The Jordan Harbinger Show - 537: Kevin Kelly | 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Episode Date: July 22, 2021

Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) is the founding editor of Wired magazine and author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. What We Discuss with Kevin Kelly: Technology is an extension of the natural process of evolution. What’s driving technology; what will the future look like? Why Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the biggest thing since electricity. Ways humanity will interact with future technology and AI — and how it will change our lives in ways we can scarcely imagine. How technology will actually make us better humans. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/537 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So, like, when you drive your car down the highway, with just your wrist and switch, turning a switch, you harness, you call forth, you beckon 250 horses, and they're going to run all day. Okay, now we're going to take 250 mines. They're not human minds, but there are 250 minds of some sort. We're going to add them to those 250 horses,

and that's the self-driving car. That's the AI car. So the question you want to ask yourself right now is, What would you do if you had 24-7 access to really cheap 1,000 minds? They're not human minds, but they're smart in many different ways. What would you do with that? Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people.

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These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topic. Go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. and of course I love you when you do that. Today, one from the vault. I'm talking with my friend Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable, understanding the 12 technological forces

that will shape our future. So you should listen to this if you're interested in knowing what's driving technology and what our future may look like, why artificial intelligence or AI, is the biggest thing since electricity. Yes, electricity.

And the way is humanity, this means you and I, will interact with technology, AI, and how the, this will change our lives in ways we can scarcely even imagine right now, both good and bad. And last but not least, how technology will actually make us better humans. Enjoy this one from the vault with Kevin Kelly. And by the way, if you want to know how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show,

it's always, always, always through my network. I know people think, oh, guests just fall in your lap. People send you emails. They're jumping to get on your show. You still got a network and create and maintain relationships, and you don't have to be a gross schmoozer to do it. I'm teaching you how I do this for free over at our six-minute networking course. It's free. Just go to jordanharbinger.com slash course.

And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Kevin Kelly. First of all, the book I read, which I really enjoyed, it's cool to look at predictions for things because me and my girlfriend, who you just met, we'd like to say, wait, in the future, this is probably going to be different.

And here's how it's going to be different. It's always really simple stuff, and seldom do we think, and then it's going to be like this, and then it's going to be like that. We kind of predicted, for example, that self-driving cars will obviously be ubiquitous in the future, but the kind of late 21st century gun nuts, if you will, will be the people who say, I have right to drive my car, even though the accident rate is so much higher, and they'll have arguments like, well, it's safer because humans don't make the same mistakes that this AI does when it comes to deciding how many people to run into at the same time.

Would you say that you have a science, of predicting? No. First of all, most of what's going to happen in the specifics, like a product or a company, is totally inherently unpredictable. There's only another set of larger scale, larger level forms that are in any way inevitable, and those have to do with the fact that any technology, including digital stuff, runs on physical apparatus. And the physics of this sort of governs these reoccurring patterns. And my job is sort of to look for these reencuring patterns. And I'd look for the way technology wants to be used in the sense of it's not being supervised. So it's like how criminals and outlaws use it, how kids use it, how the street uses it.

And that gives you a little bit more hint of its kind of natural tendencies. Thanks for leaning into me right when you said criminals and outlaws. I appreciate that. That's good for the brand. at the street. Yes. Morons use it this way. And it's these unsupervised ways that reveal sort of the underlying tendency or leaning that technologies have.

And they all have leanings. They're biased in certain directions. So what I'm looking for is the biases in technologies. And the biases, to give you an example, it's like copying, right? And so the thing about the Internet, it's the world's largest copy machine. It wants to copy everything. If it can be copied and it touches the internet, it will be copied. Okay?

Right. And so the bias is to copy. It copies, your computer is copying just in a day-to-day basis. When it goes across the internet, it's being copied thousands of times. That's just how the thing is set up. And so companies like music companies. Right, who want to resist. They're going against the grain because the bias is to copy.

And therefore, I say this tendency for copies inevitable. And if you want to work with the grain, do some. something assuming that things will be copied, which is what we now call viral videos. Viral videos, yeah, viral anything. Viral anything. It's like, okay, we're going to take advantage of the fact that there's this bias. And so if you're working against it, you're going to be frustrated and you're going to just postpone things.

Absolutely. And so there are other biases. And my job was sort of to say, what are some of these other biases in digital technology? And this has to be really tricky because if you look at, I'm a former finance guy and that talk about a profession that pretends to be able to predict something that can't predict, that's it. What's different about the mental models that you use versus, say, someone who is purely speculating on securities or trends in the market? Yeah. Well, first of all, again, I go back to the point is that you can't predict the specific, the particulars. Those things are much more

of the immediate ups and downs. Sure. Day traders are trying to predict. And that is inherently stochatic. It's inherently just random. And so if you're trying to make money that way, you have to have a much bigger view, much bigger framework than just trying to predict whether things are going to go up and down. Sure. And so I don't do that. I think it's not even possible. And we know actually from the studies of finances that it's very hard to beat the market

as a whole. It's pretty much impossible. Right. For a long term, more than just a few quarters or years or decades, but for the long term, everything kind of eaves out. And so I'm interested in those long-term trends. And so I'm not trying to tell you whether the iPhone 7 is going to succeed or whether you should have an Apple Watch or whether is Google going to be the dominant player in two years. Those, I think, really are inherently unpredictable.

Sure. This completely makes sense. And I do think, though, over my life, and I'm 36, so I assume you're a little bit older than that. I don't actually know. But when I was younger, I'd seen things like Yahoo come out. Or even before that, I think I was using gopher or something to find things on the internet. I don't even think that was a search engine. I think it was just a menu that some college kids had whipped up.

And I told my dad about it. And I said, look, you can search for things on the internet. And I think it was Alta Vista or Yahoo, or one of those early search engines. And I said, Dad, you've got to look at this. You've got to check this out. And he said, oh, that's kind of neat. You can find information? And I said, can we buy stock in this or something?

Because my dad bought investments in stocks and for it and things like that. And he said, well, I don't know. I'll have to look. And I kept bugging him. I kept bugging him. And he found some technologically. companies that were working with this stuff. And I said, let's buy stock in this, because then maybe we can sell it when I go to college.

And he said, Jordan, everybody's just going to the library. There are libraries everywhere. Not many people are going to use this. I know you think it's cool, but not many people are going to use this. People don't even know how to do it. Right, right. I thought, yeah, maybe you're right, but I feel like they're on to something with this. This whole search the internet thing.

Right, right, right. I constantly joke with him about this because he remembers it too. It was Yahoo, I think. And he remembers it too, because I told them later, I said, you know, Tesla, they're going to redo batteries and they're doing electric cars. And he went, well, I don't know. And I said, remember the Yahoo thing? And he went and he bought a bunch of shares at Tesla. And it went up and he called me.

He goes, Merry Christmas. I think it's made like 80 grand. And I was like, I told you. Imagine what we'd be driving. You know, if you bought that Yahoo stock. We'd be having this conversation on your jet. It's true. Well, yeah, I mean, looking back, this always hindsight is that way.

