Jan 2, 2019 · 41m · a16z
a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
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In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly joins Chris Dixon, Kyle Russell, and Sonal Chokshi to discuss his book 'The Inevitable' and the twelve technological forces shaping the future. They explore how AI, virtual reality, decentralized collaboration, and digital abundance will transform society, emphasizing that industry and governance must actively adapt to these macro trends rather than resist them.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 9.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 3.5 Guest teaching 4.3 Guest disagreement 1.4 The host pushing back 2.5
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 22:52 Reframing AI History vs Modern Deep Learning
Kelly rejects the host's skepticism regarding AI hype, arguing forcefully that cheap GPU parallel processing and big data represent a fundamental structural shift from past failed neural net iterations.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 22:47 Pushback on AI Boom HypeHost Sonal Chokshi directly confronts Kelly's optimism about AI, using strong emphasis to point out that tech forecasters have repeatedly and falsely claimed 'this time is different' in previous AI cycles.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:15 Edison's Phonograph and Technology BiasesKelly educates the host on how technologies are actually steered, sharing historical notes from Thomas Edison showing he originally conceived the phonograph for recording dying words and sermons rather than music.
The host holds their own ▶ 25:02 Connecting AI Utility to Brian Arthur's Second EconomySonal demonstrates strong intellectual background by citing W. Brian Arthur's seminal paper 'The Second Economy' to frame Kelly's concept of invisible, back-end AI utilities.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steering Technology Through Active Engagement and Adaptation | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Sonal challenges Kelly's thesis on inevitability by suggesting that society must go through an emotional phase of fighting new technology before adopting it. Kelly re-educates her using Edison's phonograph to show that technologies are steered only through practical engagement. | |
| Forces of Cognification, Filtering, and the Attention Economy | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Sonal prompts Kelly to provide concrete thought experiments on filtering, leading Kelly to explain how the scarcity of human attention will invert advertising into peer-to-peer micro-payout markets. The segment is entirely collaborative. | |
| Planetary Collaboration and Mass Sharing | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Sonal illustrates mass collaboration using the real-world example of Germany publishing its legal code on GitHub, while Dixon and Kelly detail VR development trajectories and foveated rendering. The dynamic is exploratory and supportive. | |
| Social Dynamics, Presence, and Cultural Artifacts in VR | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Sonal expresses intuition that VR will be anti-social rather than social, which Kelly and Dixon counter by explaining how non-verbal body language, eye contact, and presence trigger deep social responses. | |
| The Convergence of AI, Deep Learning, and Utility Grid Computing | 5 | 5 | 2 | 6 | Sonal delivers her sharpest pushback, asking why current AI claims aren't just repeated hype cycles. Kelly explains the technical convergence of cheap GPUs, big data, and deep neural nets, while Sonal counters with W. Brian Arthur's 'Second Economy' paper. | |
| Centaurs: Human-AI Collaboration and Machine Creativity | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | The participants discuss human-AI centaurs, with Dixon highlighting AlphaGo's shocking game 3 move against Lee Sedol and Sonal contributing perspectives from developmental psychology regarding child learning. | |
| Automation, Job Displacement, and the Economics of Abundance | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Kelly and Dixon discuss technological job displacement, framing productivity as a goal for robots while human value lies in inefficiency and creativity. Sonal synthesizes this into the core theme of designing for resource abundance. | |
| Unexpected Technological Breakthroughs and the Future Horizon | 2 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Co-hosts Kyle Russell and Chris Dixon probe Kelly on unexpected innovations, with Dixon challenging whether Silicon Valley is over-extrapolating computer science at the expense of biotechnology. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Kevin Kelly: Life tracking will increase over the next 30 years
“So I would suggest that I can't see any counter force where there will be less tracking of our lives in 20 or 30 years. There's going to be more of it.”
Kevin Kelly: Law should follow technology rather than precede it
“I think the job of law is to kind of put into place what has been worked out In other places. And so I think in a certain sense, the law is going to follow the technology and shouldn't really precede it.”
Kevin Kelly: Inventors rarely know how their technology will ultimately be used
“Most of the inventors don't even have any idea what the technology really ultimately be used for.”
Kevin Kelly: Anything digital touching the internet will inevitably be copied
“So the internet is the largest copy machine in the world by nature. It's inherent in the thing. Anything that can be copied that touches it will be copied.”
Kevin Kelly: The music industry lost ground by fighting digital copying
“I mean, can you imagine if the music industry had accepted? From the front. I mean, how far ahead they would have been if they say, okay, this is inevitable, this copy thing. We're not, we're just going to try and work with it. You know, there's things to adju…”
Kevin Kelly: TV networks earn 20 cents per hour per viewer
“The amount of attention that you give to a TV, you'll get 20 cents an hour is what they're earning for your attention.”
