537: Kevin Kelly | 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Kevin Kelly | 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Episode 537)

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Special thanks to Hyundai for sponsoring this episode. 

[00:00:02] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show. 

[00:00:05] Kevin Kelly: 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 back in 250 horses and they're going to run all day. Okay, now we're going to take 250 minds, 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 a 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?

[00:00:47] Jordan Harbinger: 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. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, and psychologists, even the occasional national security advisor, legendary Hollywood director, or arms trafficker. Each episode turns our guests' wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. 

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[00:01:33] Today, one from the vaults, 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 ways humanity — this means you and I — will interact with technology AI and how 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. 

[00:02:13] 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 on your lap. People send you emails. They're jumping to get on your show." You still got to 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/course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribed 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.

[00:02:49] 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 would like to say, "Wait, in the future, this is probably going to be different. And here's how it's going to be different." And 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 the right to drive my car, even though the accident rate is so much higher. 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." 

[00:03:29] Kevin Kelly: Right. Right, right. Right. 

[00:03:30] Jordan Harbinger: Would you say that you have a science of predicting? 

[00:03:33] Kevin Kelly: No. First of all, most of what's going to happen in the specifics, like a product or company is totally inherently unpredictable.

[00:03:42] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. 

[00:03:42] Kevin Kelly: 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 recurring patterns. And my job is to look for these, we incurring patterns and I look for the ways 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 his kind of natural tendencies. 

[00:04:24] Jordan Harbinger: Thanks for leaning to me when you said criminals and outlaws. I appreciate that. That's good for the brand. 

[00:04:31] Kevin Kelly: The street. 

[00:04:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Morons use it this way.

[00:04:35] Kevin Kelly: Right. And this is sort of unsupervised ways that reveal the underlying tendency or leaning the 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. 

[00:05:02] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[00:05:03] Kevin Kelly: And so the bias is to copy it, your computer's copying just in a day-to-day basis. When it goes across the Internet, it's been copied thousands of times. That's just how the thing is set up. And so companies like music company— 

[00:05:16] Jordan Harbinger: Right who wants to resist that. 

[00:05:18] Kevin Kelly: They're going against the grain because the bias is to copy. And therefore, I say this tendency for copies is inevitable. And if you want to work with the grain, do something, assuming that things would be copied, which is what we now call viral videos.  

[00:05:33] Jordan Harbinger: Viral video, yeah, viral anything. 

[00:05:35] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:05:43] Jordan Harbinger: Absolutely. 

[00:05:44] Kevin Kelly: And so there are other biases and my job was sort of to say, "Where are some of these other biases in digital technology?"

[00:05:50] Jordan Harbinger: 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?

[00:06:06] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. Well, first of all, again, I go back to the point is that you can't predict this specific, the particulars, those things are much more of the immediate ups and downs— 

[00:06:18] Jordan Harbinger: Sure, day trade. 

[00:06:19] Kevin Kelly: —that day traders are trying to predict, and that is inherently stochastic. 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.

[00:06:33] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. 

[00:06:33] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:06:43] Jordan Harbinger: It's pretty much impossible. 

[00:06:44] Kevin Kelly: Impossible for a long term, more than just a few quarters or years or decades, but for the long term, everything kind of evens 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. 

[00:07:07] Jordan Harbinger: 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've 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 AltaVista 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 and stocks and Ford 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 technology 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." 

[00:08:09] Kevin Kelly: Right, right. 

[00:08:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, maybe you're right. But I feel like they're onto something with this whole search the Internet. 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 him 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 of Tesla and it went up and he called me, he goes, "Merry Christmas. I think it just made like 80 grand." And I was like, "I told you, imagine what we'd be driving if you'd bought that Yahoo stock. We'd been having this conversation on your jet." 

[00:08:44] Kevin Kelly: It's true. Well, yeah, I mean, looking back, it's 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 called it a Jamboree. It was called the Cybertron. For 24 hours, you could buy a ticket and try all the VRs that existed in 1989. 

[00:09:11] Jordan Harbinger: What existed in 1989 in the VR space? 

[00:09:13] Kevin Kelly: The whole thing, the goggles, the glove, social more than one person in it. It was pretty good.

[00:09:18] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. 

[00:09:19] Kevin Kelly: But I thought it was going to happen like in five years. 

[00:09:21] Jordan Harbinger: Right.  

[00:09:22] Kevin Kelly: The problem was, it was equivalent to one million dollars today to set it up. It was just way too expensive. Like the head tracking, all of that technology, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, it's a three-dollar chip in your phone. 

[00:09:36] Jordan Harbinger: In your phone, sure. 

[00:09:37] Kevin Kelly: Which are those accelerometer and all that kind of — so that's why we have it now. That's why we have VR now. They took all these technologies, which are now chips in your phone and put them into the headset. And now we can have commodity consumers or in VR, but I thought it was going to take only five years in 1989. And so I was totally wrong in it since. 

[00:09:55] Jordan Harbinger: But I mean, if you're going to be wrong on VR, getting the timeframe wrong, very forgivable kind of thing, especially looking at where VR is now. 

[00:10:04] Kevin Kelly: Well, we don't even know how VR works on the brain. The curious thing is to kind of recursive, is that the main tool for understanding and how we can get better 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 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.

[00:10:42] 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 little ledge that goes a mile down 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 the room, I'm just in the room." What it is is the VR is working with different parts of your brain than the conscious visual sight. 

[00:11:17] Jordan Harbinger: Sounds a little bit like LSD or mushrooms from what I've read.

[00:11:21] Kevin Kelly: 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 a hundred percent photorealistic 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 microexpressions 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. It's that feeling of 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 currencies, these 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 them 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 manufactured, you give it to the robots as a commodity, but experiences are very, very human.

[00:12:30] Jordan Harbinger: That's super interesting. And I can see that making a lot of sense, especially once we get the data, they're 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 there? 

[00:12:46] Kevin Kelly: Everything and this is by the way, my prediction — you can 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 the dilation. 

[00:13:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:13:06] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:13:17] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Sure. 

[00:13:18] Kevin Kelly: It's the fact that you are going to be in these worlds, capturing everything about these social dynamics in minute detail, the way we can't do in real life.

[00:13:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:13:27] Kevin Kelly: And they're going to have virtual economies as well, where you're buying and selling all this virtual stuff. And so these VR are going to be the biggest companies in the world, and they're going to be VR companies. 

[00:13:38] Jordan Harbinger: 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. Those are those pictures where." Wait until Facebook knows what types of foods accelerate your heart rate and make you happier release dopamine in your brain. 

[00:13:52] Kevin Kelly: Right. 