But I've been wrong about many, many things, including, like say, virtual reality, which I had the privilege to try out in 1989 and earlier. In fact, I organized the first virtual reality public access, we call a jamboree. It was called the Cyberthon. For 24 hours, you could buy a ticket and try all the VR that existed in 1989. What existed in 1989 in the VR space? The whole thing. It goggles, the glove, social, more than one person in. it was pretty good.

Wow. But I thought it was going to happen like in five years. Right. The problem was it was equivalent of $1 million today to set it up. Right.

So it's... It was just way too expensive. Like the head tracking, all that technology, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, it's a $3 chip in your phone. In your phone, sure.

Which it does accelerometer and all that kind of stuff. So that's why we have it now. That's why we have VR now is they took all these technologies which are now chips in your phone and put them into the headsterellermermine.

set and now we can have commodity consumer oriented VR, but I thought it was going to take only five years in 89. So I was totally wrong in that sense. But I mean, if you're going to be wrong on VR, getting the time frame wrong, very forgivable kind of thing, especially looking at where VR is now. Well, we don't really even know how VR works on the brain. The curious thing is kind of recursive is that the main tool for understanding and how we can get bitter VR is VR itself. VR is kind of like the biggest brain tool that we have. And we're going to discover things about ourselves through virtual reality. By using it. By using it and making it better. And the thing that I like to emphasize about VR, the reason why I think it's so important is that what you

get inside of VR is an experience. When you take it off and you come back out and you recollect what happened, you don't remember seeing things. You remember feeling them, experiencing them. And the real typical demo for VR for first timers is you put the goggles on and then they show you're in a room and then they drop off half of the room right in front of you and you're now standing on a ledge that goes a mile down. Whoa. And your brain knows that you're just standing in the room. But your body, your other kind of lower brain is in panic and your legs are shaking and you're

backing up. I'm going to die. Even though your brain, you keep saying, I'm just in a room. I'm just in a room. What it is is is the VR is working on a different. part of your brain than the conscious visual side. Sounds a little bit like LSD or mushrooms. From what I've read.

Right, right, right. Exactly. And so it's an experience. And so what you're getting is that when you have a virtual character there, this avatar, your avatar right now today may not be exactly 100% photo realistic like you, but it's giving you eye contact. It's your voice and it has all your body language and all the little mannerisms and the micro expressions on your face.

And so what you feel from that is that you were there. Even though I know that you couldn't possibly be sitting in this chair, I feel as if you were really there. I feel as if this virtual thing is there. I feel it. And that feeling is transferring the Internet of information to the Internet of Experiences. And that's what we're going to get with VR, is that we're going to have the currency as experiences, and the Internet will become this Internet of experiences. And experiences are, by the way, one of the few things that we can't,

manufacture in a commodity way, making cheaper and cheaper. And so experiences are things that we're going to be paying more and more for. We're going to move our economy to an experience economy, and this is where the jobs will be. If you want something that's going to be a manufacturer, you give it to the robots, this is a commodity, but experiences are very, very human. That's super interesting. And I can see that making a lot of sense, especially once we get the data, the kind of uploading your brain or at least getting enough data from you, if you use VR for 300 hours,

how much does that computer, that AI at that point, know about what I would do if I'm not even... Everything. And this is, by the way, my prediction, quote me on this, is that I think the biggest companies in 20 years are going to be VR companies. Because they have this data about every aspect of your life, what you're afraid of, what you're interested in, what you find fascinating, just from looking at your eyes and your dilation. I mean, they'll know you so, so well. and they're going to gather petabytes of information about you individually. And that's going to be the value. They're not going to make money selling you goggles.

Right, sure. It's the fact that you are going to be in these worlds capturing everything about these social dynamics in minute detail in a way we can't do in real life. Yeah. And they're going to have virtual economies as well where you're buying and selling all these virtual stuff. And so these VR are going to be the biggest companies in the world.

They're going to be VR companies. I can see that. I can definitely see that. And it's fascinating, right? Because people freak out about, wow, Facebook knows my birthday and it knows where I was because I took a vacation, knows of those pictures where wait until Facebook knows what types of foods accelerate your heart rate and make you happy or release dopamine in your brain. Or the VR company knows what type of people you find attractive at a visceral level versus,

I mean, they're going to be able to make things for you in real time that are exactly what you want to eat or exactly what you want to see. So that's where the money is. It's not in selling you, you know. gear. Right. At some point, the gear could be next to free, because it could be a loss leader just to get you in there. Absolutely. Yeah, it's like the Kindle. Yeah, unbelievable. I was thinking about this, and this is more augmented reality. My friend earlier here you were speaking with before the show was selling a house. And he said, you know, staging is, this thing I hadn't thought about the cost

of staging a house, which is where they put all the fake furniture in there. It's like $6 to $8,000, depending on how nice you wanted to look and how big your house is. And I said, well, we're talking to Kevin Kelly, you should tell them, you could do even the phone VR. And you could have that be completely free because they come in and they map your house. And the way they make money is every time new people walk in your house, it's like they're looking at the corner of a room and it says $350, crate and barrel arm noir. And then it's like posturpedic mattress ranges from $1,000 to $2,000. And it's like if you want that and you want it to go right there, you can go ding, ding, and then it'll buy it with your credit card and they'll come and move it in and set it up just like you saw.

Yeah. One of the first VR experiences I had in the second go around was do. doing a walkthrough of this Malibu mansion from Fort Mason, San Francisco. And I was walking through, and it was an incredibly visceral, authentic experience of, you know, walking through a house that was for sale. What does your brain do when things aren't photorealistic? Does it just kind of go into the same mode it does when you're playing a video game where the bar kind of recalibrates to, all right, this is all the input I'm taking in? Yeah.

So photorealism is, as we know, not necessarily 100% needed. and you only have to watch, you know, like a Pixar movie or something to be swept up in someone's personality and deciding that's real. But I have to also say that the photo realism is coming along very well. I saw a demo of what they call a volumetric capture, which is the technical term for doing a complete 3D capture of somebody, like you right now. Right, like where it makes the grid on me and it shows you. Well, no, 3D meaning that I can look at you from any angle up or down or back or side, but it's also you're live. It's not just a static photo. Oh, wow.

You're living. And I can see every hair in your head move and your eyelashes move. I can see the fabric on this. And in 3D and I can walk around it. That's where we are right now in the lab. Wow. It's as good as seeing there. And the belief, the feeling, the experience is total, so much that I felt

uncomfortable getting too close to that. Because you felt that you had psychological space. Yeah, the psychological space. Even though I could walk through them was like, I don't want to get that close. Right. It was a woman. It was a beautiful woman. It was like, you can see the implications of that, too. Yeah, sure. Exactly. And so it was like, I can need to step back here. You're a gentleman. What can I say? Exactly. You're right. With somebody I don't know, sure.

Yeah, sure. Plow right through. And so I think that avatars could do more than we think cartoon versions. I think we're going to be very close to having that resolution of saying this is good enough. And it won't matter at a certain point, especially if you spend 16 waking hours in the VR and then you take it off for, a few minutes to reset your eyes or get some food, if you even need to do that in 50 to 100 years, and it won't matter. That'll be the low resolution. They'll have a slang term for real life that will be sort of pejorative, right? Yeah, I think what happens when you take it off is that you realize how amazing reality is every time. I think that you'll always be able to tell the difference between a projection and the real thing, always, if you want to. Most of time you don't care,

But if you want to, you'll be able to care. And when you take it off, you just realize there's just so much else going on. And it's not just going to be the visuals. It's the smells. It's the wind. It's the quality of the experience that we have in real life. It's really going to be hard to be. So you'll appreciate reality simply as that much more real.

