Technology, Connected - Kevin Kelly Says This Is The Next Big AI Thing

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Kevin Kelly believes the next cultural shock won’t come from AI outsmarting us, but from it feeling something, or seeming to. He predicts that once we begin to code emotion into machines, people will start to bond with them the way they do with pets, partners, or even themselves.This isn’t science fiction. Emotional computation is already arriving: systems that respond with warmth, rejection, even guilt. Kelly argues that dependency won’t look like addiction; it’ll look like necessity. When something that shapes your thoughts never turns off, when your creativity depends on its presence, what exactly is being extended... The human mind or the machine’s illusion of it?For Kelly, this is the real frontier of AI: not intelligence, but intimacy. A technology that can mirror your feelings may never be conscious, but it will always be convincing.Please enjoy the (short) show.📺 Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel: Subscribe to our channel for more interviews like this.#kevinkelly #techinterviews

I will make a prediction, which is that the next big shock for people, the thing that will cause people to really go bananas is when we start to code in emotions to the AIs. And the degree to which those emotional values and capabilities and traits will cause people to bond to the AIRs that they're using. And not just in kind of like a her romantic way, but I mean in kind of like the way you'll be. bond with your pets and beyond, but the pets don't have conversations with you, but now they're going to, and they'll be with you all the time. People have very, very strong attachments and very strong emotional complexity and all the other things of, you know, having arguments or being rejected or whatever, the whole spectrum of kinds of things with the AIs as they become

more and more emotional. And it's really going to freak out people because people will have strong emotions about them. And that's something we're not ready for right now. It's all kind of intellectual, sure, sure, sure. But no, but no, there will be people who will live with these day and night. And people will be calling addiction, but it's sort of like having glasses, which if you need to have glasses to see, the solution is not to be upset that you're dependent on it. The solution is to make sure you always have glasses.

And we're dependent on electricity. Like if electricity went out for a week. we would be just be incapable of doing anything. And so the solution is not to be upset by it, but to say, let's make sure electricity never goes off. And with the AI, it's going to be the same thing. It's like there'll be people very soon who will really be dependent on having the AI is always on

to work with them to do their best work. And the solution not to be upset is to make sure the AI is never turned off. Don't always have that with you because that is what you need to do your best work. My glasses aren't going to manipulate my motion. my emotions to read a certain book. Right. Like that's what you're saying.

Like with the emotional, yes, that's where it's going to get scary, right? Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, yeah. The reasons why is because this is incredibly more powerful than your glasses, right? I mean, it's your mind. It's what we tend to think of us as ourselves, right?

We kind of, the ancients always identify themselves as right here. The modern person, you're here. We've migrated up. So we're associate our mind with ourselves. we're messing with ourselves. So that's, that's, that's pretty, that's pretty dynamite, you know. And so, yeah, yeah, there's definitely, and, you know, I mean, things are going to go wrong. This is the most powerful technology we've ever made.

So therefore, we're going to have the most powerful problems we've ever had. And there'll be, there'll be problems coming from the fact that these things can mess with our minds, for sure. I hope that my children have their hearts broken for the first time by a real man or woman. How do you think about consciousness in AI? I like to talk about AI's in plural because it's not a single dimension. It's not even an element. I think intelligence is a compound of different kinds of cognitive elements. And it's a very high dimensional space.

It's not just a ladder going up like decibels. It's a very big space, possibility space. of all minds and mapped ours, we're going to be at the edge somewhere. There's not a general intelligence. There is all these very, very specific different compounds. We're like a salt. And so when we start thinking about that, the thing about the AIs is that there are multiple varieties,

and we're going to make many different varieties of them and some will be quite primitive and small, and some will be much more complicated. And I think there is, you can think of these as a continuum. So again, intelligence is not just an amplitude. It's a bunch of different things. And consciousness is the same way. I think it's going to be a whole space of conscious possibilities.

And some things will have small amounts or primitive versions of it and other things will have more complicated aspects of it. And I think life itself is that. I would say, you can say that a virus has a little bit of life and a bacteria has more life. And the ant has more life, and we have actually more life than the ant. And consciousness is probably something similar to be different kinds, different varieties, different arrangements of it. It's not just a binary thing where it's there or not there.

So I would say the current LLMs have some degree of consciousness in them. But it's in the same way that your dog might have some degree of that. Like ours? No. And in fact, it's unlikely to be like ours. just as the intelligences of the AIs are not going to be like ours. That's the whole point of them. We're making them because they don't think like us. And they don't.

What the LMs are doing right now is inhuman. It's not. A human cannot do what they're doing. And so that's why we have them do it. It's because they're not human. And so the consciousness is probably not going to be a human type, consciousness, but it'll be some type. So I call these things artificial aliens.

And you can think of like Spock. Conscious, coherent, smart intelligence, not quite the same as us. But that was his benefit. Yeah, they'll be conscious to some extent. Yeah. Oh, were you just signaling the Spock sign over there, Mark? I thought you had to try. What you were doing?

Yeah. Live long and prosper. Give long and prosper.