[00:13:52] Jordan Harbinger: Or the VR company knows what type of people you find attractive at a visceral level. 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. 

[00:14:05] Kevin Kelly: So that's where the money is. It's just not selling you gear. 

[00:14:08] Jordan Harbinger: Right. The gear, at some point, the gear could be next to free because it could be a loss later just to get you on the Internet. 

[00:14:13] Kevin Kelly: Yeah, just like the Kindle. 

[00:14:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Unbelievable. I was thinking about this and this is more augmented reality. My friend earlier, who you were speaking with before the show, was selling a house and he said, "You know, staging is a thing I hadn't thought about the cost of staging a house, which is where they put all the fake furniture there. It's like six to $8,000, depending on how nice you want it to look and how big your house is." And I said, "Well, we're talking to Kevin Kelly, you should tell him. You could do even the phone VR and you could have, that can 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 armoire. And then it's like posturepedic mattress ranges from $1000 to $2,000. And it's like, if you want that and you want it to go right there, you can go dink, dink, 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 it. 

[00:15:03] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. One of the first VR experiences I had in the second go round was 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 walking through a house that was on sale. 

[00:15:22] Jordan Harbinger: What does your brain do when things aren't photorealistic? Does it just kind of go into the same mode when 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." 

[00:15:32] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. So photorealism is, as we know, not necessarily a hundred percent needed and you only have to watch, you know, like a Pixar movie or something to be swept up in someone's personality and decide that's real. But I have to also say that the photorealism 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. 

[00:15:56] Jordan Harbinger: Right, like where it makes the grid on me and it shows you— 

[00:15:58] Kevin Kelly: 3D meaning that I can look at you from any angle, up or down, or back or side, but it's also your life. It's not just a static photo. 

[00:16:05] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. 

[00:16:06] Kevin Kelly: You're living. And I can see every hair on your head move and your eyelashes move. I can see the fabric on this, in 3D and I can walk around it. That's where we are right now in the lab. 

[00:16:17] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. 

[00:16:18] Kevin Kelly: It's as good as seeing there, the belief, the feeling, the experience is total, so much that I felt uncomfortable getting too close to that.

[00:16:29] Jordan Harbinger: Because you felt it had the psychological space? 

[00:16:31] Kevin Kelly: Yeah, the psychological space, even though I could walk through them, it was like, I don't want to get that close. It was a woman, it was a beautiful woman. It was like, you can see the implications of that. Exactly. And so it was like, I can step back here. 

[00:16:42] Jordan Harbinger: You're a gentleman, what can I say? 

[00:16:44] Kevin Kelly: Exactly, right. With somebody I don't know? 

[00:16:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right through you. 

[00:16:48] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:16:58] Jordan Harbinger: And it won't matter at 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 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? 

[00:17:17] Kevin Kelly: 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 projection and the real thing, always, if you want to. Most 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. That is really going to be hard to beat. 

[00:17:49] Jordan Harbinger: So you'll appreciate reality simply that much more real. 

[00:17:52] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. It's like, oh, there's all kinds of things going on here. And that's been experienced people who've spent time in it. 

[00:17:58] Jordan Harbinger: 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 amazing we programmed it is up to a point of we'll still see them at some level, not quite as real as what our brains think is real. 

[00:18:12] Kevin Kelly: Right. 

[00:18:13] Jordan Harbinger: 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 whitespace. 

[00:18:43] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. Whitespace is this idea that came from, I think, people studying the pattern of science. The whitespace 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 whitespace would be, if you take AI here in fashion. There's got to be something between AI and fashion, AI fashion, you know, whatever. I don't know what it is. That's a whitespace 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 were these empty spaces where there should be something, but there isn't. 

[00:19:25] Jordan Harbinger: And I mentioned AI, especially in the book, and the next 10,000 startups are going to be adding AI to literally just about anything else. 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," 

[00:19:43] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. The recent one, it takes something like really old fashioned boring, dumb taxis, we'll add AI. 

[00:19:51] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Uber. 

[00:19:52] Kevin Kelly: Uber, there you go. 

[00:19:53] Jordan Harbinger: I heard that's on the upswing on that company. 

[00:19:55] Kevin Kelly: Yeah, right. So, but that gives you a sense of what we can do with that. I think there's going to be in food, furniture, toys in a certain sense of the more unobvious and the more obscure the thing is, I think the more powerful the transformation will be. 

[00:20:11] Jordan Harbinger: Let's talk about what AI kind of really is, because I think a lot of folks, especially in the last few years before I really started thinking about AI, what that meant was something that talks. 

[00:20:22] Kevin Kelly: Right.

[00:20:22] Jordan Harbinger: That was pretty much. It wasn't what AI really is, which is something that almost thinks. 

[00:20:28] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. So I like to use the word artificial smartness, because we have so much intellectual baggage with intelligence. When we think we know what it is, it's the AI, you know, it's the robot, it's 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. 

[00:20:51] Jordan Harbinger: How will it be? How can we even conceive of it being different if we have to think about it and it's different thinking. 

[00:20:57] Kevin Kelly: Right now, we have an AI that's smarter than you are by miles.

[00:21:01] Jordan Harbinger: That's not surprising. 

[00:21:02] Kevin Kelly: In arithmetic. 

[00:21:04] Jordan Harbinger: Well, that's definitely not surprising. 

[00:21:05] Kevin Kelly: That's your calculator. 

[00:21:06] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man, yeah. I agree with that. 

[00:21:07] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:21:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:21:23] Kevin Kelly: It has memorized 60 trillion web pages, every word on 60 trillion web pages, it has in its head right now, it just knows. That's how you search for it. And so all these things are much greater than us. 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 and not one IQ, which is this one vector. It's a multidimensional 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. 

[00:22:11] Jordan Harbinger: 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. 

[00:22:17] Kevin Kelly: 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 conscious. 

[00:22:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, 

[00:22:27] Kevin Kelly: You don't want it to be distracted. 

[00:22:28] Jordan Harbinger: I don't want my car distracted. Right. 

[00:22:30] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:22:45] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:22:46] Kevin Kelly: And then they'll probably be really lousy with the conversation. Right? 

[00:22:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:22:50] Kevin Kelly: And if you want a conversation, you have to have another kind of AI like a 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 the way you make an artificial bird is you make a stiff wing with a huge propeller on it. 

[00:23:09] Jordan Harbinger: Right, not a — is that the Leonardo or the early—?  

[00:23:13] Kevin Kelly: Or the copper. 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.

[00:23:40] Jordan Harbinger: 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. 

[00:23:49] Kevin Kelly: 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.