Yeah. It's like, oh, there's all kinds of things going on here that that's been experienced of people who've spent time in it. I could see that because we are at some level, well, at every level, evolved to realize that this is what's real and something, no matter how amazingly programmed it is, up to a point, and will still seem at some level not quite as real as what our brains think is real. When you say that in order to predict, we look where people put their time and energy without compensation, Wikipedia, Instagram, whatever, we're curating, this podcast, for example, although now I'm compensated for it,

I wasn't before. How do you know what's going to grow? And it looks like you're aiming towards what people are paying attention to, and how do you measure those trends? How are you looking at what humans are paying attention to when it's not already happening? I mean, we know Instagram and Facebook are catching on because we're on them all the time. What do you look for in terms of those types of trends? You mentioned white space. Yeah, white space is this idea that came from, I think, people studying the pattern of science is the white space is sort of the space in between things where there's nothing and there should be something. And we can kind of explore that pretty easily by the idea of AI right now. So it's like white space would be if you take, you know, AI here and fashion,

there's got to be something between AI and fashion, AI fashion, you know, I don't know what it is. That's a white space right now. That's something that's going to be filled in with businesses, opportunities, expertise at some point in the future. But right now it's empty. So it's this idea there are these empty spaces where there should be something, but there isn't. And you'd mentioned AI, especially in the book as the next 10,000 startups are going to be adding AI to literally just about anything else. Right, right. And we're going to look back when I'm old and gray saying, man, if I'd only known about adding AI to drapes, I would be a billionaire. Exactly.

The recent one is this takes something like really old-fashioned, boring, dumb taxis. We'll add AI. Sure. Uber. There you go. I heard that's on the upswing back company. Yeah, all right. But that gives you a sense of what we can do with that.

And I think there's going to be, you know, in food, furniture, toys. In a certain sense, the more unobvious and the more obscure the thing is, I think the more powerful of the transformation will be. Let's talk about what AI kind of really is. Because I think a lot of folks, and especially in the last few years before I really started thinking about AI, what that meant was something that talks. That was pretty much it. It wasn't what AI really is, which is something that.

almost thinks. Yeah, so I'd like to use the word artificial smartness because we have so much intellectual baggage with intelligence. We think we know what it is. It's the AI, you know, it's the robot, as how, whatever it is. There are many different ways to be smart and there are many different kinds of smartness. And animal intelligence is another good example.

The thing to keep in mind is that this artificial smartness is not going to think like humans primarily. How will it be different? How can we even conceive of it being different if we have to think about it. Sure. And it's different thinking. Well, right now we have an AI that's smarter than you are by miles.

That's not surprising. In arithmetic. Well, that's definitely not surprising. That's your calculator. Oh, man. Yeah, I'll give it that. Your calculator is a genius in arithmetic compared to you, right? Are we freaked out by that?

No, because it's a very narrow thing. Your GPS is smarter than you are in spatial navigation. Google is way smarter than you are in recall. It has memorized. 60 trillion web pages. Every word on 60 trillion web pages has in its head right now. It just knows it. That's how you search for it.

And so all these things are much greater than us. And what we're going to do is we'll make these AIs more complicated by adding many different kinds of thinking. But our own brains have many different types of thinking in them. Deductive reasoning, symbolic reasoning, emotional intelligence, spatial navigation, all these things. They're very complicated. Not one IQ, which is just one vector.

It's a multi-dimensional space, and the AIs that we make are also going to be the same way. In some cases, some parts of those will be greater than us, and others will be more quieter. You can't optimize everything. Right. I don't need my cat toy to be smarter than me, except in the arena of entertaining my cat while I'm trying to sleep or whatever. Right. Your car, the self-driving car, will have an AI that's not like humans. on purpose because we don't want it to be like humans.

We don't want it to be distracted. We don't want it to be distracted. I don't want my car distracted. You just want it to drive, and it's going to drive much better than humans are. As you were saying, people might complain that they don't have the right to drive anymore, and they may not, and there's lots of problems to overcome.

But in general, it will drive better than humans, and that's why we're going to have them do it because they don't think like humans. Right. And they'll probably be really lousy with a conversation, right? Yeah. And if you want a conversation, you have to have another kind of an AI.

the conversation bot. And so all these are different ways of thinking. And we're actually going to invent wholly new ways of thinking. Just as we invented new ways of flying. We didn't flap wings. We said, well, no, your way you make an artificial bird is you make a stiff wing with a huge propeller on it.

Right, not a, is that the Leonardo, or early... Yeah, or the orthocopor. The way we're going to make AI is not like humans thinking. It's like a barn door with a propeller, and we're going to make it think in a new way. And those different ways of thinking are going to be the most valuable thing about it.

And so we're going to invent for some of the hardest problems in business and in science, we probably require new types of brains to figure them out and solve them. So we're going to be working with them because we think differently than they think and they think differently than we do.

Right. So instead of a calculator that's just good for doing math, we might have a bot that shows us how to keep water clean at an optimum level across the entire planet or something like that. Right, right. You know, like when we're trying to solve,

some problems say like taxation fairness. Well, there's no perfect taxation thing because it can't be fair for seven billion people. But you might have ways to actually try and level it in many different dimensions all at once something we can't do. Right, but making seven billion different calculations. Right, right. Similar conflict. So there are some real kinds of social level, not just trivial, but really significant things that we may use this other kind of thinking to do for us. That's going to require a lot of what you had mentioned tracking, which scares the crap out of maybe half the population, the other half of the population is voluntarily wearing things like you and I are right now to track more stuff because we want this, we want to accelerate

this process. Why is tracking so uncomfortable? What is it about that us as humans just find tracking a little bit off-putting? Well, so first of all, I don't think we find it off-putting in general because you evolved in little clans. In those clans, everybody knew everything about you. If we were in the same clan, man, we would know, and we were living, we had no technology. It's like, I know everything about you day and night. It's like high school, but times 10. Times 10. Everything about you. There's no escape. You know, we're sleeping in the same big room. I mean, they literally were. And so we have comfort there. And the reason why we are comfortable with that is because it was symmetrical. It was mutual. I saw you, you saw me, you knew everything about

me. And if you get a wrong idea or I correct you, I could hold you accountable, I got some benefit from all that. Where we're uncomfortable now is when we have tracking and it's not symmetrical. In a direction. They, whoever they are, are watching me, I don't know what they're gathering. They're not accountable to me. They could be totally wrong. And I get no benefit. So that is what feels uncomfortable, is this asymmetry. And so I talk about covalence, which is restoring that symmetry so that we are watching the watchers, the watchers are watching us, there's a mutual respect and accountability.

