-When you connect all these technologies, they create something in itself, an active system that has its own urges, sort of like a rainforest, thousands of different component species interacting and codependent on each other, the ecosystem of things that we've invented with our minds.

[ Down-tempo music plays ] -We're all seekers, searching for answers to life's biggest questions.

There are people who have made it their life's work to explore and uncover the wisdom we all seek.

In this episode, I speak with writer and artist Kevin Kelly about our relationship with technology and its transformative role in our lives.

This is "Wisdom Keepers."

Kevin Kelly, welcome to "Wisdom Keepers."

-My pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

-I was reading your book.

You write, "500 years ago, technologies were not doubling in power and halving in price every 18 months."

The speed, the pace of change has picked up in a way that wouldn't have been present earlier in our history.

What's that done to us?

-I think it's made us... become... better.

It's given us more options.

I think in the end, what technology gives us is not... ease.

It's not happiness.

It's choices.

It's possibilities.

It's widened the opportunities that we have to do whatever it is we wanted to do.

And we can still do the old ways.

If a person desires, they can live like 200 years ago, harvesting by hand, in the same way that maybe the Amish do.

That's still an option for people.

Not many choose it.

But in addition to that, we also have the option of becoming a mathematician or a ballerina, a yoga teacher, whatever it is.

Maybe even something new that hasn't been invented yet.

That's what technology gives us.

It keeps opening up our opportunities and choices.

We are beginning to make that the default, where we go through education, we go through a process of socialization that is beyond the tribe.

And so that's always difficult.

That's always something that we are working at.

But when we do, we become better people.

-What is the technium?

-We tend to think of technology as something that we've made, maybe something that we could hold in our hand, like a hammer.

When the oldest technology was actually the flint hammer, which is about this big.

But if we think of, like, a mouse for a computer, it's about the same size as a flint hammer.

But while I could probably make a flint hammer in a weekend, particularly if someone stood around and showed me how to do it, I could never make a mouse.

In fact, everybody reading this or listening to us working together could probably not make it, because it's a product not of a particular, single, individual technology, but a network, an ecosystem of all kinds of technologies that are codependent on each other.

I use the word technium to suggest that it has some agency of its own, that the system itself is not inert.

It's not just a passive thing, that when you connect all these technologies self-dependent upon each other, that they create something in itself.

It's an active system that has its own urges and tendencies.

It's sort of like a rainforest, with thousands of different component species interacting and codependent on each other.

And so we can think of this as sort of the ecosystem of things that we've invented with our minds.

-Have we been living with it, perhaps even undetected, for a long time?

-Yes, we have been.

And even longer than we think, because I maintain that our own humanity was one of the first things that we invented, that we were the first animal that we domesticated -- not the dog, not the cow.

We domesticated ourselves.

We're the self-domesticated ape.

And that domestication was something that we've done that has changed our genes.

Cooking has changed -- which we invented -- changed our jaws, changed our teeth, has permanently altered our genetic lineage.

So we have invented our own humanity.

That was our first technology.

So we are very much co-evolving with technology at this point.

-There are a lot of people within the earshot of this program who aren't sold on the idea that we're becoming better people.

What makes you say that?

-I believe that progress is real.

I think if we look in an impartial way at the evidence of the last 500 years, we see that our longevity has increased, our safety has increased, our mobility has increased, that there is a sense in which our fairness has increased.

Our sense of equitable dealings has increased.

We have gotten better as a society on average than 500 years ago.

The simple test is very, very simple.

It's very, very simple, which is if you were going to be sent back to the past or to some time, and you had no control over how you were born, where do you want to live?

You do not want to go into the past.

For the average person, it was a horrible, difficult, challenging, constraining environment compared to what we would have today.

That's evidence that we are getting better.

We have a very romantic view of history, and I think that people today have a difficulty in accepting the idea of progress, of accepting the evidence that we have actually made progress.

And I think that's in part because there is lots of stuff that is up in the air and changing where we're headed into, and we don't actually know exactly what we should do or not do.

And that uncertainty kind of drives people to cling to an idea they have of the past, of it being this good, old time.

But I've actually noticed something interesting, which is if you ask a person about when the peak, the best time of all, that we're supposedly coming down from.

it's generally the years when they were 10 years old.

That was the peak because that is the peak of human existence.

No matter who you are or when or where you are, that was the best time.

And so for them, is whenever they were 10, it's all been downhill from there.

-Well, I got to tell you, I was 10 in the late '60s, and it sucked.

[ Both laughing ] When I listen to people romanticize it, I think, "Really?