[00:24:00] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[00:24:00] Kevin Kelly: But you might have ways to actually try and level it in many different dimensions all at once something, we can't do 

[00:24:09] Jordan Harbinger: By making seven billion different calculations. 

[00:24:12] Kevin Kelly: Right. Similar things like that. So there's some real kinds of social level, not just trivial, but really significant things that we may use this other kinds of thinking to do for us.

[00:24:23] Jordan Harbinger: 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 to accelerate this process. Why is tracking so uncomfortable? What is it about us as humans just find tracking a little bit off-putting? 

[00:24:45] Kevin Kelly: Well, so first of all, I don't think we find it off-putting in general because we evolved in little clans and those clans, everybody knew everything about you. If you 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. 

[00:25:00] Jordan Harbinger: It's like in high school, but times 10. 

[00:25:02] Kevin Kelly: Times 10, everything about you. There's no escape. 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, I can correct you, I can 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. 

[00:25:25] Jordan Harbinger: Unidirectional. 

[00:25:26] Kevin Kelly: They— 

[00:25:27] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[00:25:28] Kevin Kelly: —or 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 talked about covalence which is restoring that symmetry so that we are watching the watchers and the watchers are watching us. There's a mutual respect and accountability. So if something's being attracted, 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 big company like Google, because obviously it's not symmetrical.

[00:26:12] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[00:26:12] Kevin Kelly: They're huge. And they know everybody's, and I don't even know me. Restoring that kind of symmetry is a big challenge, but I think we can go a lot further to where we are by enabling that mutual surveillance.

[00:26:29] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Kevin Kelly. We'll be right back. 

[00:26:34] This episode is sponsored in part by Public Rec. In the past, I would never be caught out, never be caught dead wearing sweatpants. Even if they're comfy, I just don't want to be seen with a saggy diaper butt, looking like a scrub who just walked out of a strip club or something like that, I have a reputation to maintain. Thank goodness for Public Rec. They make leisure wear that looks great and feels great too. My personal favorite is the all-day-everyday pants, which I've been wearing, like for the entire pandemic, nonstop, even in bed. So I don't know, that's either a massive ringing endorsement or just an indictment of my character, but Public Recs are always my go-to pants. That's all you need to know. By some magic, they don't wrinkle. They always look new. They've got zipper pockets. So your phone or your wallet doesn't slide out when you sit down, like a lot of sweatpants and I wear them so much. I bought all nine colors, one for each day of the week. Apparently, you know, during the pandemic there's nine days of the week, or at least it feels like that. 

[00:27:24] Jen Harbinger: As the world's opening back up, make sure you've got clothes that are as flexible as your life is. Public Rec rarely discounts but right now they have an exclusive offer just for our listeners. Go to publicrec.com/harbinger to receive 10 percent off. That's public-R-E-C.com/harbinger for 10 percent off.

[00:27:40] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Blue Moon. Blue Moon is on a mission to bring some brightness to your life and break up your routine. This is a delicious beer I've been drinking for a long time. It's a Belgian white. So in a way it's one of a kind beer. It's the kind of beer that you can't see through. Right? It's got that subtle sweetness. A lot of people are probably familiar with this and just don't know what it's called. And Blue Moon is ready for brighter days ahead, including reconnecting with loved ones over a beer outside, maybe even inside. Let's not get crazy though. It's great with barbecue, which is what we're doing this weekend. I'm definitely going to show up with a case of Blue Moon in tow, since they sent me this nifty cooler. It's always a crowd favorite, especially when kids are around. Not that I'm giving it to the kids, I'm drinking it because the kids are around and parents know what I'm saying. So don't let your next friend gathering be once in a blue moon, get out there and break up the day to day a little bit and get back to life.

[00:28:29] Jen Harbinger: Reach for a Blue Moon when you're in need for some added brightness. Get Blue Moon and Light Sky delivered by visiting get.bluemoonbeer.com/jordan to see your delivery options. That's get.bluemoonbeer.com/jordan. Blue Moon, made brighter. Celebrate responsibly. Blue Moon Brewing Company, Golden Colorado Ale.

[00:28:45] Jordan Harbinger: Now back to Kevin Kelly on The Jordan Harbinger Show. 

[00:28:50] 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 going to be like an arms race. Well, you put your data out there first? Well, no, your data is out there first. But what data do we want to share? What data should everyone have access to? Is there going to be a government oversight body that's going to try to do this? Which let's not go into the efficiency of that. It could be really tricky. 

[00:29:14] Kevin Kelly: It's going to be tricky and we're going to 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. 

[00:29:23] Jordan Harbinger: How is that? I mean, you can collect it right, but it's not yours. 

[00:29:26] Kevin Kelly: Well, okay. Let's take the data, the one 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? 

[00:29:40] Jordan Harbinger: True, yeah. 

[00:29:40] Kevin Kelly: Okay. There's this inherent difficulties of owning bits, but also owning bits that whose meaning comes from the fact that there's more than one person. 

[00:29:49] Jordan Harbinger: Right, multiple— 

[00:29:50] Kevin Kelly: More than one stake is 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 it too. 

[00:30:00] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. 

[00:30:00] Kevin Kelly: 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. I think the idea of like 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. 

[00:30:26] Jordan Harbinger: The first sort of subsection in the book — is it 12 subsections?  

[00:30:30] Kevin Kelly: Yeah.  

[00:30:30] Jordan Harbinger: With the first one I noticed was becoming and in that we are endless newbies, which makes me feel really good by the way, because I feel — my parents, when they look at things like iPhones, I have to take, 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." He said, "I can check my email on my phone?" And, you know, we laughed about it, but that means 20 years,  unless it's everybody at 20 years, then it's okay. 

[00:30:56] Kevin Kelly: Well, it is everybody in 20 years. Everyone's going to be a newbie. 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 then a whole new set of gestures and logic and language that will be needed to learn a new for that. And you may be pretty cool because you just graduated . Well, Java is — you know, there are going to be in a whole new language you're going to have to 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 there's 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. 

[00:31:43] Jordan Harbinger: 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 and my friend has a computer." So the gap between, I guess you'd call it 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 sways of the population consistently learning things. And 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 had 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 pops 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 the like. Just make the double tap, do the most common thing. And so it seems like what you're saying is that it'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."

[00:33:03] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. I mean, it's very possible that we can actually have an AI-assisted UX design. So the design is being developed by how people think it should be used. 

[00:33:13] Jordan Harbinger: So there's going to be eight million, two year olds and then that hive mind dictates how we use all of this. 

[00:33:18] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. Right. Right. 

[00:33:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:33:19] Kevin Kelly: Well, I mean in a certain sense that's what spelling works. If enough people misspell something— 

[00:33:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Good point. 

