The Tim Ferriss Show - #96: Kevin Kelly on Artificial Intelligence and Designer Babies
Episode Date: August 7, 2015Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) returns to the podcast due to popular demand. Kevin continues to be perhaps the Most Interesting Man in the World. He is Senior Maverick at Wire...d magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a non-profit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. In his spare time, he co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, writes bestselling books,and serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation. As part of the last, he’s investigating how to revive and restore endangered or extinct species, including the Wooly Mammoth. As usual, Kevin's responses and answers are fascinating. For all links, show notes, resources from this episode, please visit fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This podcast is brought to you by Vimeo Pro, which is ideal for entrepreneurs. In fact, a bunch of my start-ups are already using Vimeo Pro. WealthFront uses it to explain how it develops personalized investment portfolios. TaskRabbit uses it to tell the company’s story. Twitter uses it to showcase Periscope. Why are they using it instead of other options out there? Vimeo Pro provides enterprise level video hosting that typically costs thousands of dollars for a tiny fraction of the cost. Features include: Gorgeous high-quality playback with no ads Up to 20 GB of video storage every week Unlimited plays and views A fully customizable video player, which can include your company logo, custom outro, and more You get all this for just $199 per year (that’s only $17 per/mo.) There are no complicated bandwidth calculations or hidden fees. Just go to Vimeo.com/business to check it out. If you like it, you can use the promo code “Tim” to get 25% off. This is the deepest discount you will find anywhere for Vimeo Pro. This podcast is also brought to you by Mizzen + Main. These are the only “dress” shirts I now travel with — fancy enough for important dinners but made from athletic, sweat-wicking material. No more ironing, no more steaming, no more hassle. Click here for the exact shirts I wear most often. Don't forget to use the code “TIM” at checkout. Enjoy!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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optimal minimal at this altitude i can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking
can i ask you a personal question now what is your appropriate time
i'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton
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Hello, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. And welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss
Show. This is an AMA episode featuring the one and only Kevin Kelly. So Kevin Kelly,
I've said this before, might be the real life most interesting man in the world.
He is senior maverick at Wired Magazine. He was founding editor, so I suppose co-founder.
That was in 1993.
He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on Earth.
That's not a joke.
In his other spare time, he writes bestselling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation.
And he's a fascinating guy. So imagine, if you will, trying to revive and restore endangered
or extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. Yeah, he does that too. So anyway, I have a
previous interview with Kevin Kelly, which is in three parts. It's very long and we delve into
all sorts of fascinating stuff
and his background and so on. So I encourage you to check that out. That's fourhourworkweek,
all spelled out,.com forward slash Kevin. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com forward slash Kevin.
This episode, however, this AMA, meaning Ask Me Anything episode, which is comprised of your
questions that were voted up on Reddit.
And if you want to see future submissions like this,
you can just go to reddit.com,
R-E-D-D-I-T.com forward slash R forward slash Tim Ferris with two R's and two S's.
That's where I'll be putting up more of these polls where you can submit questions and vote them up and so on.
In this episode,
we touch on we, I say the Royal royal we, meaning Kevin, on a bunch of stuff.
Whether that is AI, artificial intelligence as a service like electricity.
There are a couple of questions that I really enjoyed his answers to.
Specifically, what's the threat that no one is expecting?
I think a lot of people will be surprised by that answer.
His thoughts on startups over his 30 plus years of watching them.
What is he afraid of?
Does he think the singularity is going to happen?
And designer babies, which I also really, really enjoyed.
There is a question about me in there that I swear to God was not a plant,
but you'll notice it when it comes up.
Did not ask to have that one put in. All organic. In any case, Kevin Kelly is a close friend.
Much like the interview that I did with Rick Rubin, Kevin is very subtle in some ways. And
what he says has kind of layers upon layers. So listen to some of his answers.
And there are certain things that sound very short
and perhaps even obvious in some cases
that if you contemplate for a minute or two
are actually very profound
and have immediate applications in multiple areas.
So that's all I'll say for now.
I hope you enjoy this.
It is a different type of
episode. Let me know what you think at T Ferris on Twitter and certainly also say hi to Kevin
on Twitter. He is at Kevin to Kelly. So Kevin, the number two Kelly. And that is all I'll say
about that. Please enjoy round two with Kevin Kelly.
