36: Kevin Kelly on Techno Literacy, Systems Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit jennyblake Me podcast. If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Pivot Podcast. I am overjoyed and just about fell out of my chair when today's guest said yes to be on the show. I'm thrilled to have Kevin Kelly here who is senior maverick at Wired magazine and one of his co founding editors in 1993. He served as executive editor for seven years and is also founding editor and co publisher of the popular Cool Tools website which has been Review tools daily since 2003. Among many other fascinating projects. Kevin's new book is called the understanding the 12 technological forces that Will Shape Our Future which launches this week and that's the topic of today's show. Kevin, welcome to the Pivot Podcast.

It's really my pleasure being here. Thanks for inviting me.

Sure thing. I want to kick off with a quote from the introduction of your book. You say technology is humanity's accelerant. Because of technology, everything we make is always in the process of becoming. Every kind of thing is becoming something else. While it turns from might to is, all is flux. Nothing is finished, nothing is done. This never ending change is the pivotal axis of the modern world. In our new era, processes trump products. And then you say at the end it's as if we've been living in rigid ice and now we're in liquid a new phase state. I find that absolutely fascinating. As I mentioned before we hit record, I study careers and how people can be agile in this economy. Can you talk a little bit about this phase state shift to a more liquid flux flowing technological landscape?

Yeah, I think this is.

Something that maybe a futurist from a previous generation named Alvin Toffler, he called this future shock, which is basically the idea that.

We are still kind of reverberating from this speeding up, this constant state of change, which was really not the norm for most of our human history before. I mean, most people growing up a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, 200 years ago, kind of did what their parents did. And there wasn't much need to look ahead too far because you actually probably learn more by looking at the past and things were being repeated. But that really changed with the invention of science and the arrival of technology and even kind of self creating technology where we used technology to make new technology. And now we have this sort of runaway state where things are kind of never finished. They're always in the process of becoming and.

We'Re still adjusting to that. This takes a lot of training. It takes education, because I don't think it's that natural.

To be persistent at this level, to just be constant. And I think what I suggest is we kind of adopt.

An attitude of techno literacy where we become literate in.

This sort of flux, where you become a lifelong learner.

You don't stop at high school or when you graduate from college. Basically that's the point. You begin really learning and you learn all your life. You're always a newbie, you're an eternal newbie, because technology is making new things which you have to learn anew and often have to unlearn, which is sometimes even more difficult to do. And we are in the process of also redefining our very nature, and not just redefining, but even bending, changing the very nature of what it is to be human. And so this is a big, big project, both at the individual level, your careers as well as societal level. So the gears are moving in many speeds. And I think.

We don't really give enough recognition to both the difficulty of this and the necessity of it. And I think people who are going to prosper in the future, we'll hopefully more than intuitively understand this, but also explicitly be taught that that's this meta skill that you need, which is.

How to learn new things.

Learning how this system of technology operates in general, like we learn how to read. And I think we may not just be able to learn this by osmosis, by hanging around. You can't learn reading just by sort of being near books. You actually have to spend four or five years to learn how to read. You can't really learn calculus just by being around math. You have to actually study it. And I think some of these processes of learning, becoming techno literacy may require us to actually give deliberate practice, deliberate training, deliberate education, where we understand the best practice and are taught that right now we kind of left it to ourselves to do. And so those who are able to do it themselves can prosper. But.

I think this is important enough that we'll eventually have to teach it to each other.

You give an interesting example in the book about the perpetual newbie state, where even those of us who are techno literate, let's say, well, our app is getting a system upgrade every couple months and the apps sometimes upgrade their entire interface. So even when you think you know how something works, get ready to relearn it again, that we're always going to be newbies and increasingly so.

My own personal experience is, because I'm a photographer and I do things visually and design books, is that I will use some of the Adobe suite apps, which are really some of the most complicated bits of software that we have at the consumer level, and I'll use it and then not use it for a year or something and then come back and things will be different.