[00:33:25] Kevin Kelly: That is the way it's going to be spelled. 

[00:33:27] Jordan Harbinger: That's true. That's true. Ask the British. We've basically done that to every word they all once held dear.

[00:33:32] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:33:40] Jordan Harbinger: Just phonetics.

[00:33:41] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. Right, right. Exactly. What's this, you know, Lieutenant or, I don't know—

[00:33:46] Jordan Harbinger: L-O-O-T-E-N-T or something like that. I don't know. I can't even spell phonetic.

[00:33:53] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. I mean, the difference between a chief and chef. 

[00:33:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, there's an I in there somewhere. 

[00:34:00] Kevin Kelly: No, it's a ch. One is "ch", the other one's "sh". It's like— 

[00:34:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see what you mean, yeah. 

[00:34:05] Kevin Kelly: English is just notorious for this really illogical, irrational spelling.

[00:34:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We love our exceptions. 

[00:34:10] Kevin Kelly: Which is because it came from the fusion of French and 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've ended dictionaries. So normally, what would happen— 

[00:34:27] Jordan Harbinger: Right sure, that it consistently evolves. 

[00:34:28] Kevin Kelly: It would evolve and everything was sorted out. But we lived in dictionaries right at that point of this thing. So we have this frozen artifact of this incomplete fusion. 

[00:34:39] Jordan Harbinger: It's like, we dictated it all to the Pope Webster and he went, "This is the way everything is." 

[00:34:43] Kevin Kelly: Right. 

[00:34:43] Jordan Harbinger: And if they want to make changes, now it makes news when, well, now selfie is a word. I knew it was a word before you put it in that dumb book that nobody buys anymore. 

[00:34:52] Kevin Kelly: Dictionary is an artifact that will go away. 

[00:34:55] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. I would imagine. Yeah. Other than translation, dictionaries, I think. 

[00:34:59] Kevin Kelly: If you haven't tried the new AI translation from Google, which released two days ago, try it. 

[00:35:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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 always speak Chinese, it works. And I posted this and everyone wrote, "That won't work. Have you tried Google?" 

[00:35:14] Kevin Kelly: It absolutely worked. 

[00:35:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:35:15] Kevin Kelly: Because the new Google Translate is now just about as good as the human translator. 

[00:35:21] Jordan Harbinger: That's impressive because it used to be ridiculous.  

[00:35:24] Kevin Kelly: It used to be ridiculous. It was only half as good because they were using a part thing and now they have the new neural nets that they use to beat the GoPlayer. And they've imported that into that. And it's so perfect translations consider the sixth, a normal human can translate a 5.1 and the Google can translate it 5.0, the old one was at 3. 

[00:35:43] Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible. So Scott Wilson, who on my Facebook said, "That'll never work with Vietnamese." You try that Google Translate. 

[00:35:48] Kevin Kelly: It only works with Mandarin in Chinese and English right now. 

[00:35:51] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, try later.

[00:35:53] Kevin Kelly: 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. 

[00:36:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:36:09] Kevin Kelly: Yeah.

[00:36:16] Jordan Harbinger: Dang it.

[00:36:19] What about the rate of progress 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. 

[00:36:32] Kevin Kelly: 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 use our creativity of AI, but it's not going to be creative in the way humans are creative. 

[00:37:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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?

[00:37:12] Kevin Kelly: With creativity? It's already  happened. The AlphaGo guys who lost, they said that the move 37 in the game three, which was this amazing move, absolutely one of the most creative moves they ever saw. 

[00:37:25] Jordan Harbinger: In the game of Go with an AI? 

[00:37:28] Kevin Kelly: 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. And 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. 

[00:37:49] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So to put this in context, the game of Go — 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. There's too big picture and nuanced at the same time. 

[00:38:06] Kevin Kelly: 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 snapshot 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 then the same way that can translate, you know, translating, it's not just translate one word at a time, you have to translate the whole sentence. 

[00:38:32] Jordan Harbinger: Right. You have to translate and you have to take in the context if possible. 

[00:38:35] Kevin Kelly: Right and that's what it's doing now. So it's actually being creative. And the thing is, is that it's way of being creative is different from, let me say, the highest or the best way to 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. 

[00:38:57] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. 

[00:38:58] Kevin Kelly: We will teach those aspects to the machines. 

[00:39:00] Jordan Harbinger: It looks like an amorphous shape that only humans can do, because it really is just maybe hundreds or millions or whatever. A little mechanical switch flipped in different directions that made it code almost like braille.

[00:39:11] Kevin Kelly: Well, it's like a lot of things like consciousness and all. It'll turns out that there'll be many different species of it, many 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 multidimensional, 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 serif and san serifs. 

[00:39:50] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[00:39:51] Kevin Kelly: Now everybody knows. 

[00:39:53] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Because you have Microsoft Word. 

[00:39:54] Kevin Kelly: Right. It's a general education in grammar school about kerning. 

[00:39:59] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. 

[00:39:59] Kevin Kelly: 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?" 

[00:40:11] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Oh, that's incredible. Right. Because it'll be so common that there are different types. Right now, it's just, what do you mean different types of intelligence? There's smart people and dumb people. 

[00:40:20] Kevin Kelly: The 15 ingredients for creativity. 

[00:40:22] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Yeah. To give people an idea of how much this is a big deal — you illustrated this really well — humans used to have animals pulling plows and rugs like that. And then we found engines and electric equipment. 

[00:40:34] Kevin Kelly: Artificial power. 

[00:40:35] Jordan Harbinger: Artificial power, right, or AP for those of you who want to follow along at home. And it's like, wow, we could have these things working. They don't get tired. We don't have to feed them. They don't die and get sick—  

[00:40:46] Kevin Kelly: Or they can live at a much higher, like a skyscraper, yeah. Right. 

[00:40:49] Jordan Harbinger: 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 anything, making sure you don't implode," or something like that. 

[00:41:12] Kevin Kelly: 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 back in 250 horses. 

[00:41:22] Jordan Harbinger: Right. I think about that sometimes of how many— 

[00:41:24] Kevin Kelly: 250 horses. 

[00:41:25] Jordan Harbinger: —a day.

[00:41:25] Kevin Kelly: 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 were making across the street or railways or whatever. Okay. Now we're going to take 250 minds. They're not human minds, but there are 250 minds of some sort. We're going to add them to the 250 horses. And that's a 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? 

[00:42:01] Jordan Harbinger: Start solving problems or start horsing around, probably both. 

[00:42:04] Kevin Kelly: Do something. I mean, you could take the taxis and make Uber. You could add them to their drapes. What would you do with a thousand minds that you could back in at any time? And work for cheap for as long as you want. What could you do? And that's the second industrial revolution. 

