll be things that we’ll invent that the humans won’t even use like they’ll be invented for other technologies to use. That’s mutualism where they are embedded in the system itself.
And so my view is that those are the inevitable things and they’re not at the species level. So I would say, in evolution, any planet in the galaxy that had a gravity like Earth’s and an atmosphere like Earth, that evolution will have quadrupeds. That’s inevitable because that’s just a physically elegant solution, four legs, very, very stable. But a zebra is not inevitable. That species is completely stochastic, completely random. So species are never predictable or inevitable, but the larger blueprint is. So the internet is, but a website is not inevitable. Telephones were inevitable, but the iPhone, in particular, is not necessarily inevitable. And so we can say certain AIs are going to be inevitable, but ChatGPT-4 is not necessarily inevitable.
Debbie Millman:
I had my own little epiphany as I was thinking about this inevitability and the way in which the order of technologies on different continents …
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.
Debbie Millman:
… in prehistory all were sort of on the same timetable. And in many ways, while this might seem trivial, I’ve spent most of my career in branding and I believe that the discipline of branding was also inevitable and that you have the same kind of trajectory, if you think about brands beyond consumerism. First, you get religious symbols …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… in different continents all around the same time. So you have the symbols in the Middle East, you have the symbols in Brazil or in South America. You have symbols that popped up all around the same time. About 10,000 years ago, all of a sudden humans started to create a symbol to signify their relationship with this higher power. Higher power had nothing to do with it.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
We created those. And then over time, again, we had no way of knowing what was happening on these different continents. We get flags, family crests …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… brand marks of ownership on animals. And then before you know it, Coca-Cola is in every country in the world.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
But I’ve always wondered what triggered those first religious symbols in so many places at the same time with no one else knowing about it.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great question and It’s a great image too of the first person to make a symbol on rock and to say, not just me, but all of us here that this represents us or what we believe, that’s an incredible step.
Debbie Millman:
Right?
Kevin Kelly:
Yes. It’s an incredible step. It’s a kind of an abstraction, which is really very, very powerful, but yeah, that would be interesting if maybe some of the earliest cave drawings were actually branding exercises.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I think they were. I would contend that they are because we were creating an organized system of being able to perceive reality that was a shared reality.
Kevin Kelly:
So maybe the wonderful ochre handprints or maybe those are the brand of view, the brand of me, the brand of humans.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, so the notion that most inventions and innovations are co-invented in multiple times simultaneously and independently is one of the properties of something that you call the technium and I was wondering if you could define technium for our listeners.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. So we talked earlier at the very beginning about technologies, plural, that we have a microphone and we’ve got a camera and we’ve got cars and even materials, Teflon, Kevlar. We understand these to be technologies, although it’s broader, because in fact, technologies would include things like a calendar and timekeeping. These are technologies too. But if we think of these as independent little things and in our own lives, our life is a witness to a parade of new technologies as they’re invented. But in fact, the reality is much more complicated because these new things that are being invented rely on other technologies to make them or even to input them like they’re eating them, they’re consuming them.
And so we have really something that’s much more like a rainforest of different technologies that are interdependent, codependent on each other. You can’t do farming today without computers and satellites and telephones and logistics and you can’t do those logistics unless you have food for the workers. And so there is a complete ecosystem of these technologies that are codependent on each other. And the important idea about this ecosystem, which I call the technium, is that the technium itself, the forest itself has certain biases, certain tendencies that the individual components don’t have, that the tendencies are not found in the individual components. It’s a little bit like a beehive, which I was a beekeeper and so the bees live only six weeks, but the hive can have a memory of years.
So there are attributes of the hive that you can’t find in individual bees no matter how hard you look. That’s because systems have behaviors themselves. All systems have certain antics and biases and tendencies. And so I’m saying we have a system of technologies called the technium that’s not just culture, it isn’t Earth. It’s actually active, it’s an agent, it’s doing things and it has certain tendencies and urges and recurring patterns that are not found in the individual technologies that make up and all the technologies together make up this technium. And so the question that I ask is, what are some of those behaviors of the technium at large? And that’s what I get the question, what does technology want?
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the technium is an extension of the same self-organizing system responsible for the evolution of life on this planet. How so?
Kevin Kelly:
I would say in my definition of things that are created by minds, which is what technology is that that would include the dams that beaver make, the nests that birds make, the homes that termites make because they are being created from their neurons. Their neurons are measuring the honeycomb. Their brains are assembling the nest. This way of looking at technology is something that behaves in the same way as evolution does. So you can map the genealogy of different inventions and showing how they mutate. There’s a little mutation which is picked up and it becomes more common. And that is then the origin of the next one. There’s like offspring in children.