Well, hello, innovators, self-improvers, travelers, fans of Tim Ferriss, citizens of the future, and redditors.
This is Kevin Kelly.
Thank you, Tim, for having me on. Another part of your podcast.
It's always a privilege and pleasure to be part of your never-ending quest for betterment.
I have before answers to.
As usual, the quality and volume of quiddits is really amazing. It's as par with Reddit.
The intelligence is really sterling, and I could answer almost every one of these, but I really do want to leverage our time here.
And so I've gone through and marked 15 or so, maybe a few more that I think would be useful. So I'm going to read the names of the people who have asked the question, but in the kind of way in which a lot of these handles are deliberately ambiguous, I'm sure to garble some of these in trying to pronounce them.
So my pre-apologies.
I hope you know who you are.
So first off, a question from Zero Style. If you had to invest your entire
life savings into one area of technology today, which would it be? Zero Style, that is just a
really, really bad idea. You don't want to invest your entire life savings into any one thing.
Hundreds of studies throughout the decades past have shown that by far the best investment strategy
is to have something that's much broader and not as much of a lottery as taking all your things into one specified investment, even an area
of technology.
It's just not a very good idea if that's actually what you're attempting to do.
But if you were thinking of this in more of a metaphorical way in terms of a way to answer the question of where should you put your energy or
where should you look to do some investing of part of your savings, then I would combine this with
two other questions that people have asked. One is a question from Letters for Reddit, who asks, What future technology do I think will have the most impact on our lives that we don't see coming?
And a question from The Plank Constant, who asks,
What do you see as today's low-hanging fruit in tech or Internet
that will be analogous to the dot-com domain names in 1985.
And so I think I have a single answer for those three questions,
which is sort of like what's the next big thing that one might invest either money or time into.
The thing that I'm most excited that I think is really just about coming is AI, artificial intelligence.
And this is the AI that would be a service, something that you plug into and get, not something necessarily that is roaming around in a robot head, but it's closer to web servicing
or maybe even electricity where you just purchase it and then use it in your product or service.
And so this is in many ways kind of a very boring enterprise level arrangement.
It's not necessarily consumer.
But I think like electricity 100, 150 years ago, it will transform everything.
And there's tons and tons of opportunities to take this utility and make it useful and into a business of some sort. And there aren't really that many big companies that were generating electricity that made money.
It was more the companies who made appliances, services, gadgets that depended on electricity where the wealth was made.
And so I think the same thing that there may be only a few companies actually creating the AI
that's being sold, but there are a thousand to 10,000 different opportunities to take
that commercial grade AI that will be coming along very soon and using it in some ways to make
something new and exciting that hasn't been made before. And so the question is like, well, what can I take where I can add some intelligence to it,
either a human-like or an unhuman-like intelligence, and make it interesting and useful?
And there's almost no end to that.
And so in that very broad landscape, I think there are many, many opportunities. And I think that it's
completely unknown and unsettled, but it's also maybe not something that's going to happen
next year or the year after that. There actually is very few demos of AI that really are convincing right now. There's many hints of it.
So this may be still years away. And if you were investing your life savings in it,
you're going to have to go in for the long term. And if you were going to invest into it as a career, I think it's still something that you would have to understand is going to be years from now before it even has a huge demand for it.
So AI is what I would say is the next frontier.
Question two from W Luft.
What is something, a certain habit, skill, hobby,
that you believe can have a life-changing impact for most people?
I think if you can read 10 books a year, all the way through, beginning to end,
books of your choice, it would really
change your life.
And believe it or not, that's actually a big thing for most people, particularly younger
people today, to actually accomplish.
Every year, read 10 books, and your life will be changed forever.
Question three. What current technology used by Western society would you like to see
become obsolete in the next 10 years, and why would you like to see it out of circulation?
That's a question from What Comes Up Must. So I'd like to see the gas-powered, petrol-fueled, combustible engine disappear.
There's almost nothing that it can do that is not done better by an electric motor.
And there's fewer moving parts. It's simpler. It's more powerful in most cases.
It integrates easier to the rest of our lives.
Deplution is not direct.
It's actually kicked downstream a little bit to the generation of electricity, which can be made much more ecological.
And so all around it's better,
and I think I don't have to do very much
because I think it's on its way out anyway right now
just from the general trends in improvements
in electric motors, brushless motors, batteries.