[00:42:20] Jordan Harbinger: The people who figure out how to apply the minds are going to be the people who create the Andrew Carnegie's of the next generation. 

[00:42:26] Kevin Kelly: And I kind of referred to, I talked about, well, you know, this is this the formula for the next 10,000 startups to 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 why everybody has access to it. So it actually takes AI and adds X and there was this what you do with AI. It's the interface for it because anybody can buy AI, just like you buy electricity. So it's not going to be no different station. You have to do something special. You have to have a particular story and an interface, something in addition to the AI. So it's going both ways. 

[00:43:01] Jordan Harbinger: Can you give us examples of how this might work in general fields like medicine or construction or real estate? 

[00:43:08] Kevin Kelly: 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, you don't have access to a doctor and could get this on the phone. It's like a thousand million times better than no doctor.

[00:43:27] Jordan Harbinger: Sure, sure. And eventually it will be better than a human doctor with no AI. 

[00:43:32] Kevin Kelly: But the best diagnostician medically today is not an AI. It's not a doctor, but it's a team, AI and a doctor. And so that is what will continue. But if you don't have that again, the 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— 

[00:43:56] Jordan Harbinger: Of course. 

[00:43:57] Kevin Kelly: So this all happened overseas. 

[00:43:58] Jordan Harbinger: So we can have it — yeah, I was going to say in medical tourism, where I go to China and use their AI. 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 AI diagnostics. 

[00:44:15] Kevin Kelly: Right, right, right. 

[00:44:15] Jordan Harbinger: There's something insidious about it. You got to be careful. 

[00:44:17] Kevin Kelly: They're trying to kill off all the Armenians, right? 

[00:44:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's going to be something like, "Be careful your one-sixteenth 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 has this changed photography? 

[00:44:34] Kevin Kelly: Well, it's already changed photography. I mean, the reason why they're your cell phone is a camera is because of computation. So computational photography is replacing heavy lenses and dark rooms with bets, and that will continue to go forward. There's even a possibility of having lensless photography.

[00:44:55] Jordan Harbinger: That just does computation that will replace the lens. 

[00:44:57] Kevin Kelly: 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 can take a flat sensor and put it out on the table and it gets the light from every single part of the room, but they're all different lenses. If it was smart enough, that lens could reverse engineer the entire room. 

[00:45:17] Jordan Harbinger: Right, the sensor can reverse engineer. 

[00:45:20] Kevin Kelly: Without even the lens. 

[00:45:21] Jordan Harbinger: And then it just shows you what everything looks like based on mathematical computation. 

[00:45:24] Kevin Kelly: Right. Reconstructs the entire room, just by the fact that this little pixel here we'll get a light from different directions compared to the one next to it. So it's like in the same amount of computation, but it's theoretically possible. So what that means is that in a certain sense, anything could become a camera. 

[00:45:44] Jordan Harbinger: 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. 

[00:45:53] Kevin Kelly: Right.

[00:45:53] Jordan Harbinger: Because of this technology. That's going to be how we discover things.  

[00:45:57] Kevin Kelly: That's one way we can make it even more sensitive to photons. That's a separate thing, but that is another possibility which we could send them into space. But VR, this idea of having volumetric capture in real time, we'll 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 — like, you can say, "Show me all the pictures of my mom." 

[00:46:23] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, cool.

[00:46:24] Kevin Kelly: And it will just get you all the pictures of the mom. You don't have to tag them or anything.

[00:46:27] Jordan Harbinger: What I've always wanted to do and I've been 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. 

[00:46:36] Kevin Kelly: You can do that too. 

[00:46:37] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, is that possible even now? There has to be just sheer probability. There's going to be people who live in China, people live in Russia, people live in South America, who basically look like me with hopefully a better haircut. 

[00:46:47] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. 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 on Facebook, just because they had their friends, probably. 

[00:47:01] Jordan Harbinger: Someone got a photo of them. 

[00:47:02] Kevin Kelly: And they've tagged them. 

[00:47:03] Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible. 

[00:47:04] Kevin Kelly: But they don't really want to do that because they don't think that's their business. And they’re somewhat afraid that they would be forced to do that on a regular basis by three letter agencies. 

[00:47:14] Jordan Harbinger: 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." 

[00:47:22] Kevin Kelly: That's possible now. 

[00:47:23] Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible.

[00:47:24] Kevin Kelly: That's possible now. But even if you 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. 

[00:47:34] Jordan Harbinger: That's so cool. 

[00:47:35] Kevin Kelly: I can say like, show me all the photos that have like apples in them. There they are. 

[00:47:38] Jordan Harbinger: Really? 

[00:47:39] Kevin Kelly: Show me all the photos that — I remember there was this guy with a pirate hat. There it is. 

[00:47:43] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow, that's incredible. 

[00:47:45] Kevin Kelly: Right. 

[00:47:47] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Kevin Kelly. We'll be right back.

[00:47:52] This episode is sponsored in part by Klaviyo. Ever wonder how the e-commerce brands you admire do it? How do they know just the right messages to send to the right people at the right time? It's not experience. They got the right data and the right tools because they have Klaviyo. Klaviyo's data-driven marketing automation platform is sophisticated enough to power those legendary campaigns from the brands that you admire, but they made it simple, easy, and fast enough for anyone to use. Klaviyo helps brands easily create personalized multi-channel marketing campaigns using your most powerful asset, which is your customer data. Klaviyo integrates with all leading e-commerce platforms, helping you use your customer data in real time to send more relevant email and SMS automations. Plus building a marketing campaign is drag-and-drop easy. You can get started with your first campaign in under an hour and easily build from there with Klaviyo's best performing templates. Klaviyo gives you all the power of an enterprise marketing automation platform and none of the complexity. So you can compete with the big guys. No wonder more than 65,000 brands can't get enough. 

[00:48:49] Jen Harbinger: To get started with a free trial of Klaviyo, visit klaviyo.com/jordan. That's K-L-A-V-I-Y-O.com/jordan.

[00:48:56] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Hyundai. Hyundai questioned everything to create the best Tucson ever. Every inch of the all-new Tucson has been completely re-imagined resulting in an SUV loaded with available innovations, both inside and out. From design to tech to safety, every aspect of the new Tucson has been improved upon. Hyundai's digital key allows you to transform your smartphone into a spare key. So if you're a foggy like me, you forget where your keys are all the time. It's just one less thing to remember. LED daytime running lights are stylishly hidden within the cascading front grill, making them invisible when not in use and there are multiple user profiles. So if you share your car with a little tiny Asian lady, who's pregnant, you can set your settings up and it'll remember, I can hop in and have the seat, mirrors, climate control, radio presets, all personalized for me, plus a 10.25-inch full touch infotainment screen, and a blind spot view monitor. The SUV has been completely redesigned inside and out to create the best Tucson ever. Learn more@hyundai.com. 