So if something's being tracked it, I want to have access to it. I need to be able to hold them accountable for what happens with that information, and I need to get direct benefit from it. If we can do that, I think we can restore some of that covalence. Now, that is a big task to do when you have a government or a company like Google because obviously it's not symmetrical. Right. They are huge, and they know everybody's, and I don't even know me.

Restoring that kind of symmetry is a big challenge. Sure. But I think we can go a lot further to where we are by enabling that mutual surveillance. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Kevin Kelly. We'll be right back. Now back to Kevin Kelly on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Of course, getting big data companies to share data, which is essentially the industry.

that they're in could be a little tricky. It's gonna be like an arms race. Where you put your data out there first. Well, no, you put your data out there first. But what data do we wanna share? What data should everyone have access to? Is there gonna be a government oversight body that's gonna try to do this,

which let's not even go into the efficiency of that. It could be really tricky. It's gonna be tricky and we're gonna be talking about, you know, forever now. And I would even argue with some of the basic ideas of like data ownership. I don't believe you can really even own data. How is that?

I mean, you can collect it, right? but it's not yours. Well, okay, so let's take the data, the one bit thing that I am here right now. How can I own that? First of all, because I'm in a space that other people own, and they know that I'm here. So, I mean, how do I own it if they also have it too, right?

True, yeah. Okay, there's these inherent difficulties of owning bits, but also owning bits that whose meaning comes from the fact that there's more than one person, right, multiple parties. More than when stakes involved in it. And so even my heartbeat, in a certain sense,

I'm generating the heartbeat, but this device that's measuring it, they have a stake in that, too. They have some responsibilities and duties and rights from the fact that they are collecting that information. So there's many different parts, and they have some ownership of that in a certain sense. So I think the idea of a single agent owning some data, I think, is the wrong model, is what I'm saying. I think we want to think about it as like you have multiple factors, multiple agents, multiple stakeholders in every bit that's being generated. The first sort of subsection in the book, is it 12 subsections with, the first one I knows was becoming. Right. And in that we are endless newbies, which makes me feel really good, by the way, because my parents, when they look at things like iPhones, I have to, my dad just

found out there was email on his phone. He's had an iPhone for, I think, three or four years now. And my mom said, oh, just check your email on your phone. And he said, I can check my email on my phone. And, you know, we laugh about it, but that's me in 20 years, right? Unless it's everybody in 20 years, then it's okay. Well, it is everybody in 20 years. Everyone's going to be newbies. So you think, you know, you're feeling really good because you finally mastered your smartphone, but in four years, we'll have VR, and there a whole new set of gestures and logic and language that will be needed to learn anew for that. And, you know, you may be pretty cool because you just graduated, you know, Java. Well, Java is, you know, you're going to be in a whole new language. You're going to have

learn in four years or so. And then after that, I mean, not just once, but twice and three times and four times. And so we're going to be in this perpetual state of all being newbies, no matter what age we are, of not being late, of being at this equivalent starting gate, where there are no experts. There really are no VR experts. There really are no AI experts compared to what we know in 30 years. It seems like the gap between, well, for example, the 90s, if you knew stuff about computers, people were like, whoa, what's going on with the whole computer thing? My friend has a computer. So the gap between, I guess you'd call and almost not tribal knowledge,

but having technology be esoteric in some fashion, that's quickly coming to a close so fast and so quickly that now it's going to be the opposite where nobody actually has a grip on this entirely. It's just a matter of huge swathes of the population consistently learning things. It seems like we do that a little bit now. I mean, I didn't have Instagram until recently

because I just didn't want to deal with it. And finally, enough people had been tagging me and bugging me to do it that I started it. And it took me about, I don't know, 15 minutes to figure out how to use the whole thing. And even things are very intuitive on purpose to ease in this process. So I liked a photo the other day that my friend posted. And instead of trying to click the heart,

because sometimes my finger misses and it hits something else, I just tap the photo twice. And sure enough, the heart popped up. And it's like, it knew that I wanted to do that because enough people have probably tried to do that. And they said the most common functionality is alike. Just make the double tap do the most common thing. And so it seems like what you're saying is that's going to consistently grow

until you can pick up something like this as a two-year-old kid and go, huh, I know that this makes it grow and then this thing makes it shrink and then this makes it go that way and it makes it go that way. Yeah, I mean, it's very possible that we can actually have an AI-assisted U.S. design.

So the design is being developed by how people think it should be used? So there's going to be 8 million two-year-olds and that hive mind dictates how we use all of this stuff. Exactly, right, right. Yeah. Well, I mean, in a certain sense,

that's what spelling works. If enough people misspell something. Yeah, good point. That is the way it's not going to be spelled. That's true. That's true. Ask the British. We've basically done that to every word they once held dear.

Right, exactly. And, you know, I think we could almost imagine, you know, I don't know, a thousand years from now when they would spell things logically in English. Just phonetics? Yeah, right. Right, exactly. What's the, you know, lieutenant or, I don't know. L-O-O-T-E-N-T or something like that.

I don't know. I can't even spell phonetic. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the difference between chief and chef. Yeah, there's an eye in there somewhere. No, it's a CH. One is shud. The one's CH. Oh, I see what you made. I see what you made. Yeah, yeah. English is just notorious for this really illogical, irrational spelling. Yeah, we love our exceptions. Which is because it came from the fusion of French and the Latin stuff.

And here's the kicker, which many languages have the same thing. But in English, those two joined just at the... moment that we froze everything because of dictionaries, because we invented dictionaries. See, normally what would happen. Oh, right, right, sure, but it consistently evolved. It would evolve that everything was sorted out. But we invented dictionaries right at that point of this thing. So we have this frozen artifact of this incomplete fusion.

It's like we dictated it all to the Pope Webster, and he went, this is the way everything is. And if they want to make changes, now it makes news when, well, now selfie's a word. Right. I know it was a word before you put it in that dumb book that nobody buys it. anymore. Right. So the dictionaries are an artifact that will go away. Sure. I would imagine. Yeah. Other than translation dictionaries, I think. If you haven't tried the new AI translate from Google, which was released two days ago, try it. It's funny. You should mention that because I

saw an ad the other day for these earbuds that you put in and if you only speak French and I only speak Chinese. It works. And I posted this and everyone wrote, that won't work. Have you tried Google? Absolutely work. Yeah. Because the new Google Translate is now just about as good as a human translator. That's impressive. Because it used to be ridiculous. It used to be ridiculous. It was only half as good

because they were using a part thing. Now they have the new neural nets that they used to beat the GoPlayer, and they've imported that into that. So perfect translation is considered a six. A normal human can translate a 5.1, and Google can translate at 5.0.

The old one is at 3 point. That's incredible. So Scott Wilson, who on my Facebook, said, that'll never work with Vietnamese. You try that Google translate. So it only works with Mandarin in Chinese. in English right now? Try it later.

But I think the idea of having the thing that you wear, and you need to be connected online, but I think the thing that you wear that will translate for you is within five years. So I spent the last five years learning Mandarin, and what you're saying is that may or may not have been a complete waste of my time. Yeah, yeah, right.