Things will be gone, menu items will have drifted, moved somewhere else, or there'll be new ones. And I really have to go back to Lynda, which is a site that I really recommend that teaches technical skills online. And I have to take a refresher course.

Because it's like I'm a newbie. I mean, it's like I'm brand new. I have to take the orientation classes to kind of both refresh myself, but also learn what the new things are. And that's sort of, you know, that's sort of what you have to kind of sign up for, is that you're going to go back and have to learn these things again.

And those are a great example of a little too complex to just plop yourself in front of it and learn it. At least that's been my experience with Illustrator.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can thrash around half a day just wasted and trying to remember how do I link one tiny thing? Yeah, right.

You mentioned that it's hard for us to adapt and adjust, in a sense. And it seems like the technium, as you call it, and what technology wants is actually becoming more human, like in terms of this perpetual state of becoming. And yet we're not used to it. We almost reject that in ourselves at times. I think this, this perpetual learner, never done, never there. And now technology is mirroring that, I think.

I wouldn't say that technomy is becoming human. Like, I would say it's becoming very lifelike and biological life lifelike in the sense that it's More like an organism or a super organism that has its own.

Urges and tendencies and kind of.

Exerts its own agenda to some extent.

So often I think the best way to kind of visualize where we're headed in technology is to imagine it like a wilderness where you have this very complicated ecosystem of all these interdependent pieces of technology. And to kind of intuitively grok how it works is almost like.

A scout or a naturalist being kind of intuitively, or even a doctor. To understand how the body is sort of a very large complicated system where there are many interdependent parts. And we might even need to hire guides and scouts to get us through.

This new technium.

In the sense that it's really hard to kind of reduce it the way we often think science works. To reduce just understanding one little part at a time. It really does require a more systems approach and a mindset where you understand that in the words of the kind of science of chaos, one small little change in one area can have a very large ramification, amplifying effect somewhere else. And.

There are just a lot of counterintuitive ways in which the system of technology works as a system. And I think.

Using a biological metaphor is actually helpful for people rather than the machine metaphor. So if you understand that the kind of. That your iPhone is really kind of an ecosystem, it's probably much more related.

To a meadow than it is to a clock. And everybody understands that if you upgrade this thing over here, it may require upgrading all these other things. You can't just sort of change one little gear. You have to change everything all at once. And that's, I think, part of this techno literacy that I was talking about.

One aspect of that you mentioned is systems thinking. How can people improve their systems thinking skills?

That's a really great question. And.

I don't think I have some practical advice other than I think be aware. I mean, I think the first step is really to just be aware that these are systems and the systems have their own logic. There's a great book that's an obscure book and I think still back in print. It was called System Antics. System Antics. I think that was one word and I think it was John Gall, G A L L, if I'm not mistaken. And he kind of did a little roundup of what he thought were system logic, how systems kind of work in general.

A very famous sort of.

Quote or aphorism of system thinking was the people would rise to the level of their incompetence. They would be promoted to A level of their incompetence, which makes the Peter principle, right? So that as long as you were doing well, you would get promot promoted, and then you would get promoted to the point that you weren't doing well. So basically you were being promoted to the level of your incompetence. Or another idea is that the systems generally would work expands to fulfill the amount of resources that are available to it. And so those are kind of little aphorism proverbs that have a system thinking. But I think the main thing is to just to be aware that the systems have their own way of doing things that are not present in any of the parts of the system. The sum is greater than the parts. But that also means that the behavior of the system is not contained, not representative in any of the parts. And so the system will behave in a way that none of the parts, meaning that you could have a society that behaves very differently than any of the individual humans. So while all the humans may be very nice and altruistic, the system itself could be very mercenary, say, because the system level, because it operates at a different level and it can have different behaviors there. And so just I think becoming aware of that, looking at other systems, becoming a fan, a student of nature, that's a system. Your health embodies a system. And so I think paying attention to these other systems that are around us would help us understand and become good at this other system of both the society and the technium which we are operating in and trying to make careers out of. And I think if you understand again that the system as a whole has dynamics that are not present in any of the parts, that will be a big step forward.