So it’s behaving almost identical to biological evolution with one big caveat, which is that, unlike biology, it’s very, very, very rare for anything to go extinct in the technium, but otherwise, the behavior of this as it progresses through time is very, very similar to biology and we see bits of the technium in the sense of things being made from the mind already occurring in the animal kingdom. And so for me, we can view technology as origins that’s not human-made, that actually the origins are actually at the Big Bang. It’s the same origins of the beginning of our universe and life of these self-organizing systems. And so the mathematics of the energy component of technology follows the same kind of laws that evolution does. So whenever we can measure about evolution, we can apply to the technium and see that it’s also very similar.
Debbie Millman:
So if you think about birds making nests or beavers creating their dams, there isn’t a manual that they get.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
When they are creating them, it’s very much instinctual. So they have an ability to be instinctively creative.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
And-
Kevin Kelly:
There actually is a little bit more leeway. While a lot of it is intuitive, instinctive, but we know from birdsong and stuff, they actually can learn and change. So it’s not 100% reflexive. There are elements of individual creativity even in those acts.
Debbie Millman:
And so it makes me wonder and I’m just formulating this as we speak, so it might not be quite as eloquent as I want it to be, but if we, as humans, have an ability to be creative and that’s something that many people think that all humans are born with, the whole notion of folks like Rick Rubin or Elizabeth Gilbert talking about creativity coming through us, the best creativity coming through us, not bias, I’m wondering if there’s some correlation there with this innate instinctiveness in creating the best possible art or invention.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, I think there is. And I think one of the things that AI has shown us is that creativity rather than being a high-order rarefied quality is actually very primitive. It’s actually elemental. It’s so elemental that we can actually make machines do it. Rather than it being something that is layered on top of consciousness and awareness, it actually precedes all those and that it’s actually so elemental and fundamental that we’re capable of programming it into machines and so that machines can be creative, certainly with that lowercase creativity of doing something novel. Maybe not through the breakthroughs yet, but certainly at the lowercase. And I think animals have shown that they are capable of having a lowercase creativity in certain cases.
So that to me says that yes, this is elemental foundational level of creativity is something that’s very fundamental to all living systems and that’s what living systems that try to learn and adapt. You could say that that’s one variety of creativity. And I think what we’re seeing is that is something that’s portable, that’s something that we can move and it’s not just the province of … Humans don’t own it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I want to talk quite a bit about AI, but I also want for our listeners to be able to understand something that you just mentioned which is called uppercase creativity or lowercase creativity. So I’m going to read very specifically something that Kevin has said so that folks understand. “Scholars of creativity refer to something called Uppercase Creativity. Uppercase Creativity is this stunning field-changing, world-altering rearrangement of that major breakthrough brings. Think special relativity, discovery of DNA, Picasso’s Guernica. Uppercase Creativity goes beyond the merely new. It is special and it is rare. It touches us humans in a profound way far beyond what an alien AI can fathom.” And we’ll come back to the AI conversation momentarily because there’s a bunch of other things that I want to talk to you before that.
So we were talking a little bit about … You mentioned the Big Bang. That’s a door I can’t help but go through. So you’ve written that at the core of the origin of life and its ongoing billion-year metabolism is its ability to replicate and copy information accurately and life copies itself to live, copies to grow, copies to evolve. Life wants to copy. So my question, especially given your earlier experiences in Jerusalem … You know where I’m going?
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… do you believe in God? And if so, how does that connect to the notion of evolution on this planet?
Kevin Kelly:
Sure, sure. So I do believe in God, and if listeners want to bear with some of my personal theology, it goes like this. It seems to me there’s only two major possibilities when we think about where did all this, the universe and everything in it, which is quite big as we look out into the telescopes with web and beyond, where did they come from? And so the general two answers are, well, it has always been. It somehow self-created itself. The universe has always been. Or the second one, it was that it began by itself in some weird way. Why? Who knows? And then there’s the other story which is, well, God made it. And then you say, “Well, where did God come from?” Well, he’s always been or always self-made. And all I can say is none of those are satisfactory, but I find the God version to be a lot more interesting and entertaining.
So I prefer the God explanation and my explanation of God is that God was a self-created being, the only self-created thing. And in order to understand itself, it manifests itself as the universe in order to understand what it is. And evolution is the way in which this unfolds, it’s God discovering itself by making things with free will like itself. And we are made in the image in the sense that we are now in the process of discovering who we are and we’re going to make other things like robots in order to understand what we are. We’ll give these other beings some degree of free will just as we have freewill to understand ourselves. And so this is replicating process.
And so for me, the godhood is a kind of all-encompassing being that’s served perfect, but becoming more perfect, which again logically doesn’t make any sense. What does that even mean, where if you are infinite and becoming more infinite? But the idea is that it’s not static. It is a process that itself is becoming more God-like by having a universe, by understanding itself it’s a way of looking at itself. So that’s my short version of the theology. I don’t expect anybody else to believe it, but that’s my view.
Debbie Millman:
You’re a Christian?