Were you there?"

You know, we seem to be on the cusp of a new wave of techno panic... just the latest one.

-Right.

-I mean, we've had them periodically.

Machine looms were smashed by weavers.

William Blake wrote about "dark Satanic Mills."

There were panicky predictions about steam engines making human beings travel too fast.

Even the novel "Frankenstein," now 200 years old, is a riff on scientific anxiety.

-Sure.

-Is this time different or just falling into a historical pattern?

-I think it can be both.

I think we have a reflex, particularly right now, when new technologies come along at such a rate that our automatic -- I'm speaking generally about modern human beings -- our automatic reflex right now when something new comes along is "I think this is going to bite me.

I don't know how, but it's gonna going hurt sooner or later."

And this is true because we no longer have the kind of idealized vision of technology.

We understand that it's always gonna bring problems.

I think that most of the problems that we have today have been made by the technology of the past.

And I would predict that the problems we're going to have going into the future are from technologies today.

However, I also believe that the solution to those problems made by technology is not to remove technology, but to add more, better technology to it.

So I think technology is kind of like a thought.

It's kind of like thinking made real.

So if I were to sit here, Ray, and give you a bad idea, your counsel to me would not be, "Well, you need to think less.

You need to have fewer ideas, because you have a bad idea."

No, no.

You need to have better ideas.

And that's the response -- the proper response to the problems that technology brings, is not to have less technology, but to have more and better technology.

-Something that occurred to me when I was reading your book, you write very evocatively about man as a toolmaking being and how long, how far back that goes.

And even animals make tools.

But if I had to locate some of the discontent about now, that knapped chunk of flint that you write about that becomes a spear tip, or a tool for flensing, removing flesh from a hide or even a clubhead, if you drop it in the forest, or you lose it, or you just leave it somewhere, it can't do anything.

-Sure.

Right.

-It becomes inert.

And a lot of what I hear people talking about is this... unsettling feeling that machines can do stuff without us.

-Yes.

And that seems to be significantly different from that spearhead.

-You're right.

That is what is different this time, is that this technium and individual pieces of it have become so complicated that they can absorb a lot of the biological dynamics that we see in life, in our own intelligence.

And geologically, humans right now, modern humans, are in a very odd position, because we've been the only sentient species on the planet for a very short time.

Before this, we had Neanderthals and Denisovans and others.

We were one of many other sentient species.

But now we're the only ones.

And so we've gotten these -- We're not comfortable with other sentient species that we've made artificially coming along.

And so this is sort of new for us as a modern species that we have to deal with things that are like us, but not us.

I find it very thrilling.

I understand how it can be very scary.

The only thing I can tell you is that we have time.

We have time to adjust to this.

We have time to try and control it.

We have time to try and train it.

It's like raising children, where you actually want to train them, tell them what our values are, embed those values.

It's actually not that hard to put the values into the things that we're making that think.

The hard part is that we don't have an agreement on what the values are.

We don't have a consensus on what we want to teach these things.

And it turns out that our own morality is very shallow, inconsistent, and not very robust, as once we try and transfer it to machines, we realize, "Hmm.

We don't have a very deep set of morality to even transfer."

We need to do better.

And I believe that's one way that these technologies that we're trying to make in the end will help us make us better as humans.

And here's something that's interesting about A.I., is that there have never been a technology where we have rehearsed for it longer than A.I.

We've been thinking about this for a hundred years.

We've been anticipating it.

We've been going through all the possible scenarios for a hundred years with science fiction.

So this is not new.

Everybody through Hollywood movies had an idea about A.I.

So in some senses, we've never really reviewed or previewed a technology as much as A.I.

before.

And so I think that's a good sign, that we are actually trying to anticipate what it is that we're making.

-Has the loss of social trust made that a little harder, when you hear -- And I've spoken to people who seriously believe that there are nanobots in vaccines.

-Sure.

Yeah.

-That 5G technology is going to track us and control our behavior, who believe unbelievable things... -Right.

Yeah.

-...in part because the sturdiness of our binds, our bonds to each other seem to have frayed.

-Yes.

You're right.

And I think it's even further than that.

I think... for hundreds of years, we were people of the book.

We believed in the power and the authority of authors, of the permanence of black-and-white, fixed ink on a book that did not change and the value of a scripture, of a constitution, of law, of the immobility and immutation of that.

That was a powerful thing in our lives.

And our culture kind of revolved around texts and books.

We're now people of the screen.

And the screen is liquid and fluid and ephemeral, and it's flowing.

And there is no permanence, there is no authority, there is no authors.