One of the things I found quite hopeful in the book is you say 2016, now is the best time to start up, that even though some people feel like they missed the boat because so many domains are already registered, you're saying we're gonna look back on this time now and say, wow, that was prime time. Can you say a little more about that?

Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm old enough to have been through couple of tech cycles and.

You know, hindsight's much clearer than foresight. And so in retrospect, you know, when the web was, when the Internet was first coming along, anybody could have claimed a domain name.

For nothing. Almost really just you decided you wanted it and you get it because they were all available. It was the very, very beginning. And.

So.

A lot of the simple ideas of taking something that existed in the physical world and say, let's make an online version of it and we'll take a store and we'll make an online store. Wow. Okay, so that was a very obvious thing to do and many people did. And some people got rich doing it, others lost money. But there was a lot of opportunity to take those obvious things. And it seems now that, well, all the easy things were done and really you're fighting a billion startups and they're all competing for scarce attention. And how much better would it have been to have started 20 years ago? And the thing that people forget is.

That.

What is coming, where we're going to, the things that are going to be invented in the next 10 or 20 years will be so significant that they will dwarf what we've already had. And while we think we're kind, you know, we've been living in the Internet age, we actually haven't even, I mean, the Internet's still in its infancy. It's only, you know, 8,000 days old or something. It's very, very, very young. And in the next 30 years it will develop into this much more amazing and deep thing that when we look back at this time right now, we'll say, well, you guys didn't really even have an Internet then.

Which also means that the most important inventions and innovations in 30 years from now haven't been invented yet. I mean, not just like haven't been marketed yet. I mean, they haven't even been invented yet. We don't even don't have names, we haven't seen them. And I'm not talking about the things, I'm talking about my book, like AI and virtual reality, because we do do have those now and I do believe that they will become really, really important. But they won't be the most important thing, the most important thing we have not yet invented. And that means that one of you people out there right now listening could be the person to, or the team to invent that. Wherever you live, no matter where it's, where in the world it is, you have as much of a chance and maybe a better chance than someone working at Google or Facebook does to actually invent.

These things that were going to become the Central engines in 30 years from now. So that means that you're not late. That means that.

This really is the best time in the world so far ever. Because we now have more tools, lower barriers, and all the low hanging fruits are still there. All the low hanging fruits for the next 30 years are right here. And I mentioned AI, and that's one of them which is like or VR. There are no VR experts. There are a lot of people working on VR right now. But in terms of what actually works in 30 years, there are no experts right now. There are actually very few AI experts. So.

You have as much you out there, the listeners have as much chances of anybody becoming the VR expert or the AI expert.

I love how you say in the book that the business plans for the next 10,000 startups could be take AI and combine it with something else.

Right.

The analogy that I'm using is 150 years ago, the Industrial revolution, which.

Our prosperity was based on, it brought in all the good stuff, the leisure, the increased health and longevity that we all enjoy right now. The Industrial Revolution was really powered by this synthetic power, by the fact that we figured out how to make artificial power instead of relying on human muscle or animal power. So we harness first steam, coal and steam, and then oil.

In generating electricity to.

Do all this work. And so when you have a car today that has 250 horses in it, basically 250 horsepower, you are harnessing the power of 250 horses just at the, you know.

Flick of your key. And so.

That was the Industrial Revolution. And we took things that were manual, like a hand pump to water pump, and we electrified them. And the thing was, and the beauty of it was that.

You were just buying, we made electrical grids so anybody could purchase electricity, they didn't have to generate it. They could just purchase this commodity called electricity and electrify their factory or take something like a pump and make an electric pump out of it. So that's where a lot of the wealth came from, both in making these new kinds of devices and then also using them to do all kinds of things that we couldn't do before. And now we're going to kind of do this second Industrial revolution, this.

New information based thing where we're going to take AI, we're going to take artificial smartness, artificial intelligence. We're going to cognify things that we had formerly electrified, where we're going to add a little, we're going to add 250 minds, 250 brains to do something. And.