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
You had a religious epiphany …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… in Jerusalem in the 1970s. Can you just share a bit of a high-altitude explanation of what happened?
Kevin Kelly:
I don’t know if I can explain it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Kevin Kelly:
But I can tell you the short … There’s a couple versions of it. By the way, the first time I told the story about it was on This American Life and I don’t think I’ve been able to tell it as well since. The short version is that I was working in Iran during the Khomeini revolution, got kicked out, went to Jerusalem to photograph Easter and had a conversion experience in Easter where I really believed that Jesus was the cosmic Jesus. Cosmic Jesus, again, taking that view of the godhood and understanding that, when you have a free will, we’re going to discover this ourselves when we make robots that have free will, is that, when a robot that you made decides to do harm, the question is, what are the consequences? Should the robot absorb it? Does the maker of the robot have any degree of capability? And how do we satisfy the need for justice while still also be loving?
And for me the answer is that the godhood, the creator takes on the penalty itself. It absorbs the penalty in part in order to relieve the being with free will from eternal guilt and the burden of having to suffer the consequences of doing harm. And so for me, that’s the cosmic Jesus and that-
Debbie Millman:
So that everybody is forgiven?
Kevin Kelly:
Right. And so that set me off on a course of an assignment that I believe I got, which was to try and live as if I was going to die in six months. And that set me off on a different course where I graduated from photographing and traveling and I was trying to prepare for this short time of no regrets and trying to deal with things to be ready. And what I didn’t understand at the time, but did later on, was this was providing me with a rebirth experience where I actually went through the whole thing and then didn’t die, but was reborn in a very, very visceral, tangible way that I could not have believed.
And so what was interesting about having six months to live was that I could only do that by denying a future. So every day, I was giving up the future. I was not thinking about … I wasn’t taking photographs because what’s the point? You’re not going to be there in six months. And that restricting of the future was another lesson, because when it came out of it on the other side, I realized that having a future was one of the most human things that was really necessary for our own humanity, was to have something in the front of us and that, if you take that away, you take away a lot of humanity.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s really the only thing that differentiates us from other species, is our ability to imagine …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… a scenario or a future.
Kevin Kelly:
And so I began much more interested in thinking about the future after that.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting because you had this sense that you were going to die and it does seem like that six months was a death of sorts and that you were rebirthed in a new way …
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.
Debbie Millman:
… thinking about time in an entirely new way. Did you have a sense that this was more a metaphysical death or did you believe that it was going to be a physical death and that you might get hit by a car or be involved in some …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… accident and no longer exist?
Kevin Kelly:
I was taking it very literally that I was preparing for the complete death where I would go to sleep that night and not wake up. That was the assignment to me, was to prepare in every way as if this was a complete physical reality. So I was acting as much as I could to be responsible in taking that seriously in every respect. So when I went to bed that night, I was prepared to physically die.
Debbie Millman:
Initially, you thought that, with six months to live, you would climb Mount Everest or go scuba diving or get in a speedboat and see how fast you could go.
Kevin Kelly:
Right. That would be the natural inclination to live life to the fullest, but in fact, I surprised myself because I wanted to see my parents and my brothers and sisters and do ordinary things. Yeah, that was a surprise to me.
Debbie Millman:
You found the ordinary quite exotic when you went back.
Kevin Kelly:
Yes, and that’s I think part of the marvel of life, is finding the extraordinary and the ordinary and finding the ordinary and the extraordinary and I think that was a gift.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote about what you did when you were back home with your parents. You said that you helped around the house, you cut shrubs, you worked on a deck, you moved furniture, you washed dishes. Were you bored doing those things or were you feeling very fulfilled by doing those things?
Kevin Kelly:
I was a little bored, because after three months, I got on a bicycle and rode across the US to visit my brothers …
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Kevin Kelly:
… and sisters. So no, I get bored pretty easily.
Debbie Millman:
You returned home again on October 31st from a 5,000-…
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… mile trek on your bicycle to visit your siblings. Nobody knew this entire time that you were in a race against the clock, so to speak …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… and that you were expecting to die on November 1st, but you didn’t die. Did that surprise you when you woke up on November 1st? Did you think like Groundhog Day or did you-
Kevin Kelly:
No, no, that’s what I was saying, I literally felt like I was being born. When I was opening up my eyes, the experience from the visceral, from my whole body was a gift like being born. Because as I was opening my eyes and coming to, I realized that I had a future again, that I had everything. And so it was, yes, a surprise in that sense. It was … I mean, surprise is not the exact word. It was a gratitude, it was an appreciation. It was like, if you were conscious and you were born, what would that feeling be? How would you describe that? If you were, instead of being born as a baby, you were born as an adult, there would be an exhilaration that you would feel and that’s what I felt.