And so I think we're near a tipping point
where all of a sudden,
I think petrol motors are going to be scarcer and scarcer.
Electric motors will become more ubiquitous.
And we see this happening in places like China where I go a lot.
And an entire city will have only electric motor scooters.
And we're on our way to seeing places where they have only electric cars.
And I think that's none too soon and much better.
And again, this is not just for greeny karma.
This is because electric cars are just better cars.
Electric vehicles are just better in almost every dimension.
So I think that's an upset and a revolution and a disruption and a displacement that I'm really eager to see happen as soon as possible.
Next question is from Helpful Hank.
What's the threat, either technological, economic, or otherwise,
that no one's expecting?
Well, again, literally, there's probably nothing that no one expected.
There's many people looking forward.
But I would say something that's underappreciated right now in the range of, say, a 50-year horizon is underpopulation, global underpopulation.
That the fact that we're not very far away from having fewer humans on the planet every year.
And a lot of people would say that's a good thing because,
um,
of the way that we,
um,
consume resources,
but,
uh,
we're actually decreasing our resources right now.
Very,
very fast.
Um,
but,
uh,
we're not,
we,
we're not, we're, we have a dearth of people
and places like China with one
child policy and many other places including Mexico are aging
very very rapidly faster even than the US. US is sort of unusual
in the world for a developed country that's maintaining its population.
Most places in Europe, which is widely known, have birth rates way below the fertility replacement
level, meaning that every year they have fewer and fewer people.
Japan is famously like that.
And many other countries are on the verge, including countries in the developing world. And so if we take a global population where immigration doesn't help,
it helps the U.S. but doesn't help the globe,
this is a serious thing because we have no experience in human history
of rising living standards and decreasing population.
All our experiences in the last couple hundred years of progress
have all relied on increasing population.
And so this is something that I think we haven't really dealt with,
which is having an economy and progress, which is a growth of some sort that doesn't rely on population growth.
And so I'm very, very worried about that.
What can you do about it?
Well, if you have the resources, I think you should have as many kids as you want to.
So this is a question from EC20.
Let's see what you think about Tim.
What's the thing that you most admire about Tim Ferriss
and wish you could make part of your own life?
That's a really great question. I think one of the things that Tim Ferris does that very few people do well, which is he's learned how to
discipline his learning. I'm a lifelong learner. I love learning and I spend my life trying to
learn new things, but I'm actually not very disciplined about it. I'm not very methodical. I'm haphazard. I do it in kind of an unplanned, messy way.
But Tim is the expert in knowing how his own learning works and dissecting his learning
and mastering it and then refining, a very disciplined way his ability to learn.
And I find that completely admirable, amazing. It is sort of a superpower. I wish I had it.
And I'm trying better through his own examples and his teaching to try and improve my own life. And so I think that it's something that really distinguishes Tim,
is his discipline ability to learn, or his ability to learn in a disciplined way.
Next question is from Mayus.
With proliferation of on-demand apps and products and technologies in general, how can one approach adding value to the lives of people in the mass market?
I've hung around a lot of people who have done startups and who have businesses, not just in this kind of current era of the last decade, but I mean over the past 30 or 40 years.
And some of these businesses weren't necessarily high-tech at all. this kind of current era of the last decade, but I mean over the past 30 or 40 years.
And some of these businesses weren't necessarily high-tech at all. They were dealing with products or restaurants or food or clothing, shoes. The most reliable place that I've noticed people start is with themselves as a dissatisfied customer.
They sort of, there's something in their own experience, in their own interest that they notice that's not being met.
They have either an expectation, a desire, a want, a frustration.
There's something that they have experienced,
and they have a visceral experience as being disappointed by.
And they set out to rectify it.
And it's important that when they begin,
it's not a craving to solve the mass market.
They're not thinking of the mass market.
I think that way lies madness.
They're thinking very, very specifically about something of value that begins with them.
And then if they find friends or other people that also have that same dissatisfaction, then they can solve their problem.
It grows in a very direct way.
They don't step back abstractly and think about what can I do that will interest the most people in the world. No, they start with something that begins with them,
some itch that they're going to solve,
something that they're going to create, some value.
And then they extend that in very slow circles from out of them to others.