Shoot, buhu'll. Buhuhao. Longfetian, jeet. Dang it. What about the rate of profit? and especially AI, are we going to become future blind where things are moving so fast that we just can't even keep up? Because we're no longer sort of bottleneck in the process of design and technology if AI starts to take this over. I want to emphasize again,

the AI thinks differently than humans and that we will team up with it. And there's so much that we value in our own lives that we want human relationships, which are terribly inefficient and not at all robotic. I mean, AI can be very creative. We know that right now. It's going to be very creative. There's this myth that it's not creative. Well, it's very creative, but it's creative in a different way. And we're going to use that creativity. There'll be designers and other people who will use our creativity of AI, but it's not going to be creative in the way humans are creative. And that's a relief to a lot of people, I think, but also kind of a bummer in some ways, because what if that could take off exponentially? Or do you think that's just a matter of time

until that happens as well? With the creativity? It's already happened. The AlphaGo guys who lost. They said that a move 37 in the game three, which was this amazing move, and absolutely one of the most creative moves they ever saw. In the game of Go, then the game of Go. Okay. Right. So this was the AlphaGo, Google AI, making that move. And they said, the people who knew the best, said that was absolutely one of the most brilliant creative moves ever. Okay. So it was creative. We can see them doing AI's doing painting, doing music. They can compose music that even experts couldn't tell whether it was a Mozart, composition or not. Wow. So to put this in context, the game of go is, and I might butcher this, kind of like it's Asian sort of chess-ish, checkers-ish, so complicated game that they said

AI can never do this because there's just too much going on. Right. It's too big picture and nuanced at the same time. Exactly. It was not something that was at all could be done in a mechanical way of exploring all the possibilities. There were just too many possibilities. The only way you could actually win it was to take a kind of holistic, intuitive, snap, shot of what was going on. And that's what they thought they couldn't tell the machine how to do, but this neural net from Google actually learned how to do that. And in the same way, it can translate. You know, translating is not just translate one word at a time. You need to translate the whole sentence. Right. You have to translate and you have to take in the context if possible.

And that's what it's doing now. So it's actually being creative. And the thing is, is that its way of being creative is different from, let me say, the highest or the best way the humans are. And I think what we're going to discover is that creativity is actually pretty mechanical. Creativity is actually not creative. There are a lot of aspects of creativity that are going to be very mechanical. Interesting. We will teach those aspects to the machines. It looks like an amorphous shape that only humans can do because it really is just maybe hundreds or millions or whatever of little mechanical switches flipped in different directions that make it code, almost like braille.

Well, it's like a lot of things. It's like consciousness and all. It turns out that there will be many different species of it, many different. different varieties of it. And so creativity itself is something we use in a broad term, but there's probably maybe 10, 15 different varieties. And what's going to happen over time is that we're going to evolve the kind of language to understand that in the same way, intelligence. Intelligence is not a single thing. It's multi-dimension. There are many different types of it. And over time, every person will have an idea of the different types of intelligence and thinking and creativity. Just like

30, 40 years ago, typography was a very esoteric thing that only 200 people in the world knew, the difference between Seris and San Serra's face, right? Now everybody knows. Right, because you have Microsoft Word. Right, right. So something, it's a general education in grammar school about Kearning. Sure. Right? Okay. Well, the same thing. Right now, we have no idea about the differences in creativity or intelligence, but every grammar school kid in 50 years will be able to tell you, oh, what are the 10 types of intelligence? Sure. Oh, that's a lot of, incredible, right, because it'll be so common that there are different types. Right, right, right. Right. Right. Right. There's smart people and dumb people. The 15 ingredients for creativity. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. To give people an idea of how much this is a big deal is, you illustrated this really well.

Humans used to have animals pulling plows and things like that. And then we found engines and electric equipment. Artificial power, right? Artificial power, right? So, or AP for those of you who want to follow along at home, right? And it's like, wow, we can have these things working. They don't get tired. We don't feed them. They don't die and get sick. They can live much higher. You know, we can make a skyscraper. Yeah. Right. And then AI is that times whatever exponential value because not only are we able to power things and make them strong and infinitely large, small, whatever, we're then going to be able to say, you know what? You figure out the best way to do this because you have type number 78 intelligence, which is what you're designed to do. I'll be over here not doing a thing, making sure you don't implode or something like that. Right, right. So like when you drive your car down the highway, with just your wrist and switch, turning a switch, you harness, you call forth, you beckon 250 horses.

Right. I think about that sometimes. How many... 250 horses? It's like, oh, there they are. And they're going to run all day. We'll use them to throw up a skyscraper like they're making across the street or railways or whatever.

Okay, now we're going to take 250 mines. They're not human minds, but there are 250 minds of some sort. We're going to add them to those 250 horses, and that's the self-driving car. That's the AI car. So the question you want to ask yourself right now is, what would you do

if you had 24-7 access to really cheap a thousand minds, they're not human minds, but they're smart in many different ways. What would you do with that? Start solving problems or start horsing around? Probably both, I'll be honest. Do something. I mean, you could take the taxis and make Uber. You could add them to the drapes.

What would you do with a thousand minds that you could beckon at any time and work for cheap for as long as you want? What could you do? And that's the second industrial revolution. And the people who figure out how to apply the mines are going to be the people who are the Andrew Carnegie's. Right. And I kind of refer to her.

I talk about, well, you know, this is the formula for the next 10,000 startups, take X and add AI. But because AI becomes a commodity. But if it's a commodity, you also have the reverse problem, which is, well, everybody has access to it. So it's actually take AI and add X. In other words, it's what you do with the AI. It's the interface for it.

Because anybody can buy AI just like you can buy electricity. So it's not going to be no differentiation. You have to do something special. You have to have a particular story and interface something in addition to the AI. So it's going both ways. Can you give us examples of how this might work in general fields like medicine or construction or real estate or something? Medicine. It's already happening.

I just talked to a guy last night doing diagnostics. So right now, an AI can do pretty good. medical diagnostics. It's not as good as a human, but by the way, if you're in Africa and don't have access to a doctor and could get this on a phone, it's like a thousand million times better than no doctor. Sure, sure. And eventually it'll be better than a human doctor with no AI. But the best diagnostician medically today is not an AI and it's not a doctor, but it's a team of AI and an doctor. And so that is what will continue. But if you don't have that, again, And this AI by itself is better than no doctor at all.

And that's happening very, very, very rapidly. There's a lot of legal issues which will prevent it from happening as quick as it could. The FDA wants to be involved. Of course. So this all happen overseas. So we can have, yeah, I was going to say medical tourism where I go to China and use their AI. Right. And everybody says, oh, I heard those can kill you.

I saw it on Fox. Those robots, they put them inside you and they take over. That's the email I'm going to get from my mom in five years. Don't use the AI diagnostics. Right, right, right. There's something insidious about it. They're trying to kill off all the Armenians, right? Right, yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's going to be something like, be careful, you're 116th Armenian. Wait a minute, what? I'm Googling this. Why does my mom not want me to go to the doctor? Photography is something that you're passionate about. How is this changed photography? It's already changed photography. I mean, the reason why your cell phone is a camera is because of computation.