And that lack of authority is something which requires you to kind of assemble the truth in your own way.

And I think that is a large part of the kind of fertile ground that makes this kind of suspicion about science and technology possible, because there is a sense in which we've lost the power of authority.

-Right now, with A.I., legislators, ethicists, tech giants themselves are trying to reassure people that there are positive applications, that we aren't gonna let this run away, that it can be done ethically.

-Yeah.

-And people aren't so sure yet.

-People aren't sure, and the experts aren't sure.

It's the very people making these -- They're not sure where it's going.

The challenge is, is that our intelligence, we don't know what it is.

We have no idea what it is, actually.

And we're trying to make it artificially.

And I'm reminded of the early days of understanding electricity and the elements in chemistry.

And some of the smartest people in the world, like Newton, were completely wrong.

Lots of the things that they thought were elemental turned out to be compounds.

And I think intelligence is one of those.

People think intelligence is like a single dimensional amplitude, like loudness.

You get louder and louder, more and more smarter.

But it turns out to be this very complicated compound composed of many different varieties of elemental cognitions in different ways.

And so the kind of artificial intelligence that we're making are complicated ecosystems of various types, and none of them are exactly like human thinking.

And that's their benefit, is they don't think like us.

So the thing is, we don't even know what it is that our intelligence -- the people making it don't know what it is.

So there's a huge uncertainty about what it will be able to do or not do, and very little agreement about how far it can even go.

And so this is the kind of case where the only way we're gonna be figuring out what it is, is by using it.

Not by thinking about it.

We thought about it for a hundred years.

Thinking is not gonna get us any further.

We actually have to make it and use it to find out what it is.

And it's probably not -- It's not the A.I.

or A.I.

It's A.I.s, plural, multiple species, multiple kinds.

We don't talk about the machine.

Talk about machines.

Because there's lots of little, tiny motor here, the big motor over there.

They all are different.

They're going to be regulated differently.

Same with the A.I.s.

It's not a single thing.

It's not an element.

It's complicated stuff.

And we're going to take some time to figure out what it is, to figure out what it's good for, to see some evidence of actual harm, rather than all the imaginary harm that we're talking about with A.I.

And we can only do that by using A.I., seeing how it works in real life, seeing what happens.

-Well, the single most common job in the U.S. economy for a man is driver.

-Right.

Driving a truck.

Right.

So, how many drivers have lost their job to A.I.

so far?

-Very few so far.

-So far.

'Cause that's all I'm talking about.

-Okay.

-Let's look at the evidence.

I want evidence-based policy, not what we imagine could happen.

But let's look at the evidence.

But right now we've been thinking about it, and we're just gonna think, think, think, think.

And we can only go so far in thinking.

-But once that cab learns everything it needs to learn... -Right.

-...it will start to replace actual cabbies.

-That's the theory.

That's your theory.

Let's see what happens.

-Well, they don't call in sick.

They never get tired.

They are different.

-Right, right.

So, for right now, A.I.

is used to very great effect in X-ray diagnosis.

And the prediction was that the number of radiologists would just fall off the map.

What's happened is that there are more radiologists being hired.

This is why we want to look at the evidence of what actually is happening, versus the imaginary harm that we can imagine.

-You play around in your writing with agency and whether machines have it.

And I think that's intimately knotted up with some of the things that we've been talking about.

-Yeah.

-It's not mere hardware.

Rather, it's more akin to an organism.

It is not inert nor passive.

-Right.

-It wants to fill in the blank.

-Right.

Yeah.

And that want is not necessarily a conscious one.

I would say if you have a plant sitting in your living room that it wants light.

It wants to grow towards the light.

It's not a conscious, intelligent want.

It's an urge.

It's a tendency.

And I would say a lot of these systems, even outside of A.I., can have a tendency to move in a certain direction, to lean in a certain way, to favor certain things over other things.

And I would say the technology that we make, when they get really complicated, like we're talking about, will have certain tendencies independent of what we want or who made them.

So what I suggest is that we try and pay attention to what those tendencies are, because it's like trying to go against the grain if you're going against them.

It's just not going to work.

And, so, in the animal world, we have animal whisperers and dog trainers.

And they are so special, because they kind of understand, and they align themselves with the general tendency of a dog or a horse to do what it wants to do.

And that's what we want to do.

We want to have A.I.

whisperers.

We want to have technology whisperers who are listening to the technology and seeing where it tends to want to go.

