Kevin Kelly on the Future of Tech, Parenting Tips, & His New Book
"The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI."
—Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly is a futurist, author, and editor who has been writing about technology for over 30 years. He co-founded Wired magazine and wrote several books, including Out of Control, What Technology Wants, and The Inevitable.
He co-founded Wired magazine, which quickly became one of the most influential publications in the world. He co-founded the Hackers Conference in 1984 which still exists. He rose his bike across America twice. He has a great TED talk called, The future will be shaped by optimists.
Kelly is a radical optimist who believes that technology has the potential to solve many of the world's problems. He argues that technology can help us to create a more sustainable, equitable, and peaceful world.
In this interview, we talk bout his new book, Excellent Advice For Living, the future of technology, and advice for parents.
5 Questions For Kevin Kelly
1. Your newsletter, Recommendo, is the one I looked forward to the most each week. Some of my favorite recommendations have been A Short History of Living Longer, these productivity hacks, and this coffee cup. Out of all of the things that have ever been added to that list, what are some of your favorites?
My favorite Recomendos are the Merlin bird song app, brass garden hose instant couplers, and our Chevy Bolt all electric car. Everytime I use them I think to myself “these are so good everyone should know about them."
2. As a co-founder of Wired magazine and a renowned technology futurist, you have been at the forefront of technological innovation for many years. How do you see technology shaping the future in the next decade, and what are some emerging trends that you find particularly exciting?
The primary technological force in the coming years are AIs. We’ll invent hundreds of varieties of AIs to do thousands of different jobs, and most of those intelligences will be not be thinking like humans at all. That difference will be their main attraction.
3. You have written extensively about the impact of the internet and digital technologies on culture, economy, and society. What can we do to maximize the positive outcomes while mitigating the negative ones?
Use young and emerging technologies as soon as possible and judge their worth on actual evidence, rather than on what we imagine what they could do or not do.
4. Your new book, Excellent Advice for Living, is a collection of “wise, practical, optimistic life advice” that you started writing down around your 68th birthday. With this in mind, I'm curious to know which pieces of advice from your book have resonated the most with your readers?
The biggest surprise of this book and the hundreds of interviews I have done about it is that there has been very little overlap in the favorite pieces of advice from one person to to the next. Everyone has different ones that resonate with them.
5. One of your pieces of advice in the book is "For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should but double the time with them." What are some other pieces of advice for parents?
“Let your children pick their punishments. They will be harsher than you.” and “Try to have as many family rituals as possible, The ritual doesn’t have to be “important” in order to become significant and meaningful as long as it is repeated often.”