And I think that is a much better way to start something than working back from saying, I want to appeal to the mass of humanity.
What can I make?
I think it's very rare when that happens successfully and much more common and sane, actually, to start with some dissatisfaction or yearning you have for you personally.
Next question is from Schism.
He says, I'd like to hear very much something along the lines of,
what are you afraid of, which Vox asked Bill Gates.
I am really concerned about nationalism and cyber war.
Nationalism, I think, is a real disease that we need to overcome.
It's, I think, I hope that eventually we'll be seeing this something equivalent to almost like racism.
The idea that one nation's interest should somehow trump or be sovereign over other nations' interests.
I mean, it's a really crazy idea.
It somehow seems perfectly normal for people right now. team, but we're talking about a different kind of stakes in nationalism where one nation
claims the right to injure another nation.
And I think cyber war right now is a little bit like that in the sense that we don't have
rules.
We don't have a set of things that we agree on
are accepted or unacceptable.
We do in regular warfare where we say,
you know, it's okay to shoot a person,
but it's not okay to shoot a civilian.
I mean, it's okay to shoot a soldier, but not a civilian.
These seem, again, in the abstract,
they seem really strange
that we would have the wars for killing,
but actually it's better than not having them.
And so because we have conflict now moving into the arena of the digital world, we don't have any rules.
We don't.
The nations like the U.S. are doing offensive attacks. Other nation states and rogue institutions
are attacking the U.S.,
but there's no rules that we have agreed on
to say, well, it's not fair
to cause the infrastructure to collapse
or a bridge to go down or a plane to go down,
whatever it is.
So right now, there are no agreements anywhere.
And I think what will happen is that it may take
some really bad disaster before people,
before nations begin to agree on it.
And I think that's unnecessary. We could begin to agree on it. And I think that's unnecessary.
We could begin to agree on that right now.
I would say one last thing about that,
and that is people, or excuse me,
nations talk about national security.
Well, in the cyber arena, in the world of the Internet,
there is no national security without global security.
There's the interest of everybody to have a network that's secure from hackers, which I want.
I don't want hackers coming into my computer.
I don't want Russian hackers, Chinese hackers, U.S. hackers, NSA.
I don't want those people infiltrating my computer. So I want Russian hackers, Chinese hackers, U.S. hackers, NSA. I don't want those people infiltrating my computer.
So I want security.
But there's no way to do that nationally.
You have to do it globally.
And so as long as this is a national issue, it's not going to be a kind of a global approach to this, which will require a surrendering of this idea of sovereignty in cyberspace and agreeing to some kind of a global consensus. huge step, but it is something that worries me because I think without it, we're really set up
to have some really nasty occurrences, events happen without such an agreement.
Next question is from Stevenyo101. How does your view of the future affect how you live your life in the short term?
I think, how do you plan for the future when you know so little about the landscape you will be
operating in? All right. So things are moving so fast, faster and faster and faster. How can we for our lives in the future. And yeah, I agree.
This is a real challenge.
It seems very hard
because one wants to be ready for whatever comes,
but what we know is that you cannot plan very far and there's going to be a lot of surprises.
And I think the kinds of things that you hear about on this podcast from Tim are all about learning how to learn.
And you aren't going to know which programming language is going to be used in the future.
You aren't going to know.
You're going to have to relearn, and you'll be a newbie in the next platform that comes along.
You're going to have to start all over again.
When we have electric cars and electric scooters and everything else.
You're going to have to learn how to use those in a different way.
So this idea of constantly being a student, constantly learning,
is the default mode that we're going to be in.
And I think anyone who studies jazz or improv understands that
there's kind of a particular stance that you take where
you remain very nimble and agile, which is one of the reasons why I keep traveling so
much.
And I recommend that for others is because it keeps your mind flexible.
So that's one of the things that you want to do is do things that will keep your mind
flexible and agile, will keep your mind flexible and agile.
Keep changing your mind.
And I think the third stance is one that maybe someone who does parkour or any kind of frantic, athletic, extreme sports,
which is that you are always looking for your next step,
to place your next step so that you constantly have options
and that you don't ever want to get into a place where you restrict your options,
where you paint yourself into it so you are bound and can't back up or get out.
And so the kind of move you want to make, the kind of judo move, is you want to always be moving towards a place where you have increased your options rather than decreased them.