That we're going to have the same kind of an effect on our society in every respect. The same way that Industrial revolution affected everything we had done before, from education to entertainment, to sports, food, whatever. The same kind of effect is going to be coming soon when we have this AI as a commodity. And you won't generate the AI, you'll just purchase it on a grid as much AI or IQ as you want or can afford or need and you'll use it to make smart the pump. The pump will now be a smart pump and or the.

Again the most, the more obscure the idea, the more powerful will be when we add this 24 hours, seven day a week, 365 days a year, mind thinking, synthetic learning to these things. And.

That'S the new frontier. And again it's going to be available to anybody in the world. Right now, today, right as we are speaking, you can buy AI from Google. Google is now and so is Microsoft, but Google is a commercial product where you can go to their site and purchase AI mostly right now in perception. And it's 60 cents for a thousand instances.

What could you do with that? Well, that's a great question. And some people will start to fool around and think about what they could do with this cheap AI.

So fascinating. You mentioned also virtual reality and augmented reality. And now there's a term, mixed reality. I just finished reading your magic leap write up for Wired. It was so, so good. And then Wired also recently released a video which I'll link in the show notes. Everybody must watch this. This technology is truly mind blowing and I would love to hear a little more about your experience with it. And for someone like me, I can see virtual reality or augment AR or Mr. Coming down the pike. But it's hard for me to see how it will relate to career and business. Right now it seems a lot of fun, imagination and video games and even health. So I'm wondering if you can speak to that second part as well.

Yeah, so.

Virtual reality is the thing that we have the most preconceptions about is you have a goggle that you put on like swim goggles and it kind of replaces everything you see with synthetic, artificial world. And the thing about it is the crucial innovation is that you 100% feel in your body, not just your mind, but you feel like you're somewhere else. And the. Mr. The ar, the mixed reality is where you take something that's like a clear pair of glasses, kind of like Google Glass, but you take clear glasses and.

Something artificial, like an artificial object will appear in the kind of the normal vision of the room that you're in or even outside. And so you can see something synthetic, maybe even synthetic screens, artificial screens that will be hovering wherever you want to put them. And you can manipulate these artificial things with your hands. And so I mean you can move them around. So.

Those two, the second ones making the mixed reality, where you take ordinary reality and you add this virtual stuff layered into it that's technically more difficult to do. And if you can do that, you can actually do VR by just kind of making everything black and then making the room. You turn down the room in the background and you have a completely artificial world. So VR is a subset of the bigger mixed reality. So if you can do mixed reality, you can do both. And Magic Leap is this secretive company in Florida that got several billion dollars in financing, and they haven't yet released even demos.

Or developer kits or anything.

But their technology does work.

My experience in trying it out is that.

The synthetic things that you see in your glasses.

Look exactly real, but they look really present. So it's like maybe if you had a cartoon version of Mickey Mouse and it was really present, you really felt it was there, that cartoon was really there.

So that's sort of the state of the art. And the VR worlds from the Oculus and others that Facebook have been financing do really work. There's enough resolution and. And other things, other technical aspects of it, that you really do feel you're somewhere else. And so your question is, well, okay, we can kind of see how a game would really kind of be cool, the Ready Player One Oasis game, where you are in these other worlds, but how would that be applied to a career? And I think the mixed reality is actually one place where we're going to see it first come, actually arrive in workplaces, and that is that if you can wear a pair of spectacles and have.

Artificial screens and an artificial person, like a teleconference, like a holodeck kind of version of a holographic version of a person, a colleague, a co worker from a distant place sitting next to you.

That really does change.

How we work. And I would say a couple things about that telepresence. One is.

There'S lots of approaches right now to try and ramp up.

The resolution so it really looks like it's a real person. And it is amazing. I mean, some of the demos I saw.

You could see every hair of the person moving, and you could see the fabric, the weave of the fabric in their clothes. And it was actually so.

Real looking that it felt uncomfortable getting too close, because, I mean, you could actually walk through them because they're just a visual, they're just a ghost. But this felt like you're invading your space. And so that. That works. But it turns out, in fact, that you don't even need that kind of.