Debbie Millman:
You had your religious epiphany when you were 27 and you thought you only had six months to live. After you realized that you were not going to die, you created a countdown clock on your computer to count down the days you had left after figuring out your anticipated life expectancy based on some Medicaid actuary charts …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… that told you that your new projected age of dying was going to be 78.68 years old. I believe you’re now 70?
Kevin Kelly:
71.
Debbie Millman:
Seventy-one. According to the date, duration, calendar, you figured out the estimated last day of your life was now going to be January 1st, 2031. How do you think about that day now?
Kevin Kelly:
Well, so the thing about it is the good news is that my longevity has been increasing. So now, when I look at the tables, it’s like 80, 81 or something. And there’s also something about it. The longer you live, the higher your chances of living longer and then there’s medical advances. And so in some senses, in the last couple of years, I haven’t been losing any dates. I’ve actually been able to maintain the same 5,080 days. And so that’s been a bonus, some gravy, but I think I run it just to sharpen my commitment and my focus during the day, because each day, if I have 5,080 days to do everything on my list, then is doing what I am right now, is it what I want to do? And the answer is, in this case, yes, absolutely, but it helps me focus in that way.
Debbie Millman:
I went and did the same thing after reading about you doing this. I have about 10,000 days left.
Kevin Kelly:
There you go.
Debbie Millman:
I am projected to live until 91, which means only two-thirds of my life is over. I have another big chunk, a big third. What’s interesting is that my grandmother lived until 91 and her sister lived until 91. My mother is currently 81, still going.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So I’m feeling good about that and so the 10,000 days is something now I’m thinking about.
Kevin Kelly:
Well, see, you may say 10,000 days is a lot, but to me, for all the things I want to do, even 10,000 days doesn’t seem like enough.
Debbie Millman:
No, it doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Are you afraid of dying?
Kevin Kelly:
No, because I’ve already rehearsed it. I’m not looking forward to it at all. I don’t want it, but I’m not afraid of it.
Debbie Millman:
Are you afraid of anything?
Kevin Kelly:
I’m afraid of being wrong about so many things. There are lots of things that I believe that I’m sure will be totally wrong. It’s a different kind of fear, but in terms of actual things that exist today that I am afraid of, no.
Debbie Millman:
From what I understand, you haven’t been wrong about that much. I think the one article … No, no, no, the one article that I think you were really embarrassed about was something called The Roaring Zeros or something like that.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. No, there’s plenty of things I’m sure, beliefs that I have that I’m sure I’m wrong about that people in the future will look back and be embarrassed. My descendants will be embarrassed by what I believed.
Debbie Millman:
Well, fortunately, I think there’s going to be enough other good stuff to cover that stuff up. I want to talk a little bit about your use of technology. In 2010, when you wrote What Technology Wants, you stated that you didn’t have a smartphone, Bluetooth, Twitter. Your kids grew up without TV as you did. You had no cable. At the time, you said you didn’t have a laptop or traveled with a computer. Now, I know now that most of the above you now have.
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right, right, right, right.
Debbie Millman:
When did you decide to dive into social media and what has your experience been of it?
Kevin Kelly:
Right. So I have social media, but not on my phone.
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Kevin Kelly:
I have it on my desktop and that works for me in terms of hearing the people I follow or thinking about. So for me, it’s very, very useful. I have a laptop which I use when I travel, but it is primarily again just to do email. I’m an email old school person. So I don’t know, I find it pretty easy to manage or to unplug things. I know people, not everybody feels that same way, but for me, there hasn’t been a problem. We didn’t have TV in our household, not because of the content, because we were actually one of the first families that got the ISDN, and then later on, we were the first with Netflix discs.
My main objection to it was the commercials. Our kids grew up without the commercials and that was the main. And the second thing was also seeing things on our demand rather than having to watch when things were being shown. So it was this idea of content on demand without advertisements, which is streaming these days …
Debbie Millman:
Right.
Kevin Kelly:
… right?
Debbie Millman:
So the inevitable.
Kevin Kelly:
Right, exactly. That’s what we wanted. Because I do remember a great moment, when my oldest daughter was maybe eight or something, no, six or eight, she came to me and she said … Because we had borrowed a VHS tape, a Disney tape, and she came to me and said, “Daddy, daddy, there’s a program in my program.” I said, “Well, let me go see,” and it was an advertisement, interrupted her program. She had no idea what it was and we had a teaching moment about what the commercials are really about. So that was the objection. And these days, we were talking about YouTube, one of the best bargains in the world is YouTube Premium. If you don’t have it, it’s like crazy because there’s no commercials, there’s no ads on YouTube. It’s worth, whatever, I’m paying not to see ads.