So computational photography is replacing heavy lenses and dark rooms with bits, and that will continue to go forward. There's even a possibility of having a lensless photography. That just does computations, that replace the lens? What the lens does, you know, there's a sensor and there's a lens, and it's focusing the light, and you have to point it in the general direction. But you could take a flat sensor on, put it out on the table, and it gets the light from every single part of the room, but they're all different lengths. If it was smart enough, that lens could

reverse engineer the entire room. Right. The sensor can reverse engineering the whole room. Without even the lens. And then it just shows you what everything looks like based on mathematical calculation. Right. It reconstructs the entire room just for the fact that this little pixel here will get light from different directions compared to the one next to it. So it's like an insane amount of computation. But it's theoretically possible. So what that means is that in a certain sense, anything could become a camera. Sure. Man, that's going to be cool to put something like that in space and be able to see

1,000, 10,000, a million times more things than we can see now with Hubble. Right. Because of this technology. That's going to be how we discover things that are mind-law. That's one way where you make it even more sensitive to photons. That's a separate thing. But that is another possibility, which we can send them into space. But VR, this idea of having a volumetric capture in real time, will keep, will occupy

photography for a long time. And then the other thing that AI is going to change photography is right now, if you upload all your photos to Google, the Google AI will search through all your photos and tell you. You can say, show me all the pictures of my mom. Oh, cool.

And it'll just get you all the pictures of the mom. You don't have to tag them or anything. What I've always wanted to do, and I'm waiting for somebody to make this on Facebook for literally 10 years, I want to find all the people in the world that look pretty much exactly like me with different haircuts.

You could do that too. Is that possible even now? there have to be just sheer probability. There's going to be people who live in China, people who live in Russia, people who live in South America, who basically look like me with hopefully a better haircut.

So Facebook says they have the technology to do that. In fact, Facebook says that they have the technology that could identify every human on Earth, even if they're not on Facebook, just because they had their friends probably. Sure, someone got a photo of that. And they tagged them.

That's incredible. But they don't really want to do that because they don't think that's their business and they were somewhat afraid that they would be forced to do that on a regular basis by three-letter agencies. Sure. Well, China can do it first for their own government, and then somebody could say, you know, we can market this, and then we'll all be using that licensed version of what that is. So that's possible now. That's incredible. That's possible now.

But even if you go onto your, upload your own photos, which I've uploaded almost 200,000 photos to Google, and I can search for anything in any of my photos. That's so cool. I could say, like, show me all the photos that have, like, apples in them. There they are. Really? Show me all the photos that. I remember there was this guy with a pirate hat. There it is.

Oh, wow, that's incredible. Right. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Kevin Kelly. We'll be right back. I just want to thank you for listening to this show. I love the fact that I hear from you all the time. I love the fact that I'm able to be in your ears. A lot of the time here, the highest compliment y'all can give me is that you listen to this.

And we put a lot of work into it. And by the way, the sponsor, all these codes, all these URLs you hear, I don't expect you to remember those. We've made it convenient. We've put them all in one spot. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. All the promo codes, all the deals are right there.

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Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find all those. And don't forget, we've got worksheets for many of these episodes if you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show. They're all in one easy place as well. The link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of my conversation with Kevin Kelly. That ties together the world in a really cool way. The other week, I got an email from somebody who said,

hey, this is random, but literally 10 years ago almost now, we did a show on the radio where we were doing, it was an article about Halloween or something like that, and we did a show about it. And we found some guy with a Halloween costume on that he had made that was an ingenious beer keg that he had a drinkable spout, and it was hilarious. And we took that picture and we uploaded it.

And last week or so, somebody said, hey, this is weird, but do you know the guy in the photo? And I said, no, we just got on the internet. And he goes, dang, you know what, it's my brother, and we're looking for his friends, and he'd passed away and we don't have a connection with his life and we were hoping maybe you knew him.

And he goes, I just can't believe I found this picture in your article because he wasn't looking for the picture. He wasn't looking for his brother. He was just reading an article. And it's like if you're looking for somebody and you can type in or upload a photo of them that you have of them as a kid

and a computer says, well, this is what they would look like now. This person lives in another country. I mean, you could track people in a way that's just unprecedented. Well, actually, the Google face recognition will recognize people independent of their age. Really? How does that, so there's certain things that don't change? So he had pictures and he tied to his daughter and when he uploaded his earlier pictures of her when she was really young, it recognized. That's so cool. Oh my gosh. So we're very close to this point where the AIs can

understand photos and remember everyone that's ever seen. That's the thing is they will remember every single photo and everybody in every single photo forever. This reminds me of when smartphone or phones in general that you fit in your pocket you know how no one knows phone numbers now just nobody does and that you should maybe she'd learn at least one right and you don't know how to navigate anywhere well maybe you do and i i barely do but i'll tell you right now a lot of my friends especially younger ones they couldn't find their way out of a paper bag because they have GPS all the time is recognizing people going to be something that we eventually stopped doing like you look familiar it's your mother jordan come on my phone's not with me sorry i've

I left it in the car. Well, my glasses. It's your glasses that's going to do it, right? So it'll say, this is Kevin Kelly. You met it, so, so bad. I want it right now. Because I had gone to conferences and the next day. I'm sorry, what was your name?

Never again. That'll never happen again. It'd just spend an afternoon with him. It's terrible. Yeah, you'll know his name, his wife's name, his kids' birthdays. And the salary? Yeah, and where he went on vacation. Exactly.

And if you're one of the guys who likes to break things and set them up, you'll be able to add your own notes or you'll be able to crowdsource stuff. Yeah, right, right. Jane thought he was a real jerk. She went out with him three. years ago, here's what happened. Would that change behavior? Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Hopefully for the better. Yeah. You're always on your best behavior because something that happens with you and I today is going to come back in 10 years with a mutual friend long after. This is that covalence that I'm talking about. Yeah, we've got to be careful. Remember, next time you feel like acting up with somebody, covalence. Just remember.

And we're training this AI every day, right? Absolutely. Every time I surf. You think you're surfing around, clicking on random things, but each time you click, you are training the AI. Yeah, man. Will AI replace us largely or will help us become better humans, mostly?

Right now, a lot of the tasks that we do in our lives where any kind of tasks where efficiency and productivity as an issue goes to the bots. But a lot of the things that we value the most, like innovation, science are inherently inefficient because we have failure after failure after failure. So those are the things that we're going to gravitate to and human experiences and interpersonal relationships,

which, by the way, are inherently inefficient. Those are things that we will continue to do because we like other humans. But we're in San Francisco. I don't know if everybody shares that same view, right? This is Silicon Valley. Not everybody likes other humans. No, we all like other humans in the end.