Realism, which is very bandwidth intensive. So that's going to be a long Time before most people have that kind of bandwidth. And we're talking like gigabytes per second.

I mean, it's like. Or, you know, it's way beyond what we have right now.

To be able to transmit that kind of stuff in live, real time. And it also requires a lot of.

Camera stuff set up in both rooms. And so, I mean, both sides of the link. And so it turns out that you don't need that high of a resolution. If you have a couple other things, you can kind of do something with a little bit more cartoony.

Kind of like what Second Life was originally trying to do. They're now doing it in three dimensions. In the virtual reality presence.

If the other person is looking, is giving you eye contact that you can follow, that has their voice, and if all.

The facial micro movements are communicated from their own face onto this avatar, that you have enough of a sense of presence of them being there that it works. And so that does exist now. And where I'm going with this is that.

The office of the future would be putting on one of these things wherever you are. And then you can have your entire future, as many screens as you wanted to. You have your other colleagues working, not just one, but you can have many of them sitting around in the kinds of Hollywood versions of this. And that ability to have other people really present and collaborate with them in that way, I think is huge for the future of work and how we work together.

I really believe that the most social of all the social media that we have invented is going to be VR. It's having other people there, either sharing experiences or sharing work, collaborating. That's the real power. It's not kind of on your own, exploring the world. It's actually having other people and doing things together. That is the real, real power there. And I think that will change how we work together.

Yeah, those were two themes that came up strongly in the book, that it's not so much the technology itself, it's the people and the experiences. And that's what's going to continue to engage us and connect us and differentiate us and VR.

I think what VR generates for us or gives us is right now we have an Internet of information, From Wikipedia to PDFs to news sites to our little tweets, to sharing.

Photographs. These are all documents and information. And I think what you get with VR is the currency of VR is experiences you actually experience. You actually are there somewhere else.

If you can do a kind of a virtual relocation to, say, a scene in Iran where they're having A demonstration, you're no longer coming, observing it, you actually are experiencing it. When you actually exit, you recall it not as having something you have seen, but you recall it as something that you experience. And so this currency of experience, I think is the other shift that we're going to, from Internet of information to Internet of experiences. And.

That'S much more human in many ways. That's what we're built for, is to share experiences. And the information stuff is sort of what the AIs and the bots and the robots are doing. They're going to process the information, they're going to give us the answers.

And. But what we're concerned about as humans are this other stuff of experiences, of.

Questions, of uncertainties, of.

Inefficiencies, of trial failures. Because science and innovation mostly is composed of things that don't work. And.

Those are the kinds of things I think we're going to.

Really as humans, that's what our job is going to be. So anything that is sort of information based, anything that's related to productivity, anything that's about efficiency, goes to the bots, it goes to the AIs, goes to the machines.

Getting an answer, getting the right answer is a job for machines. That's what machines are good at. And if you want an answer, don't ask a human, ask a machine. But what humans are good for are asking questions. And I think in the future.

You'Ll be paid by how good your questions are. You'll be paid by what kind of questions you ask. You'll be paid by how well you question the assumptions. You'll be paid by.

You know, how well you.

Ask and discover something, explore.

That seems very aspirational right now. People will say, well, you know, that's for the elites, that's for the privilege. And that is true right now, but that's actually where we're headed to. That's actually what we're trying to do. That's actually what we want. We actually want to do that in the same way that education was just something that the elite had 300 years ago.

Being literate was something for the elites. But now we understand that and we are able actually have education for everybody. So it's something that we are committed in our best moments to have available to everybody. And everybody can be, we realize everybody can be educated. And I think the same thing about having jobs that are based around what humans are good at and not having jobs that humans are or don't really want to do and aren't really good at. So a Lot of the jobs that the politicians are fighting over are really, I believe, jobs that we're going to be embarrassed that humans ever did. Working in a factory is.

A job for robots. Being a cashier, a truck driver. These are things that while people can get some enjoyment and can do a good job, they really should go to the AIs and robots and.