And my view of technology is that it's an extension of evolution in biology, it's the seventh kingdom of life, and that it behaves in a very similar way, and that some of the things -- You know, A.I.

in general was inevitable, but the character of the A.I.

that we have, the actual legal regime we use to regulate it -- none of those are inevitable.

And we have a huge choice in that, and those choices make a big difference to us.

And so we still have lots of freedom for choice.

Even though A.I.

might be inevitable, he type of A.I., the character who funds it, whether it's open, international -- all those things are still under us to decide and choose.

-Along with cultures evolving a relationship to the technology that they developed, every single culture on Earth, from prehistory on, has in parallel asked, "Who am I?"

-Yeah.

-"Why am I here?

Who made me?

Do I belong to other people?

Do other people belong to me?"

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Do these worlds meet on the horizon, like the parallel lines of theory?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Or are they always separate realms, never the twain shall meet?

-I think -- One of the reasons why I'm very excited about what's happening with artificial intelligences, plural, is that it is bringing those questions to us at the forefront.

It's making ordinary people in the street have to ask that question.

And I've heard it myself at almost every dinner party that I've been in for the past two years.

People are saying, "What should I do?

What should humans do?

What should we be doing?

What are we going to be doing?

What are we humans for?"

And so this kind of society-wide or species-wide identity crisis has been made possible because A.I.

is so much like us in so many ways.

We're saying, "Well, if it does that, then what are we going to do?," or, "What should we be doing?

", which is the better question, or, "What can we do?"

And so I think for the next hundred years, that is our assignment, is we're going to be asking this question on an almost daily basis about, "Well, if it can do this or that, what do I do?

Why am I here for?

What's the purpose of my life?

What's the purpose of anybody's life here?"

And all those kind of philosophical late-night bong sessions that people used to have in dormitories are going to be on the newscast, because people are going to have to really answer this question.

And I think the answer from that will make us better humans.

-When there have been technological leaps, like the lethality of a Late Middle Ages longbowmen, which changed warfare for a long time, were there also parallel leaps in the human idea about who a human was and what he was for and who made him?

-I think so.

I mean, my reading of coming of artificial power, the steam engine, electricity, wind -- all the power, where until that moment, humans' physical muscles or animal muscles did -- If you built a city, it was built with muscle of some sort.

And that arrival and the power did get people thinking about, "Well, you know, if humans aren't necessary to build, then what are we going to do?

Why are we here?"

I think there's a little bit of that, but nothing like what I've seen.

I think this is the moment where it's different than before, where this existential question really is at a heart.

And ordinary people kind of aren't immune from having to ask that question.

I think that's thrilling, that we are at that point where everybody has to ask that question of themselves.

-We aren't conceptually where you suggest we have already been for centuries -- that is, understanding that we have a symbiotic relationship with the technological world that we've built around ourselves.

Romantically, almost reflexively, there is periodically a back-to-the-land movement, an effort to do without things that are machine-made and make them for ourselves and so on.

-Yeah.

-And I wonder whether that's sort of a necessary tendency to blow off some of that steam, but, also, to remind ourselves that we are a mix of things.

-Yeah.

No, again, I think we want to keep opening choices and possibilities.

And the option to drop out, the option to go the other way, the option to grow your own food, build your own home, have homeschooling should always be there.

That's fantastic.

And I think it's really great that there are people who want to explore that and learn from it and do that and form the communities, and more power to them.

Going into the future, I would love a world in which the Amish farm most of the Midwest of America -- that would be great -- and where the rest of us are all huddled in cities.

More power to them.

And so yes, we want to keep those options of doing things the old way, in part as a backup, in part because it makes some people happy, and in part because we can still learn from that.

-One group of people who arguably, even if they couldn't make everything that they come into contact with in a given day, know somebody who made that thing or could explain how it's made are the Amish.

The things in their lives have been refined to a kind of elegance, because they are entirely fit for purpose and understandable, legible in a way that so many of the objects that we come in contact today with or not.

-Yes, yes.

So, I have a particular interest in the Amish.

I have an Amish beard, but I'm not Amish.

But I enjoy being around them.

And I was "studying them" for a while, trying to understand how they made the decisions about what technologies to accept in their lives and which ones not.

Because the myth of the Amish is that they have rejected technology, and nothing could be further from the truth.

They're actually embracers of technology, and there are Amish hackers who are hacking the technology within their own rules.

So the Amish I would think of you can better think of them as late adopters.

They're very, very slow to accept things.

And importantly, they have a societal, collective way of deciding what comes into their homes.

Famously, they don't usually have cars.

They usually don't have electricity, except they kind of do now, because they are beginning to accept solar-powered batteries rather than being connected to the grid.