Kevin Kelly: Advertisers will bypass agencies to pay influencers directly
“I think this is one of the shifts that I can see coming, which is that we kind of flip things around, and you have a reverse market, so to speak, for attention, where you're paying the high influencers directly, not going through the ad agencies.”
Kevin Kelly: Digital sharing economy is still at day one
“So sharing, just generally sharing, even though it's been going on for 20 years or more, I think we're still at the day one, day two of this.”
Sonal Chokshi: Germany published its legal statutes on GitHub
“When in the early days when countries like Germany put their entire code, their laws in GitHub, and people, everyone essentially became an open source contributor.”
Kevin Kelly: Planetary-scale collaboration will become standard within 30 years
“That's still something where it's way beyond in terms of what most people are even imagining, but I think that's what we're going to be doing in the next 1020 to 30 years.”
Kevin Kelly: The internet is shifting from information to experiences
“One is that we're moving from an internet of information to the internet of experiences, right? So that's the currency, is experiences.”
Chris Dixon: Oculus is at the Apple II stage of VR
“We think it's like, this is the Apple II, like the Oculus is the Apple II. And, you know, if you go back and look at it wasn't until 81 when the PC came out that it really kind of exploded. So we're a couple of years away, but it's very, very clear what you ne…”
Chris Dixon: VR improvement is a straightforward hardware engineering problem
“Like, here, it's just kind of a straightforward path. Hardware problem. Like, right, like, and we know how to do that, and people are working on it. A lot of money is going into it, so it's going to happen.”
Kevin Kelly: VR will become the most social medium ever
“Like I think that VR will be the most social of all the social media ever.”
Kevin Kelly: Most VR content will be lightweight meme-like experiences
“Because that's what's going to, most of the stuff in VR will be low cats.”
Chris Dixon: AI error rates on ImageNet have surpassed human accuracy
“Like the, if you look at the results, like image net's a good, it's a good example where the, you know, it's been the error rates were 30% or something, and now are better than humans.”
Kevin Kelly: AI will become a commoditized grid service like electricity
“And so my hypothesis is, is that AI becomes a commodity on the grid. And that it's served like electricity. You purchase it like you purchase electricity to do what you want.”
Kevin Kelly: AI will succeed by becoming invisible to everyday users
“We have hundreds of motors that we don't even see in our home, And that's because they succeeded by becoming invisible. And that's sort of, I think the AI is going to become invisible.”
Kevin Kelly: Future workers will be paid based on AI collaboration skills
“So people will be paid by how well they work with
The AI.”
Kevin Kelly: Artificial intelligence will definitely achieve creativity
“I think definitely AIs will be creative. They definitely will, would do creative things, because creativity is like, gonna be like driving. It's like, of course machines can be creative.”
Kevin Kelly: Humans will specialize in interpersonal roles over next 20 years
“I think what humans are going to be good for in the next 10 to 20 years is these interpersonal roles, like, you know, nursing at home coaching experiences, again, coming back to experiences, and asking questions, and so I think
If you want to answer, you're go…”
Kevin Kelly: Skynet-style AI apocalypse is highly unlikely
“The Skynet thing I think is cheap. Hollywood trope that is highly, highly unlikely.”
Kevin Kelly: Any job defined by efficiency will ultimately be automated
“Any job that can be specified or can be specified in terms of efficiency or productivity is a job that humans should not be doing, and it will be a job that would go to the bots.”
Chris Dixon: Tech pessimism stems from asymmetry in imagining future jobs
“I think one reason people are pessimistic in general about technological progress is it's, there's an asymmetry in that it's very easy to imagine the jobs that are destroyed and very hard to imagine the ones that are created.”
Kevin Kelly: Innovation will explode when AI compute is cheap to waste
“AI is going to be very close to that where you can basically take the world's best AI and completely waste it in ways that you couldn't before because it was too precious. And that's when all the new things and innovations and all the new wealth comes is when …”
Kevin Kelly: AI and VR were expected, while the internet was unexpected
“I think AI and VR were both overly expected. I mean, they've been expected for such a long time that it's almost hard to, escaping from that is really hard. So, the kind of ones that aren't expected, well, the internet was actually not expected. There's almost…”
Kevin Kelly: Software will dominate for 25 years before biotech eclipses it
“20, 25 year horizon that I'm talking about. So, so I think beyond that, yes, I think it's wide open, but I think, you know, for the next 25 years, I think this is what I'm talking about. I think computer science will continue to run everything. Software will c…”