And until recently, I went off of Google, which I was a very early, one of the first Google users, went off the Googles because they didn’t offer a version of Google where you paid to not see ads, those sponsored links. So I went to a version of a search engine, it was with Neeva and I’m now going to you.com where you can pay and you don’t see the sponsored ads. So I am totally in favor of controlling what you see by supporting the site in other ways than giving my attention. I’d rather give the money than give my attention.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that the complexity of social media is akin to biology …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… and that it’s not a coincidence that we speak of things going viral.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
And I’m wondering if you can elaborate a little bit more on why you feel that way.
Kevin Kelly:
I wrote a whole book, my first book called Out of Control, which was about decentralized systems and the parallels between the world of the born and the world of the maid and how when things are complex and complicated enough we can import the behavior of biological systems to manage them, to make them work, to evolve them and adapt them, to make them more alive and organic. And we’re seeing that and one of the ideas is that very large systems like the internet can have an immune system, whereas you cannot ever completely eradicate spam, but you can keep it down to a minimum, just like you have infections or you have cells in your own body. You don’t ever actually eliminate them. You just keep it down to a manageable level.
The general principle is that these systems, when we take some of these biological principles into these complicated systems, we can make them more like a living system, which makes them better for us.
Debbie Millman:
I’d like to read a quote of yours that I found in my research about the state of social media. You state, “We cannot use something for hours a day every day and have it not affect us. We have hints, but don’t really know. As we discover how it works, a wise society would modulate how this technology is used by adults and children. As we begin to understand its tendencies, harms and benefits, we can devise incentives to continually redesign the tech to enhance democracy and well-being. All this must be done on the fly, in real-time, because what we’ve learned over the past a hundred years is that we can’t figure out, we can’t predict what technologies will be good by simply thinking and talking about them. New technologies are so complex they have to be used on the street in order to reveal their actual character.”
That is one of the most cogent statements I’ve encountered about the quagmire of social media, Kevin, and I’m wondering, how can we best manage our relationship with social media? Do you believe that we are addicted and that it’s all a dopamine game and we’re all searching for constant gratification through our devices?
Kevin Kelly:
I think there’s an element to it, but I think the whole point of social media is obviously there’s more going on than just that. And I also don’t believe that everybody that is inherently addictive. I think there are categories. A lot of the studies on social media used right now is based on the US and the US is peculiar in so many ways. Other countries don’t necessarily have the same problems that we have with social media. We don’t have enough data from their use to know whether this is a human thing or just an American thing. And what we do know from the studies in health say is that you don’t want to base policy on just one or two health studies of a thing. We just don’t know enough. It’s so complicated. We need hundreds of studies before we can say, “Definitely, this or that,” and making a policy level.
And right now, we just don’t have enough studies about social media to understand where the harm is coming from exactly. And the third thing I would say about it is, whenever we’re evaluating new technologies, we always have to say, “Compared to what?” “Compared to the existing technology. So yes, dental fillings may cause some harm, but compared to what? Compared to cavities? They’re way an improvement.” The same thing with say influencing elections. I think there’s an overestimation of the role of the social media. You want to say, “Compared to what? Compared cable TV? Compared to Fox News?”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it’s interesting to think about the self-driving cars and the outrage that people had about one car accident.
Kevin Kelly:
Right, “Compared to what?”
Debbie Millman:
There are a million car accidents a year, right?
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
Something like that?
Kevin Kelly:
Right. So the idea would be, are we going to prohibit human drivers until they’re 99.99% safe. No, we’re giving a pass to human drivers that we don’t expect or the pass that we’re not giving to the new technologies. “The self-driving cars, how safe are they compared to what?” “Compared to the old. Compared to what we have right now.” And so the same thing with whatever other issues in social media like bullying. “Okay, compared to what? Compared to what happens in the middle school hallway?” And so-
Debbie Millman:
The junior high school gym in my case.
Kevin Kelly:
Exactly. “Compared to what?” So we tend to evaluate new technologies at a higher double standard than we do with the existing technology. And part of what my idea of proactionary stance to technology is that we want to constantly evaluate the old technology too. The FDA gives a pass for approval of a drug, but it should be about reevaluating it all the time in the context of new evidence and the way it’s being actually used. And so we want constant evaluation and I think we should make policy based on evidence, evidence-based policy. A lot of the policy in AI is now being made on imaginary harms. People are imagining what could go wrong. They’re imagining the harms and they’re going to make policy based on those imaginations and that’s very, very dangerous and harmful to the technology.
Debbie Millman:
Speaking of new technologies, on May 4th, 2022, you veered from the type of daily art you were posting on your Instagram page.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
Rather than making daily art on your own, you began to use AI to help make a new type of images.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
What has that experience been like for you?
Kevin Kelly:
Well, part of what I was doing for the year posting a piece of art that I made every day was I would sit down and literally have no idea what I was going to make and I had one goal, which was to surprise myself. I wanted to make something, I was like, “Where did that come from?” I didn’t know that or I didn’t have that in my mind. It came out of the drawing or painting. And that was really fun. And so then when the AI came along, it was easy to do that part of being surprised, but it turned out to be really, really hard to get it to obey you. The AIs are easy to surprise and hard to follow your orders.