They find that more conducive to them.

So what are the two criteria the Amish use?

Well, their major one is they say, "Will this technology that comes into our lives will enable us to spend more time with our family, including work."

So, they like to work either on the farm or in the barn behind the farm, doing some kind of physical work that would allow them to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner with their children.

That is their goal.

So they say, "Will this new technology -- Does A.I., does a cellphone, does, you know, solar power -- does it help us have those meals with their children?

If yes, then we'll consider it."

The second one is, "Does it strengthen our community?"

Because they don't do anything except as a community.

And so that's why they have horse and buggy, is because it can only go 15 miles at the maximum, which requires them to do everything within that 15 miles -- shopping, doctors, whatever.

They will ride in other people's cars, but they don't "own it."

So that's one distinction the Amish make, is that they make a difference between using things and owning it, because they feel that if you own it, it owns you.

And I think that's a really great lesson for us is to think about it in our own lives, what are our criteria for whether we decide to accept or to use a technology or not?

We should have some.

We don't have to be the Amish's, which is, "Does it does allow our family to have three meals a day, and does it strengthen our community?

", but it could be other things.

But at least they have those.

-They are idealized as being happier.

Did they strike you as being happier?

-They don't strike me as being happier.

They strike me as being... more satisfied.

-Important distinction.

-It's an important distinction.

More satisfied, more content.

And they have the additional quality of being more certain about who they are.

They have a clear idea of who they are and what they represent.

And finally, they, also, in general, seem to be working for something bigger than themselves.

-You've noted that much more of the world's wealth is now created in intangible ways... -Right.

...that instead of bashing metal into shapes and then moving it from place to place, it's ideas and images and... -Software.

[ Chuckles ] -...symbols of value that move from place to place.

In that less tangible world, do we have to worry that there's... enough to keep people... active, involved, busy, engaged?

If we're creating a world where fewer people are doing more high-value work, do we have to worry about what everybody else does?

-I think the real question about the future of work is we've tended to think that a job was something you didn't want to do.

The only reason why you were doing it was because you were being paid.

-To eat.

-Yeah.

-You did it to eat.

-Right.

And that was gonna be... the lot of most people, was doing something they didn't like in exchange for getting paid because they needed to eat.

And I think we can get away from that idea of that's what the lot of most people is, to one where you are doing something that maybe you at least don't mind doing as a first step to one where you're doing something that you want to do.

Any kind of a job where efficiency is important or productivity, those are jobs for robots.

What you want humans to be doing, because we specialize this, is being inefficient.

We want jobs where discovery is important.

Discovery is not very efficient.

Innovation is not efficient.

Science is not efficient.

Art is not efficient.

Small talk is not efficient.

None of those are efficient, but those are all the kinds of things that we actually want to be doing.

And so we want to move the creation of wealth into that category where we are being creative, we're being innovative, we're discovering things.

We are spending time with people.

We are being human.

And that's entirely possible with the technology that we're making today, is to give those kinds of chores to the bots and let us explore the kinds of chores where we're being inefficient.

-Is there a set of intangibles that we have to worry about when assessing the human condition?

Yes, there's the measurable, visible, touchable world.

Is there also... a soul, a spirit that has to be at least taken into account, even if you aren't a person who is personally involved in those realms yourself?

-Yeah, yeah.

Yes, the answer is I do believe that there is a spiritual, for the better word, component to technology.

I think there's a spiritual component to the world, to the universe.

And I think that that is captured or reflected in technology.

So the way I would say it is that just as you could see a Redwood cathedral as a reflection of a divine force in the world, some higher order, some higher power, I think you can see the same thing in a cellphone, that the cellphone also reflects a certain divineness in my eyes.

And that's because I think that these two realms, the realm of the born, the biological realm, and the realm of the made, the manufacturer, are really stemming from the same force in the world.

When I look at the technium, I see it as reflective of the divine part of creation.

It's a natural extension of the same forces that run through the origin of life and evolution and all that we are in our own bodies.

That miracle, whatever that is, that long thread that moves through life -- it's a force of abundance.

It's a force of generosity.

It's a force of ever increasing choices and possibilities.

And then technology is accelerating the same thing that evolution did for 4 billion years, faster in other places, enabling as many people on the planet to try and be their best.

The miracle of life is extended into the miracle of technology.

-Well, Kevin Kelly, thanks for joining us on "Wisdom Keepers."

It's been great to have you.

-Oh, it's been my pleasure and a lot of fun.

Thank you for the great questions.

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