And it's more than just having a plan B.
It's having multiple plans, having ways to keep maneuvering, keep going, rather than banking everything on a single plan that is unlikely to come true.
Next question is from MD163.
What's your definition of journalism?
What does it mean?
And what do I think the responsibility of a journalist should be?
I don't really consider myself a journalist.
I think if you are authentic and ask honest questions and try very hard to be fair and accurate.
Fact check.
Go to the sources.
Go to the prime documents.
That's what it's about.
It's about being true and honest.
And I think a lot of the other stuff that journalism claims, I'm just not that interested in it. There are some responsibilities at a certain level. If you have access to certain levels of, um, power, then maybe you have more duties, but I'm really not interested in that i i am interested in in using writing as a way to help me think and talking to
others as a way to learn and communicating what i learned to others as a way to make a living
and um some people may call that journalism but i i think as reporting as um as sharing and so um i'm not very professional in that sense
i haven't been trained i don't think that way um that may not answer your question but that's
how i see it next question from m craft 4 100 4100 um you mentioned doing things that only you could do and being disciplined to continually
act in this way. Could you please elaborate on how you look for such opportunities?
Seems competition can actually be a hindrance to one's greatest work. Yeah, I think that's
right. But there's a second question that follows that by Maestro Boss, I think.
Can you say some more nice, soothing words on being in your 20s
and being like this little wisp in the world before plunging into your career?
Yeah, I think those two are very similar.
So the one thing that I would say about it is that don't be in a hurry.
It's incremental.
It takes a long time.
I think some of the most successful people are late bloomers rather than early bloomers.
Some people know and have a very good idea of what it is that they do,
and they can harvest that and the benefits of that early. Others have to try lots of things because maybe what it is that they do very well
is sort of hidden and not obvious in the culture at this time.
And so that's something to keep in mind too is that imagine if you were the world's best Internet programmer guy
and you were born in 1950.
I mean, it would just be really tough because
what are you going to do well you it would take a long time before you maybe found your way to the
mit railway club and you realize that um here in this kind of systems approach the world is where
you really had something to offer um so whereas now, today, it would be a little bit more obvious to you.
So that's part of the challenge is that in different times,
you're actually what you do well is going to be appreciated differently.
So it may take some people longer to really discover this.
And I think thinking broadly
and trying as many different things as possible
is really one of the ways that you're going to do this.
So it may take, again,
lots of attempts at trying things
that don't seem very obvious
in order to really come across what it is that you do with ease and that you do that few others can do.
Question from Jared James.
Have you tried out the Oculus Rift yet?
And if so, did the experience change your view of the future?
Yes, I have tried it um but it it's it's it's reinforced my idea of the future
because uh 25 years ago i um tried uh virtual reality and while the oculus rift is better it's
not um qualitatively better than some of the best VR that has already been out there, stuff at Stanford and other places, which I've been trying.
So this is much more consumer-oriented, and it is better.
But I was already convinced that this was going to be world-changing and probably the next platform after the smartphone to really take off.
And I think even before AI,
or I should say that AI will be part of making this virtual reality
and augmented reality work.
So there's much potential still a few years away from becoming a consumer thing, but I think the HoloLens from Microsoft, the Magic Leap goggles, all these things, not just the Oculus, all pointing to the fact that there's something big happening in the virtual reality space.
Next question from Sir Author Dane. Inventing yourself, finding yourself. Do you have some examples of people you know who drifted along the years without any clear goal and stumbled upon their life task by chance?
Not by chance.
I think there's lots and lots of examples of people I know who came late to finding their thing.
But in between, they weren't drifting and it didn't come by chance.
They came because they were working constantly, even at the times it didn't come by chance they came because they
were working constantly even at the times it seemed very remote from what they ended up doing
they were really trying to maximize and get everything they could from it
in retrospect it looks like they were far from where they ended up
but often this is the only way they could get there. Often, the things that they learned serving tables, driving a bus, being a salesperson, whatever it was that they were doing in between, was often crucial to what they were able to do later on.
And then they wouldn't have gotten there unless they had gone through that.
I'm not talking about something fatalistic.
I'm just saying that the idea that they were drifting or wasting the time in between was not really accurate.
They were just late in arriving where they had the ease and success.