And so what I’ve been trying to do is get them to go in certain directions and have things I can imagine. Surprise part is easy, but getting them to do something great is really, really difficult. They call this new art or job of prompting. You’re constantly nudging them and you’re trying to figure out what they want to hear and you’re guessing. It’s like working with a donkey. It’s really hard to get them to go in certain directions. And here’s what the epiphany that I had recently. So I’ve been making for a year, I’ve done this, I’m using Mid-Journey and Dall-e and Stable Diffusion and recently Photoshop has a built-in, which I think they’re going to open AI. But anyway, there’s the fourth one, Photoshop.
And what I realized is that there are images, art that I could imagine, but I didn’t have any words for and a lot of great art you can’t put into words. And that means that, even though theoretically the AIs could make any possible image, they cannot. These large language models cannot make art that’s not tethered to language. It’s bound to things that you can describe. So there’s this whole world of art that I have in my mind that I don’t have words for. Therefore, the AI can’t make it. I can draw because I’m able to transcend language in my mind, but they can’t. And so that was an epiphany that the current crop of AI are incapable of making images that transcend language, which is some of the best art in the world.
Debbie Millman:
I recently heard about the job title prompt engineer …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… and investigated what that was like. It still seems that all of the AIs, as you put it because it’s going to be more than one or is more than one, aren’t really self-directed and that’s what John Mato once said about the computer, the inherent flaw of the computer was that it could do nothing on its own. It had to be directed by us to do it.
Kevin Kelly:
I think that is true currently. We might see abilities to make it self-directed and the question is, well, how long will it go before it putters out or stops itself? But you’re right. Right now, that is absolutely true. There is no self-directed and what amounts there are is very limited. And that’s one of the things that I’ve also observed is that they have very short attention spans.
Debbie Millman:
But you’re having a lot of fun with it.
Kevin Kelly:
I’m having a lot of fun, but they have short attention spans. So one of the first things we want to do, I had a friend, science fiction writer, we want to make a book, illustrate a book. And the problem was is that it could develop a character and then forget about it two seconds later. It’s like, “No, no, no, come on, you need to remember this.” The new versions of ChatGPT have a little bit more memory, but they’re still just not engineered or not capable of sustaining attention over long periods of time to the same thing. So that’s another failing of them currently as they have short attention spans.
Debbie Millman:
There have been so many headlines about the future of AI in the New York Times.
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
The New York Times I think published over 60 articles on AI alone in the last 30 days. Some of them with titles including “How Could AI Destroy Humanity?,” “Big Tech is Bad, Big AI will be Worse,” and the pessimistic, “AI Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
That was an actual headline in the New York Times: “AI Poses Risk of Extinction, Industry Leaders Warn.”
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
How accurate do you think these headlines are?
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, they remind me very much of headlines. I should go back and read the New York Times when it was talking about the internet, but we’d certainly heard similar … I wouldn’t say they’re that drastic, but we did hear very dire warnings about the internet and there was, I remember, a Time Magazine cover about, “If the internet continues, spam will take over the world and destroy the internet.” They were saying, “Well, look, how much spam we have right now. If everybody has email, then spam will just kill it.” Of course, the solution was we had spam filters and that spam filters even being embedded at the level of Google. So that’s what’s happening, is that Google is basically filtering the spam before it even reaches you.
So we developed technologies to deal with that issue and that’s what we’re going to do with AI, is there are certainly going to be new problems, biases, prejudices. These are real, but we can invent technologies and solutions that will solve them. They’ll make new problems of their own. So we’re not looking forward to a problem-free future That’s utopia, which I don’t think is possible or desirable, but what I call protopia where we are going to have more problems, but the solutions to those problems are more technologies. So I’m optimistic about that protopia, not because I think our problems are smaller than we thought, but because I think our capacity to solve them is even greater.
And so that’s the missing part, is our ability to keep solving these problems that come up. And if we can never get better at it, then yes, I would agree with the pessimists, “It’s at the end. We’re done,” but the thing is that these new technologies also help us to create new solutions at an even faster rate than before.
Debbie Millman:
I came of age as a designer in that time between doing old-school hands-on …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… drafting table graphic design and then morphing and migrating to an Apple computer. And in that time, there were many, many people, older designers than I was that were absolutely vehement, that nothing creative could come out of a computer …
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
… that …
Kevin Kelly:
It was cheating.