[00:49:51] This episode is sponsored in part by Fruit of the Loom, Fruit of the Loom made true. Fruit of the Loom didn't get where they are today without taking a few chances. They are forever moving toward the future and forever optimistic. They don't brag. They let their innovation speak for themselves. It's this spirit that will take them into the next century of Fruit of the Loom. Every day, over 29,000 talented and passionate innovators wake up excited to obsess over even the smallest details so people can give their attention to what matters most. That's the kind of brand they are. They set the bar high and shoot even higher with the utmost consideration and care for the people they serve. Passionate about exceeding expectations and work tirelessly to anticipate people's needs that every touchpoint. Pursue better relentlessly, better fit, better quality, and better performance. Create quality apparel at an affordable price for everybody and everybody. I grew up with Fruit of the Loom, and I'm sure many of you do it as well with over 170 years of spark and soul, they'll forge on going above and beyond on every standard and putting passion, care, and optimism into every stitch. Visit fruit.com today. 

[00:50:50] 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 sponsors, 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 jordanharbinger.com/deals. All the promo codes, all the deals are right there. Please do consider supporting those who support us. I love providing this for free. That's why I don't shill crazy, you know, life-coaching workshops or anything like that. I just want to do this. And when you buy a freaking mattress or do something else that try out some food from our sponsors, that's what keeps the lights on. jordanharbinger.com/deals is where you can find all those. 

[00:51:38] 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 jordanharbinger.com/podcast. Now for the conclusion of my conversation with Kevin Kelly. 

[00:51:54] 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." He goes, "Dang. You know what, it's my brother. And we're looking for his friends and he passed away and we don't have a connection with his life. And we were hoping it'd be a new one." 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. 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— 

[00:52:55] Kevin Kelly: Well, actually the Google face recognition will recognize people independent of their age.

[00:53:00] Jordan Harbinger: Really? How is that? So there are certain things that—

[00:53:03] Kevin Kelly: So he had pictures and he typed his daughter. And when he uploaded his earlier pictures of her, when she was really young, it recognized it. 

[00:53:11] Jordan Harbinger: That's  so cool. Oh my gosh. 

[00:53:14] Kevin Kelly: So we're very close— 

[00:53:15] Jordan Harbinger: Unreal. 

[00:53:15] Kevin Kelly: —to this point where the AIs can understand photos and remember everyone has never seen. The thing is they will remember every single photo and everybody in every single photo forever. 

[00:53:26] Jordan Harbinger: This reminds me of when smartphones or phones in general, that you sit in your pocket, you know how no one knows phone numbers now, just nobody does. 

[00:53:33] Kevin Kelly: I know. My wife, never. 

[00:53:34] Jordan Harbinger: That maybe you should learn at least one, right? And you don't know how to navigate anywhere. Well, maybe you do. And 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 left it in the car." 

[00:53:58] Kevin Kelly: No, it's my glasses. It's your glasses. That's going to do it, right? 

[00:54:01] Jordan Harbinger: So it'll say this is Kevin Kelly. You met him in 2016. 

[00:54:03] Kevin Kelly: I want it so bad. 

[00:54:04] Jordan Harbinger: I want it right now. 

[00:54:05] Kevin Kelly: Because I had gone to conferences. And the next day— 

[00:54:08] Jordan Harbinger: I'm sorry, what was your name? That will never happen again. 

[00:54:11] Kevin Kelly: I just spent an afternoon with him. It was terrible. 

[00:54:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You'll know his name, his wife's name, his kids' birthdays. 

[00:54:16] Kevin Kelly: Or salary. Yeah. 

[00:54:17] Jordan Harbinger: And where he went on vacation. 

[00:54:18] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. 

[00:54:19] Jordan Harbinger: 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. So you'll be able to crowdsource stuff. "Jane thought he was a real jerk. She went out with him three years ago. Here's what happened?" 

[00:54:29] Kevin Kelly: Would that change that behavior? 

[00:54:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think so. Hopefully, for the better. 

[00:54:34] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. 

[00:54:34] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 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. 

[00:54:40] Kevin Kelly: This is that covalence I was talking about.

[00:54:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. We got to be careful. Remember, next time you feel like acting up with somebody, covalence, just remember. 

[00:54:48] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. 

[00:54:48] Kevin Kelly: And we're training this AI every day, right? 

[00:54:50] Kevin Kelly: Absolutely. 

[00:54:51] Jordan Harbinger: Every time I search— 

[00:54:52] Kevin Kelly: You think you're surfing around, clicking on random things, but each time you click, you are training the AI. 

[00:54:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, man. Will AI replace us largely? Or will it help us become better humans, mostly? 

[00:55:04] Kevin Kelly: Right now, a lot of the tasks that we do in our lives or any kind of tax where efficiency and productivity is an issue goes to the bots. But a lot of the things that we value the most, like innovation science, are inherently inefficient because you have failure after failure after failure. So those are the things that we're going to gravitate to and human experiences and your interpersonal relationships, which by the way, are inherently inefficient. 

[00:55:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. 

[00:55:27] Kevin Kelly: Those are things that we will continue to do because we like other humans. And so— 

[00:55:34] Jordan Harbinger: 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. 

[00:55:40] Kevin Kelly: No we all like other humans in the end. Some of us like machines too. 

[00:55:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. That's true. 

[00:55:45] Kevin Kelly: I think that people forget that we're going to invent so many new things that we want to have done with the aid of the AIs 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'll be so many more new things to do and jobs than before. 

[00:56:10] Jordan Harbinger: So they'll 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 of these jobs are going to go away. They're just going to become different jobs or evolving. 

[00:56:22] Kevin Kelly: The most common job in America right now is truck driver. 

[00:56:26] Jordan Harbinger: Truck driver, yeah. 

[00:56:27] Kevin Kelly: And what's going to happen is a lot of the truck drivers. Well, some will have to be retrained, but a lot of them we're going to have to keep those trucks going.

[00:56:34] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. They'll turn into— 

[00:56:35] Kevin Kelly: Repair. 

[00:56:35] Jordan Harbinger: Auto truck mechanics. 

[00:56:36] Kevin Kelly: Auto truck mechanics. That will be a huge thing just to, you know, they'll think differently. There'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 just kind of imagining this. There might be people who have actually ride around inside of them, maybe because in the beginning there'll be certain parts that they can't drive.

[00:56:55] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It won't be too tricky. 