Becoming a personal coach, a yoga teacher, a nurse, a mathematician, a ballerina. These are things that, these are the kinds of jobs that we should be aiming for.

And a lot of those jobs are interpersonal and more creative. Like the example of the ballerina. She's not a widget in a factory, you know, she's expressing art essentially. And I think it's the hope that more people can find a sustainable way to live by doing their art, whatever that means to them.

Right, but you used a key word, interpersonal. Because one of the things I wanted to emphasize is that these kind of jobs that are actually going to be made by technology and allowed us because the robots would do other things. It's not, people say, well, not everybody's cut out to do this intellectual, cognitive load bearing jobs. And that's true, not everybody is going to be happy doing that. But a lot of these things are very interpersonal. It's like.

A nursing bedside, someone to sit with you while you're sick. That's where we want the human touch. That's the very interpersonal, that's a very social thing. That's not something, that's something that doesn't require a lot of liberal training to do, requires someone with great interpersonal skills.

And I think those are actually become some of the most expensive. That's where we're going to spend our money. I mean the commodities and the food and all these things will be at the commodity level will become cheaper. But like a chef.

Cooking really good food, not just kind of your basic staples, which the robots will do, but doing something that touches people.

That'S where our money's going to go to. And that's one of the few places right now where the prices are rising. Concert tickets, experiences, a tour for this or that, even babysitting, all these kinds of things.

Are things where the prices are going up. And I think.

So interpersonal is actually a great term for a lot of the kind of jobs that humans will be doing and that will feel rewarding to people.

Yeah, it seems interpersonal and almost inter. Robot. I know you're going to speak with Tom Guariello who does Robo Psych, the Psychology of Human Robot Interaction. We're friends here in New York. And it seems like also interfacing with the robots and partnering with robots will be helpful. Helpful to some extent, yes.

I think you'll be paid by how well you actually whisper to AI, how well you understand AI. It's just like.

How well you work with robots. That will be. Another aspect of the techno literacy skill is understanding how they work because they will think differently than humans. And just like some people are really good with machines, understanding the machines how like a lawnmower car runs, there'll be people who will have a better skill at understanding of talking to or cooperating or working with AIs. And the way that some people are kind of power users for Google. Right? I mean, Google is a kind of AI already, so they just kind of.

They might be able to command a better position because they can actually talk to the AIs. And I think I will stress that the AIs are going to eliminate certain tasks. I think.

They may not eliminate jobs, I think they may transform jobs, but they're going to eliminate a lot of tasks. And so a lot of the jobs. Jobs is composed of many tasks. And some of those tasks will just be done by AIs. But that means that we kind of wind up working with the AIs. And the great example to me was.

The loss of the.

Human chess champion, Garry Kasparov to Deep Blue almost a decade ago.

He realized. Kasparov, the chess champ, realized that he could have won if he had had access to the same database of all the moves in history that Deep Blue had, the AI had. And so he made up new chess league that was kind of like a free martial arts version where you could play with.

The AI. You could either be an AI playing or you could be a human chess master playing, or you could be what they call centaurs, a AI plus human. And right now, in the last couple of years, the world's best chess player is not an AI and is not a human, but it is a centaur. It is a human plus AI. And, and Deep Blue was basically retrained as Watson and is now being trained as a doctor to do diagnosis. But the best diagnoses are not a human and are not Watson itself, but a human plus Watson. And that suggests to us that.

The best, smartest, best team for doing something will be not just AIs and robots and not just humans, but AIs plus robots. And so I think learning how to work with.

These things, because they are going to be systems, it's like having interpersonal skills, as you say, you kind of inner robotic skills, but they'll be inner artificial person skills will be really crucial. And.

I think if I was giving career advice, I would say.

Yeah, learn how to work with these things as part of your techno literacy, because that would become a really very, very valuable skill.