Debbie Millman:
… this was … Yeah, yeah, and then of course, when the iPhone came out, everybody was talking about how this was going to ruin the discipline of photography. And this is another quote I found from you, “We might’ve expected professional occupations in photography to fall as the smartphone swallowed the world and everybody became a photographer with 95 million uploads to Instagram a day and counting. Yet the number of photography professionals in the US has been slowly rising from 160,000 in 2002 before camera phones to 230,000 in 2021.” So I think that you talk about the tech panic cycle and I think we’re in one of those right now with a number of different technologies.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, and we’re dwelling on AI because that is the most recent one, but there are others that cause panic cycles including genetic engineering, embryo selection. These are things that are going to come and we’ll be facing those very squarely soon, genetic sequencing of newborns and all kinds of things are going to be in front of us and there are people … Here’s the problem. The problem is that it is very easy to imagine how things don’t work. That’s entropy. That’s the easiest most probable things or things fail, things don’t work. So seeing the path where things break is easy. Seeing the path where things work in a new way for the first time is hard. It’s improbable, okay? It requires a lot more energy and effort.
And so we tend to take the easy path of just quickly imagining all the ways that these things break and are going to harm us. And going the other direction of imagining the ways in which there’s unintended benefits rather than harms is harder. And I think there are less people doing it. So what I’m trying to spend my time on is coming up with those possible paths where there’s a future ahead of us that I want to live in at least. And I think we benefited in today’s generation from people who thought about Star Trek, the communicator. What an inspiration that was for people making the iPhones. They could see it in their head, “There it was. We can make that come true.” And I think the fact that it was imagined made it easier to make it come true.
And I think it’s hard for us to really have a future that’s going to be really great unless we imagine it first. I think it’s hard to get there inadvertently. And what I’m looking for is we don’t want to ignore the problems. They need great attention and I’m glad there’s many people focused on their problems, but we just need a few more who are focused on the opportunities and who can articulate what one of those good futures might look like to help us make them achievable.
Debbie Millman:
Kevin, before I let you go, I want to talk about your new book. It is a delicious book. It is called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. And you’ve said that Excellent Advice for Living is an inadvertent book and that writing a book of advice was never on your bucket list. What made you decide to publish this book?
Kevin Kelly:
It was born on the internets and it came from a habit that I had of jotting down great sayings by other people. One, I just loved the form, the format of proverbs, just that condensation, the little kind of zip file that you have to unpack. And at some point, many years ago, I began writing down my own versions of things and it was just for the joy and pleasure of trying to compress something into a whole book of wisdom into a single sentence. And then at some point, I realized that as I was getting older that there were things I really had wished I’d known earlier. And so I thought, “Well, I should give these to my young adult children because we weren’t very preachy and I never really gave advice in that way and they would probably benefit from hearing this younger rather than later.”
So I wrote down 68 of them on my 68th birthday to give to my kids and I posted them, not expecting very much just because I’d written them and they went viral and bounced around to such an extent that I was encouraged to do the same thing a year later, 69 and 70. At some point, they made it to the New York Times op-ed page and so I thought, “Okay, there’s something here. I should put them all together in a way that makes it handy to hand someone rather than have to search through the internet to look for them.” And so it was originally to help me. I think of these as reminders, reminding myself of things in a way that I can repeat to myself that I thought would be handy for my kids to help them repeat and change their behavior.
And so some of them are just channeling the ancients and others are very practical things that probably won’t make sense in 10 years, but it could be practical right now.
Debbie Millman:
You stated that when you want to change your own behavior, you need to repeat little behavior modifying mantras as reminders and I do the same thing. I’d like to share some of my favorites from your book. Some are a little too hard, hit a little too hard, if you know what I mean, but that’s a good thing. So here’s some of my favorites, “When you are anxious because of your to-do list, take comfort in your have-done list.”
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right. The paper version of to-do list are good for that because you can see your have-dones.
Debbie Millman:
Yes, that’s why I like to check things off.
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, exactly.
Debbie Millman:
This one is really good, “A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.”
Kevin Kelly:
We are a package of contradictions and opposites.
Debbie Millman:
Right?
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
A couple of these are pieces of advice that I am taking into the podcast now in terms of how I think about things. So the next two are, “A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier,” and this goes all the way back to that thinking when I was 40 that anything I didn’t know about was not important to know.
Kevin Kelly:
Well, for me, that thing has been learning about the elements.
Debbie Millman:
Oh really? The periodic table?
Kevin Kelly:
The periodic table elements. I was shocked by how ignorant I was of the elements, these basic building blocks of the universe and elements that I had no clue even existed, their names, their profiles. It’s like, “How could I miss? This is universal. This is like any galaxy, any planet, anywhere in the world. They’ll know this, but I don’t know them.” And so I’ve been reading more and more about the elements and hearing about the history of their discovery. It’s just like I’m shocked by how ignorant I was.
Debbie Millman:
Good. That’s a good thing, right?
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
“Rule of three in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said, then again and then once more. The third time’s answer is the one closest to the truth.” So you’ll be seeing me apply that in the podcast. And then I have three more. This is something I’m working on, too: “Forgiveness is accepting the apology you’ll never get.”