[00:56:56] Kevin Kelly: There'll be too tricky. Or maybe they're like pilots, when they come into the Harbor. 

[00:57:00] Jordan Harbinger: Right, sure. 

[00:57:01] Kevin Kelly: You have pilots that just get in and they drive it there and then they give it back. So maybe they hang out at these tough intersections or whatever it is. 

[00:57:08] Jordan Harbinger: They'll be like, "Watch this," and then it's going to beep and then they're going to put this on pause.

[00:57:12] Kevin Kelly: Yeah. Right. 

[00:57:13] Jordan Harbinger: Back down the switchback trail. Incredible. 

[00:57:16] Kevin Kelly: I think we haven't even begun to imagine all the ways in which we are going to participate in this, but there are going to be so many new things for us to do. 

[00:57:22] Jordan Harbinger: Elon Musk and Sam Harris and other guys like that have this fear of AI. Do you share this sort of, oh, what happens if it gets too smart?

[00:57:29] Kevin Kelly: Well, the idea there is that you have this intelligence explosion when we make an AI, they can then 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. You know, I think that is, has a probability greater than zero, but it's very, very unlikely for many reasons. And I think the main fallacy that makes it again is this idea of a single dimension in intelligence. 

[00:58:03] Jordan Harbinger: Right. A general intelligence zone. 

[00:58:04] Kevin Kelly: Because as I said, AI is already  smarter than us in these other things. 

[00:58:09] Jordan Harbinger: Right, like I'm not afraid of my calculator. I can leave alone with my fiancée or kids.

[00:58:13] Kevin Kelly: So this is idea that you have this sort of general purpose. And this also the intelligence is infinite, which is a very interesting idea that we have no evidence for. 

[00:58:22] Jordan Harbinger: Right, right. True. 

[00:58:24] Kevin Kelly: 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?

[00:58:34] Jordan Harbinger: 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, ah, who's going to meet a high ground, higher than that. So we're kind of at that point where if you can't see it, because it's over the horizon, just think, "Wow, it must just keep going forever."

[00:58:49]Kevin Kelly: Exactly. But we don't have any evidence on that side. 

[00:58:52] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's like the flat earth. Will this just go forever? And then, "Oh, it's a sphere. Oh, that makes so much sense." 

[00:58:59] Kevin Kelly: So is intelligence spherical? 

[00:59:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I don't know, outside my pay grade right now. Yeah, exactly. Robots, 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— 

[00:59:21] Kevin Kelly: They do now. 

[00:59:22] Jordan Harbinger: Good thing. I'm not a lawyer anymore.

[00:59:23] Kevin Kelly: That's one of the biggest things that AI in law field is going through evidence in a way that humans simply couldn't. You can just memorize, but they can actually memorize every single page of 10,000 documents. And so that's already happening. The concern people have is what if they're starting to 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. 

[00:59:48] Jordan Harbinger: How's that? 

[00:59:49] Kevin Kelly: They're using AI and making mortgages. They started out on mortgages,  which has huge effect on people and there will be even more. So right now, the army is really interested in having drones to kill people, having them be autonomous.

[01:00:04] Jordan Harbinger: So that we don't have a guy in Nevada deciding whether or not to do it. That seems a little, I mean this really does something to me. 

[01:00:10] Kevin Kelly: Right. Okay. And so here's the argument for no AI will ever be accused of a war crime because we'll make their ethics or decision completely waterproof. And so they will be less emotional about it. They'll 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 kind of relieve the humans of some of this messy decision. 

[01:00:38] Jordan Harbinger: Do you realize this is literally how Skynet started, right? 

[01:00:41] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. 

[01:00:42]  Jordan Harbinger: This is exactly what happened. 

[01:00:44] Kevin Kelly: Right. 

[01:00:44]  Jordan Harbinger: Trust me, it's going to be safer. But of course, that also presupposes that it was a generalized AI which is what you said is not something that we have to worry about. 

[01:00:54] Kevin Kelly: No. Well, you have one just manufactured to kill. That's all. 

[01:00:57]  Jordan Harbinger: That's why it's scarier than a calculator.

[01:00:59] Kevin Kelly: Right. 

[01:00:59]  Jordan Harbinger: Because it has missiles on it. 

[01:01:01] Kevin Kelly: Right. Exactly. But it's this 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? 

[01:01:09] Jordan Harbinger: I'd rather send a robot into battle than my neighbor or my kid. 

[01:01:12] Kevin Kelly: Right. Exactly. 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 mean, that's just the beginning of the conversations. That's not the end, but I will say is that, of course, if the US doesn't do it, which they're thinking about China and Russia will. 

[01:01:30] Jordan Harbinger: Somebody else will do it. 

[01:01:31] Kevin Kelly: Somebody else will do it. 

[01:01:31] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's like saying, "Hey, these nuclear things are really dangerous. We should stay away from that. Wait, is everybody going to abide by that? Probably not. All right. Get to work on these. 

[01:01:38] Kevin Kelly: 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 it like chemical warfare or is that like, you know, that's just war. 

[01:02:04] Jordan Harbinger: Fair play. 

[01:02:04] Kevin Kelly: This is fair play. And what about, you know, taking out the traffic light? It's like we have no rules at all about what's acceptable. And even though the US 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. 

[01:02:26] Jordan Harbinger: 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. 

[01:02:35] Kevin Kelly: Well, it was necessary because they want to show strength.  They had this justification. 

[01:02:38] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[01:02:39] Kevin Kelly: But we've come to say, no, that's unacceptable. Women and children, unacceptable, on killing them or chemicals, maybe minds 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— 

[01:02:52] Jordan Harbinger: Quantify, exactly. 

[01:02:53] Kevin Kelly: —who's done it. But also because it's also new and we don't have these equivalencies right now in our mind. 

[01:03:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's hard to say taking out the electrical grid during the winter time in Michigan was as severe as just carpet bombing in Detroit but it kind of, maybe it has the exact same effect in terms of human life.

[01:03:11] Kevin Kelly: It could. 

[01:03:12] Jordan Harbinger: Right. 

[01:03:12] Kevin Kelly: And so I do worry that we might have, or endure, a huge disaster first before it kind of forces a demand for the security.  

[01:03:21] Jordan Harbinger: 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 has, oh, that's never going to happen. That was stage one, I think, right?

[01:03:34] Kevin Kelly: There's a Pew survey in the Internet that this very large scale survey, which I replicated at my book launch with 200 people from Silicon Valley. And it's important to remember that they're from Silicon Valley and I asked the same question that Pew asked and I said, "How many people here would agree with the statement that in 50 years, 75 percent of the current jobs would be gone?" Because 150 years ago, 70 percent of Americans were farmers. Well, that's one percent. So basically 70 percent 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 percent of all today's jobs will be gone?" And it was almost universal. Everybody said, "Yes, I think 70 percent, 50 years." And then I asked the follow up question, which Pew said, "How many people here would agree with the statement that in 50 years, your job is going to be gone?" Nobody. 