Some of us like machines too. Yes, I guess that's true. I think that people forget is that we're going to invent so many new things that we want done with the aid of the AI and the robots. They will inspire us, force us to invent new things that we want done, that we want to happen. And these new things will be new jobs for us. And so there will be so many more new things to do and jobs than before. So they'll just be different jobs. It's not like the freak out that

we had when we have an assembly line. Oh my gosh, we don't have to hammer these things into place anymore. All these jobs are going to go away. They're just going to become different jobs or evolving. The most common job in America right now is truck driver. And what's going to happen with a lot of the truck riders? Well, some will have to be retrained, but a lot of them are going to have to keep those trucks going. Sure, they'll turn into repair them. Auto truck mechanics. That'll be a huge thing just to, you know, they'll think differently. They'll be all kinds of things necessary for them to do that we don't do with them right now. It's even possible. I was kind of imagining this. There might be people who actually ride around inside of them, maybe because in the beginning there'll be certain parts

that they can't drive. Right, it won't be too tricky. They'll be too tricky. Or maybe they're like pilots when they come into the harbor. Right, sure. You have pilots that just get in and they drive it there and they give it back. So maybe they hang out at these tough intersections or whatever it is. They're just watch this and then it's going to beep and then they're going to put this on pause. Yeah, right. Back down the switchback trail. Yeah, yeah. Incredible. So I think we haven't even begun to imagine all the ways in which we're going to. going to participate in this, but there are going to be so many new things for us to do. Elon Musk and Sam Harris and other guys like that have this fear of AI. Do you share this sort of,

uh-oh, what happens if it gets too smart thing? Well, the idea there is that you have this intelligence explosion. We make an AI. They can then itself design an AI smarter than itself, which then can make something smarter than itself. And you have this infinite regress upwards where it suddenly kind of explodes and becomes God. That's the vision. And of course, then if you're God, you don't need humans. I think that has a probability greater than zero, but it's very, very unlikely for many reasons. And I think the main fallacy that makes, again, is this idea of a single dimension in intelligence. Right, a general intelligence. Because as I said, AIs are already smarter than us in these other. Right. I'm not afraid of my calculator. I can leave it alone

with my fiancé. And so this is the idea that you have this sort of general purpose. And it's also, the intelligence is infinite, which is a very interesting idea that we have no evidence for. Right, right, true. That intelligence, unlike, say, speed, speed has a limit, speed of light, temperature has a limit, coldness has a limit. Why do we think intelligence doesn't have a limit? Right. It's kind of like the Greeks, ancient Greeks, everything over, I think, a thousand, they said infinite in all the literature, because they were like, who's going to need a count higher than that? Right, right, right. So we're kind of at that point where if you can't see it, because it's over the horizon, you just think, wow, it must just keep going forever. Exactly. But we don't have any

evidence at death cycle. Right. It's like the flat earth, right? Right. Right. And then, oh, it's a sphere. Oh, that makes so much sense. Yeah. So is intelligence spherical? Yeah, I don't know. Outside my pay grade right now. Exactly. Robots farm and they manufacture better. Do you think they're going to be doing the white collar work at some level? I mean, I'm a former attorney. I think that a really smart Monkey could have done a lot of what I was doing. Certainly I can see AI going through 8,000 legal cases in a certain district and saying, guess what? This is the outcome. They do now. That's the thing I'm not a lawyer anymore. That's one of the biggest things of AI in the law field is going through evidence. In a way that the humans simply couldn't. You can't just memorize, but they can actually

memorize every single page in 10,000 documents. And so that's already happening. The concern that people have was what if they're starting making decisions? What if you have an AI judge? What if you have an AI making some kind of decisions that affects people's lives? And by the way, that's already happening too. How's that? They're using AIs and making mortgages. Oh, I see. Yeah.

Okay. Sure. Which have a huge effect on people. And there will be even more so. Right now, the Army is really interested in having drones who kill people, having them be autonomous. So that we don't have a guy in Nevada deciding whether or not to do it. That seems a little, I mean, that, this really does something to me.

Right. Okay. And so here's the argument. for no AI will ever be accused of a war crime. Right. Because we'll make their ethics or decision completely waterproof. And so they will be less emotional about it. They will be much more rational.

They will follow the orders all the time. And if you have orders that you agree with, then that's what you'll get. And so in a certain sense, you're kind of relieving the humans of some of this messy decision. You realize this is literally how SkyNet started, right? Exactly. Right. This is exactly what happened. Right.

Trust me, it's going to be safer. Right. But, of course, that also presupposed that it was a generalized AI, which is what you said is not something that we have to worry about. No, you have one just manufactured it's all. Right. It's not general. That's not general at a purpose at all. That's why it's scarier than a calculator.

Right. Because it has missiles on it. Right. Exactly. But it's his only job is. It's not to do anything else but to kill. And by the way, if you're going to have soldiers, isn't that what you want? I'd rather send a robot into battle than my neighbor.

or my kid. Right, exactly. Yeah. So the ethics and morality is something that we're going to have a huge or should be having this huge conversation about. And I don't think that's, I mean, that's just the beginning of the conversations.

That's not the end. But I will say is that, of course, if the U.S. doesn't do it, which they're thinking about China and Russia will. Somebody else will do it. Somebody else will do it. Right. It's like saying, hey, these nuclear things

are really dangerous, which should stay away from that. Wait, is everybody going to abide by that? Probably not. All right, get to work on these things. So people ask me if I'm worried about anything in technology and this is what I'm worried about, is the weaponization of AI and cyber warfare and cyber war

because we have no agreed rules. We have no consensus among all these big superpowers, what the rules should be. Is it okay to hack into a nation's banking system and take it down? Is that like chemical warfare or is that like, you know, that's just war? Fair play. That's just fair play. What about, you know, taking out the traffic lights? It's like we have no rules at all.

about what's acceptable. And even though the U.S. has offensive cyber hacking and China and Russia and Iran and Israel, nobody is admitting to it, and therefore there's no consensus on what's acceptable. Right. We're kind of in that rape and pillage phase where people used to go and burn down the whole village

and it's like, why did they do that? That was unnecessary. We're kind of there with cyber warfare. Well, it was necessary because, you know, they wanted to show strength. Sure. They had the justification. Right.

But we've come to say, no, that's unacceptable. women and children, unacceptable on killing them, or chemicals, maybe mines to some extent, but we should be. So we don't have the equivalent right now in cyber, partly because it's really hard to verify. Yeah, quantify it. Exactly. Verify who's done it. But also because it's also new, and we don't have these equivalencies right now in our money. Yeah, it's hard to say taking out the electrical grid during the wintertime in Michigan was as severe as just carpet bomb in Detroit. But it kind of, maybe it has the exact same effect in terms of human minds.

Right. And so I do worry that we might have or endure a huge disaster first before it kind of forces a demand for this. Sure. I can absolutely see that. And you outlined the seven stages of robot replacement. Am I getting that right? It was something like I did the first three in my head, which is, oh, that's never going to happen. That was stage one, I think, right? There was a Pew survey of the internet did this very large-scale survey, which I replicated at my book launch, was 200 people from Silicon Valley. And it's important to remember that they're from Silicon Valley. And I asked the same question that the Pew asked. And I said, how many people here would agree with the statement that in 50 years, 75% of the current jobs would be gone? Because

150 years ago, 70% of Americans were farmers, less 1%. So basically, 70% of all American jobs were gone, were completely eradicated by technology. How many people in this room think that in 50 years from now, 75% of all today's jobs will be gone? And it was almost universal. Everybody said, yes, I think 70% in 50 years. And then I asked the follow-up question, which Pugh said, how many people here would agree with the statement that in 50 years your job is going to be gone? Right.

Nobody. Right. Nobody. Of course. So they think all everyone else's job is going to be taken by him. Poor bastards. But not my job. Luckily, I'm smarter than that. I knew that.