Kevin Kelly:
Oh, yeah and it’s a gift to yourself.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. That’s why I said before, “Everyone will be forgiven.” “Superheroes and saints never make art. Only in perfect beings can make art because art begins in what is broken.”
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah. If people think, “Well, I can’t make it because I’m not enlightened, I’m not there,” no, no, no, no, that’s exactly where you want to start.
Debbie Millman:
“Everyone’s time is finite and shrinking. The highest leverage you can get with your money is to buy someone else’s time. Hire and outsource when you can.” I love that.
Kevin Kelly:
That took me so long to understand. As a whole earth do-it-yourselfer, everything that was like the highest quality, but when I realized that the billionaires with all the money cannot buy more time. And so it is the most precious and scarcity that we have, and getting someone else to give you their time, oh my gosh, it’s worth anything.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I think so much about time now. I don’t know if you saw the article a couple of days ago, I think it was in nature.com that scientists are beginning to believe that time immediately after the Big Bang …
Kevin Kelly:
Yeah, yeah, I saw that.
Debbie Millman:
… was slower …
Kevin Kelly:
Right, right.
Debbie Millman:
… than time now. And since the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, I’m wondering if that correlates with time feeling like It’s going faster too.
Kevin Kelly:
I asked that exact question five days ago to Brian Green.
Debbie Millman:
And?
Kevin Kelly:
So I said, “Brian, my understanding is that, from the Big Bang, the universe is expanding, space is expanding and that, compared to now, the universe was very tiny. Does that mean that time is also expanding and that, compared to now, a billion years, it went very fast?” He said, “No. So the standard theory is that space expands in time, that time is constant, the speed of light is constant, because if it wasn’t constant, the speed light wouldn’t be constant.” He says, “The standard theory right now is that, no, space expands, but time does not.” He says, “There are some other alternative theories about a flexible time, but they’re all considered not proven.” So I was very disappointed because …
Debbie Millman:
I am too …
Kevin Kelly:
… the same thing …
Debbie Millman:
… Kevin.
Kevin Kelly:
… I was thinking, “Oh, well, a billion years ago, it was only a second now.”
Debbie Millman:
That 10,000 days might just go on forever. In an interview with Tyler Cowen, he gave you a piece of advice and he said, “Tell me if this is good or bad, minimize deathbed regret.” And you felt it was good and you went on to say that the people that you respect the most in your circle are still asking themselves at 70 years old, “What am I going to do when I grow up? Who am I? What am I here for? Should I be doing this?” “That’s actually why I respect them so much because they’re still constructing their lives rather than, say, discovering it or finding it. They’re constructing it,” and I think that’s a really wonderful metaphor. And I wanted to share that with our listeners because so many people that I encounter that listen to the show are always worried about when they’re going to be able to find their purpose or make their mark or do the thing that they were meant to do. And I think that that’s a wonderful way of thinking about the long game or the long now.
Kevin Kelly:
Sure. I think that that’s a direction, not a destination, that awareness of becoming what I say the only and that it’s a lifetime duty, it’s a lifetime chore, a lifetime assignment that you’ll spend all your life to get there and it’s not somewhere you arrive. It’s like an asymptote; you keep approaching it and ideally, on the day before you die, you feel like, “Okay, I fully become myself.” So-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. People talk about making it and I say, “Why would you want to peak until the day before you die?”
Kevin Kelly:
Right.
Debbie Millman:
“You don’t want to be a has been.”
Kevin Kelly:
You don’t want to arrive up too early.
Debbie Millman:
Right. Kevin, I want to end the show today by reading a little bit more from your interview with Tyler Cowen about your new book. And this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve encountered in a while and I want to read it in its entirety. You state, “I think there is one little piece of advice at the very end which is your goal in life. Your goal in life is to be able to say, on the day before you die, that you have fully become yourself. I want to emphasize the idea of fully becoming yourself and the difficulty and the challenge to discover what that is, but how powerful it is. And that’s true whether you’re starting a company or becoming an artist or a teacher, whatever it is.
And the reason why I’m very pro on technology is that I think it enables us, helps us generally to become more of ourselves. We all have mixtures of talents that need external tools to help us express things. I am interested in increasing that pool of possible tools in the world, so that all of us have some chance to really express our genius and fully become ourselves.” And, Kevin, then you conclude by saying, “It’s going to take all your life to figure that out. Life is to figure it out. Every part of your life, every day is actually an attempt to figure this out.”
Kevin Kelly:
So thank you for helping me figure it out today.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Kevin Kelly, thank you so much for making so much work that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. It has been an absolute honor.
Kevin Kelly:
And a real delight. Thank you for inviting me.
Debbie Millman:
Kevin Kelly’s most recent book is titled Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. You can find out more about Kevin Kelly and all of the extraordinary things he’s doing, only some of which we touched on today on his website, kk.org. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.