One of the things I find fascinating and inspiring about you is how early you try new technologies, and not just that, but how you sort of parse which ones have a future and might catch on. And of course, I'm sure that involves some intuition and maybe a lot of mistakes too, but you even share how you consulted for the movie Minority Report that was set for 2050, and many of those things are. Are becoming reality, like Magic Leap. So I'm just curious, how do you get your finger on the pulse so early with technology? What are your secrets, and how do you, if at all, sort out what might really catch on and filter out the noise?

Yeah, that's a good question. So one thing that, you know, we have a limited amount of time, so one thing I would say is in a certain sense, I am privileged because this is sort of my job, okay? So in some sense it is my. My work to try these things.

The key word there is try. So I will try things pretty early, but I'm very happy to let things go and not to feel obligated to use Twitter or Facebook or whatever it is if it's not working for me. And I have certain things that I'm trying to optimize in my life. So.

I think there's too many choices that we have.

To be kind of constrained to any particular ones. So we should be very, very free to abandon things. But I really think that the way we can steer and manage technology is through engagement. And so I'm a big advocate of trying things and particularly try them before you dismiss them. Them. I mean, it's okay to dismiss them after you try them, but you really have to try things.

So trying as many things as one of the jobs, and it is sometimes a job. And then secondly, I pay a lot of attention to how things are actually used versus how the inventors think they're going to use versus how they're supposed to be used.

William Gibson, a science fiction writer, had a great line, which is the street has its own use for things. And so I really try to look at the street use of how people are really using them. And I really pay a lot of attention to these kind of sometimes small notices about.

People using something that was not designed to be used that way.

And that's my idea. Kind of the talk, the technology, listening to the technology, it's kind of like the technology has a certain bias that is easier to use in certain directions. It's kind of like a grain in wood. It can go in certain directions. So I'm looking to see where technology is biased and how it kind of wants to be used. And so oftentimes.

Where laws are occurring, laws often are written to try and prevent the technology from doing what it wants to do, trying to run in one way, for instance, like copying. So I like to say that the Internet's the world's largest copy machine. If it can be copied and it touches the Internet, it will be copied. And so there was, this was very obvious to me that this is this new era that we kind of encountered in the late 80s. Nobody had ever thought about it before very much. I was bought into the kind of copyright idea everybody else, but it was obvious from the very beginning that it wanted to copy stuff.

And so there was this kind of.

Effort, a response to limit the copy protection, all kinds of laws to prevent the copying. But it was like, no, the technology says that it wants to copy. And so what would if it, you know, if you allow that, if you let it go in that direction, because it's going eventually anyway, then what does that look like? And so you begin to rehearse like, well, if everything's being copied, then what happens? So that's what I would do is I would look at it and say, what does it want? But how is the technology biased in a certain direction?

Because eventually it's going to trump our other attempts and the law will eventually catch up to just sort of acknowledge the fact that that's how things are being done. So that's a long winded way of saying that. I try to listen to the technology and look at how it encourages people to really use, not necessarily how it was designed to be used.

I love that. And it's as you say, it's also about leaning into the uncertainty, chaos and fluidity of technology. And I love that. Listening to what Technology Wants, which was also an amazing book that you wrote. I want to end with a note from my dad. He read what Technology Wants and he says some books are food for thought. This one is a 12 course meal and it's exactly how I feel about the inevitable as well. Kevin Kelly, thank you so much. This has been beyond fascinating. I'm a huge fan of you and your work and really just want to say thank you for your contributions to this space. It's incredibly enlightening and thought provoking. Thank you.

Well, it's a real pleasure being here. Thank you for my interest in the inevitable and these sort of long term trends which I think are going to play out. And I hope that we can engage them and embrace them. That's the best way to steer stuff is through engagement. I think this is a really exciting time.

This is a moment when the power to make something happen has never been easier. I hope that all your listeners try to make something happen.

And.

I'm really excited by where we're going. I'm a total optimist. I think this is going to be amazing 20 to 30 years ahead. So I appreciate your inviting me and having a chance to share.

The pleasure is all mine and ours. Thank you everyone for listening. Kevin, thanks again for being here.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit JennyBlake me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter ennyblake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.