But they were working hard all the way along, even when it seemed to be going in 180 degrees from where they ended up. So I don't think drifting for very long is good.
I think sometimes you need to clutch between shifts,
and I think wasting time and doing nothing is very good for periods of time
to unloosen and unlearn things.
And I'm a big, big advocate of, as I said, travel, vacations,
goofing off, trying stuff. But I think the idea that you drift around for decades is not really
what I'm recommending. Next question from Helpful Hank. In what ways does technology
have the power to make people happy? And in what ways
does it not have that power? I think in the end, all this technology that we're making in our lives
and adding to our lives and that we're creating and inventing and trying to sell and buy, I think
the only thing that technology gives us that could be sensed or reckoned in the happy column is it gives us
more choices. And I think more choices make us happy. So sometimes those choices themselves
don't lead to happiness. People choose to weaponize technology, to make a laser gun that shoots people.
But the fact that we have more choices makes us happy.
And I think that's what we get from technology in the end.
And so I think, again, this is about keeping our options, increasing the options, opening up and making more options in life.
And I think that's something that we get from technology.
Next question from Colby Seance says,
how far will technology take us by 2020?
It'll take us all the way.
Next question from Sirenity.
Do you see any possibilities or need for a new
mythology to arise in the coming
decades, a mythology
which integrates our understanding of science
and technology and the pace of change
with the actualities of human experience
I do
and I think it's a big vacuum
and I think that we are going to see
new mythologies arise and in some senses I think it's a big vacuum, and I think that we are going to see new mythologies arise.
And in some senses, I think the singularity is a new mythology.
It happens to be a myth that I think is just a myth, but it's a very powerful idea that will never go away.
And so in that sense, it is a new mythology. But I think we're also going to make other mythologies that are new and that are supported by science and technology and that have spiritual aspects. 50 to 100 years, and particularly in places like China or Russia, where there's a real vacuum right now for something big to believe in, because communism doesn't work.
They don't have constitutions that they believe in.
There's very few other texts that are foundational.
And so even religion is sort of in disrepute officially in China.
So this is an empty vacuum
that's going to be filled with new mythologies.
So,
Tweets Happen asked,
Do you have any tips for finding one's purpose
or mission in life?
The thing that only you can do,
which we talked about earlier,
for someone who's completely unsure.
I don't, other than whatever is said, which is take your time, make new mistakes, try
as many things as you can, travel to keep your mind agile, and understand that it may take you longer than
others, but don't worry about that. So I have just time for two last questions. One from Satay Sauce.
Do you think the technological singularity will happen? I don't. I think it's a myth,
a very powerful myth, but in the sense of it being an AI that takes over and makes another AI so smart that it becomes, through immediate generations, becomes God.
No, I don't believe that myth, but I do think it's a very powerful idea.
And last question from Simple Goyi.
What do you think will be the impact of designer babies in the future?
Will everyone eventually become super intelligent blue-eyed people?
You know, I do think we will have designer babies in the future.
I'm not saying so many people want, I think,
are going to think blue eyes are such a good idea when they can make green or purple.
And super intelligent is a problem because intelligence is not a single dimension.
You know, a lot of harm is done by really smart people.
I think we'll begin to understand through these attempts to make superintell people that, um, uh,
there are different kinds of intelligences,
uh,
you know,
um,
a lot of books written showing that there's,
um,
EQ,
emotional intelligence.
There's,
there's lots of different ways to be intelligent.
And some of those are actually much more important than say,
being a math genius.
And so,
um, when we understand that
and when we try to make our kids intelligent in different ways,
I think that that's a much more interesting challenge.
And it's not going to be a simple one.
And I'm not even so sure that we'll come to regard it as a desirable thing to do.
I suspect, and I could be wrong, I suspect that what we'll end up doing is trying to make each person have their own kind of intelligence.
And that's just not a matter of trying to move some genes around.
That's a matter of moving their environment, their education, all kinds of things.
And so I think what you really want to have is you want to have your child have their own unique special intelligence.
And I think that's a much wider thing than just
genetic engineering, although that will be part of it. So, wow, those were amazing questions.
Thank you for asking them. I hope I was helpful in some ways. Thanks again to Tim Ferriss for
having me on. And I really appreciate your attention to my work. And I wish you the best.
Go forth and thrive. Prosper and thrive. Thanks.
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