[01:04:35] Jordan Harbinger: Of course. 

[01:04:37] Jordan Harbinger: So all, everyone else's jobs going to be taken by it, but not mine. 

[01:04:41] Jordan Harbinger: Poor bastards. Luckily, I'm smarter than that. I knew that was coming. I saw that 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 one. It's true. I mean, I guarantee you, if you ask any lawyer right now for 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 cause it's a little more nuanced, but some of my first year in second year associates, those people are definitely going to be screwed, you know, in 20 years." I can see that for sure.

[01:05:14] What I really like about the future, according to the future of Kevin Kelly is personalization of everything. And 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 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.

[01:05:31] Jordan Harbinger: I was taking my vitamins this morning, for example. And I took, I don't know, some sort of multi things liquid and some garlic and the fish oil and 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 and I may order this combo from Amazon in the future. Pretty soon, we'll probably be making them at home day by day. 

[01:06:02] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. There's this guy in Silicon Valley who has a startup, that is he called 3D pill printing, but it's actually more complicated. It has to do with the quantified self stuff where you're monitoring your own health, not just health. 

[01:06:16] Jordan Harbinger: Nanobots in your bloodstream or whatever. 

[01:06:18] Kevin Kelly: 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 measure your exhalations. It turns out that when you exhale, you're actually exhaling a lot of body chemistry. And the way to do this is a way to actually suck blood through your skin without picking it in a very tiny amounts that you can actually measure. So you could 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.

[01:06:45] Jordan Harbinger: 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, and it was sent it back to the pill machine. So that tomorrow is going to readjust the  dosages. 

[01:07:10] Jordan Harbinger: Right, "Oh, you got to much of iron before launch. We'll have that release a little slower. 

[01:07:14] Kevin Kelly: And so it will remix it. So you have this daily, personal therapeutic, just for you. 

[01:07:21] Jordan Harbinger: Great. 

[01:07:21] Kevin Kelly: That's where we're going with this kind of stuff. 

[01:07:23] Jordan Harbinger: Too busy to have lunch, try this Wi-Fi back patch that sucks your blood through your skin measures is what you need and manufactures it for you.

[01:07:30] Kevin Kelly: Exactly. 

[01:07:31] Jordan Harbinger: Might want to work on that copy. So if we have all these medical gears, we've got all this personalization, our healthcare is going to be great. Our lifestyle is going to be great, hopefully, a lot safer. Are you worried about overpopulation at all? 

[01:07:41] Kevin Kelly: Oh my gosh. No. I'm worried about under population, severe under population on a global level. There are a couple of countries in the world that's been a lot of time in like Japan, where depopulation is a real issue. Every official UN projection that we seen has one version of it, where the population peaks out and I don't know whether it is 20, 70, or somewhere, there's a peak population. What's interesting about all these curves is they never show you that, the other side. What happens on the other side?

[01:08:15] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's always here's the scary thing that you've got to look forward to. 

[01:08:17] Kevin Kelly: It stops right here, but it's like, okay, but what happens in the other side? It goes down, down, down, down, because you have basically low fertility below replacement level throughout the world. This begins in the developed countries, but it's happening very rapidly, even in the developing countries. And China is aging faster than the US. Okay, Mexico's aging faster than the US. US is sort of an exception for only one reason. 

[01:08:41] Jordan Harbinger: Immigration.

[01:08:41] Kevin Kelly: Immigration. 

[01:08:42] Jordan Harbinger: Really? 

[01:08:43]  Kevin Kelly: US 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. 

[01:08:53]Jordan Harbinger: So send us your huddled masses, as long as they're under 30. 

[01:08:56] Kevin Kelly: 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.

[01:09:19] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see. Okay. 

[01:09:21] Kevin Kelly: We have no evidence anywhere. There've been increasing populations and decreasing standards, but there has never been increasing standards and decreasing populations. Because basically the more people you have, the more minds you have, the more of a market you have, et cetera. So we have no evidence, no experience with increasing standards and decreasing population.

[01:09:41] Jordan Harbinger: So do you think our standards will potentially decrease when the population goes down? 

[01:09:46] Kevin Kelly: 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 we will make artificial minds and they will buy stuff. Or 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, there are fewer and fewer workers to work on it. Your market is smaller and smaller. No matter what. 

[01:10:17] Jordan Harbinger: No matter what, yeah. 

[01:10:18]  Kevin Kelly: So like how do you increase the prosperity over time? And so AI maybe part of that. 

[01:10:24] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe but you and I will be dead by then. So it's your problem now. Kevin, thank you so much. 

[01:10:29]  Kevin Kelly: Hey, it was really great. 

[01:10:31] Jordan Harbinger: Likewise. 

[01:10:32]  Kevin Kelly: Really great. Thank you. 

[01:10:33] Jordan Harbinger: 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. 

[01:10:46] Dan Ariely: 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. 

[01:11:13] What is our understanding? Think about how we waste our time. Think about how we waste our money, how we waste our health. 

[01:11:23] My mission is to do some 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 are actually going backwards. 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 is a wonderful process.

[01:11:45] So when people read or listen or think about those topics, I think that the real benefit is to say, "What can I take from 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 on something? Is there something I would like to try out in a few different ways and see what leads to a better outcome?" 

[01:12:10] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[01:12:26] 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. You know, during our parents' lifetime, there was the 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 changing the world.

[01:12:59] 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. 

[01:13:24] Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts for episodes are in the show notes. Also we've got videos of many of our interviews on our YouTube channel. jordanharbinger.com/youtube. There's a clips channel as well with cuts that don't make it to the show or highlights from the interviews that you can't see anywhere else. jordanharbinger.com/clips is where you can find. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on Twitter, Instagram. You can also add me on LinkedIn. I love talking with you all on all platforms. 

[01:13:53] And I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using software, systems, and tiny habits. The same stuff I use, really non-complex, really simple. It takes a handful of minutes a day, like six. Well, five, but five minute networking was taken. So it's called Six-Minute Networking and it's free. It's over at jordanharbinger.com/course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. That's what I'm teaching you in this course. Additionally, most of the guests on the show that you hear, they subscribe to the course and they contribute to the course. So come join us, you'll be in smart company where you. 

[01:14:22]This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's interested in the future, futurism, technology, AI, share this episode with them. I hope you find something great in every episode. Please share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

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