I knew that. Come, so I coming. Well, I think Jordan Bot would do pretty good. He probably wouldn't have to pee halfway through every single show, which is fine. I mean, that's an improvement if I've ever seen it. It's true. I mean, I guarantee you, if you ask any lawyer right now, if a robot can do their job, I would say that a much greater percentage than half is going to say, well, probably not what I

do because it's a little more nuanced, but some of my first year and second year associates, those people are definitely going to be screwed, you know, in 20 years. I can see that for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I really like about the future, according to the future according to Kevin Kelly, is personalization of everything. A lot of people are kind of scared of this. Oh, I saw an ad for a jacket on Facebook and I was just looking at it. That's creeped me out. I love that. I think that's one of the coolest things that we're going to see. And you took it a step further, which I thought was even more amazing. I was taking my vitamins this morning, for example. And I took, I don't know, some sort of multi-thing is liquid and some garlic and the fish oil and an oregano or whatever.

But you're saying that in the future, it's going to be able to look at my DNA and say, or my metabolism or some combination of factors and say, all right, your multi has exactly this and none of that. And you're taking exactly this amount of this and none of this other stuff. And you might be able to even use 23 in me and order this combo from Amazon in the future. Pretty soon we'll probably be making them at home day by day. Exactly. There's this guy in Silicon Valley who has a startup that is, he called it 3D pill printing, but it's actually more complicated. It has to do with quantified self stuff where you're monitoring your own health, not just health.

Nanobots in your bloodstream or something. I mean, there's so many things right now. There's even ways to actually do blood tests without pricking you. One way is to actually look at, measure your exhalations. Turns out that when you exhale, you're actually exhaling a lot of body chemistry. and all the way is a way to actually suck blood through your skin without pricking it in a very tiny amount so that you can actually measure. So you can do kind of like ongoing blood tests things that right now are done very infrequently and are expensive but tell you everything about your blood.

So imagine if you had some kind of thing at home where you had any kind of supplements or treatments that you were taking all in bulk. And each day you would make one pill. It would take all the things you were supposed to take and take it one pill. and you would take it, and then your sensors would measure the results in your body, the changes. Sure. And it would send it back to the pill machine so that tomorrow is going to make, readjust the dosages. Right.

Oh, you've got too much iron before lunch. We'll have that release a little slower. Right. And so we'll remix it. So you have this daily personal therapeutic just for you. Great. That's where we're going with this kind of stuff. Too busy to have lunch?

Try this Wi-Fi backpatch that sucks your blood through your skin, measures, what you need and manufactures it for you. Exactly. Might want to work on that copy. So if we have all these medical gears, we've got all this personalization, our health care is going to be great, our lifestyle is going to be great,

hopefully a lot safer. Are you worried about overpopulation at all? Oh my gosh. No, I'm worried about underpopulation, severe underpopulation on a global level. There are a couple countries in the world that I spend a lot of time in, like Japan, where deep population is a real issue.

Every official UN projection that we've seen has one version of it where the population peaks out in, I don't know, whatever it is, is 2070 or somewhere. There's a peak population. What's interesting about all those curves is they never show you the other side of what happens on the other side. Here's this scary thing you've got to look forward to. It stops right here, but it's like, okay, what happens to the other side is it goes down, down, down, down, because you have basically low fertility below replacement levels throughout the world. And all this begins in the developed countries, but it's happening very rapidly, even in the developing countries.

In China is aging faster than the U.S. Okay, Mexico is aging faster than the U.S. The U.S. is sort of an exception for only one reason. Immigration? Immigration. Really? The U.S. would be in the same state as Italy and other countries if we didn't have immigration. So that's another reason, for many good reasons, to have immigration, because we'll have a positive

fertility rate. So send us your huddled masses as long as they're under 30. Exactly, right. So some people would say, well, that's really good for the earth because we have less people, less stress on it. But here's the thing. Throughout history, throughout the entire 10,000 years of recorded history that we know about, every time there was rising standards of living, it always was accompanied by increasing population. Oh, I see. Okay. We have no evidence anywhere.

There have been increasing populations and decreasing standards. But there's never been increasing standards and decreasing population. Because basically, the more people you have, the more mines you have, the more of a market you have, etc. So we have no evidence, no experience with increasing standards and decreasing population. So do you think our standards will potentially decrease when the population goes down? So one idea is, that's one idea. The second idea is we have to have a new kind of capitalism or a new kind of a market. Third idea is, well, we make artificial mines.

And they will buy stuff or, you know, who knows? The main point is that we're in uncharted territory, that we don't know. Because imagine this, you're in a business where every year there's fewer and fewer people to buy, fewer or fewer workers to work on it. Your market is smaller and smaller, no matter what. No matter what, yeah. So, like, how do you increase prosperity over time? And so AI may be part of that?

Maybe. But you and I will be dead by then, so it's your problem now. Kevin, thank you so much. Hey, it was really great. Likewise. Really great. Thank you. I've got some thoughts on this one as usual, but before I get into that,

behavioral economist Dan Ariely shares the hidden logic that shapes our motivations and helps us understand what makes us tick. Here's a preview. I think that we used to think that the big mysteries of life is, you know, what's in the stars and maybe microbiology, and of course these are big mysteries. But the human mystery is wonderful. And even though it's just in front of us, there's so much we don't know. We operate as if we know how the world works,

but because our model is wrong, we inflict more pain and increase suffering. I think it's true for lots of things. What is our understanding? Think about how we waste our time. Think about how we waste our money, how we waste our health. my mission is to do kind of good social engineering. And I think there's just a ton of progress to make. And sadly, we're not doing it in the right way.

I think we're actually going backward. And the process of social science in which we try different things and try to measure objectively what's going on and attributing and trying to improve things over time, I think it's a wonderful process. So when people read or listen or think about those topics, I think the real benefit is to say, what can I take for my life?

What are the things about my life that I'm not observing? Can I be a bit better in observing my own life? Can I try to implement something? And then hopefully also can I try to experiment with something? Is there something I would like to try out in a few different ways and see what leads to a better outcome? For more with Dan Ariely on one of the best productivity tools around, what will help you utilize the most productive hours of the day

and why even the best of us lie and cheat sometimes, check out episode 417 on the Jordan Harbinger show. Thanks to Kevin for this, super fascinating guy, very fascinating research, really AI being the thing we add to everything, just like electricity was the thing we added to all of our machines. That's big news. That's a big revelation for me. And the fact that that's happening in our lifetime is really something special, right?

You know, during our parents' lifetime, there was Internet. That was probably also your lifetime, too, depending on how old you are. But electricity was around forever before that, right? So this is a really, really big deal. And I hope to hear a few of you, future billionaires, doing something that includes AI and really change in the world. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget, you can thank Kevin Kelly on Twitter. We'll have that link in the show notes,

as well as some of the other resources mentioned on the show, including, of course, his book, The Inevitable. And if you do buy books from our guests, please use the links in our website. It helps support the show, even if you're overseas, even if you're getting a Kindle version or whatever, I think we get a little, you know, dime in the jar, so to speak. So please do use those website links.

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