Kevin Kelly

Senior Maverick, Wired · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

authorjournalistfounderexecutive@Kevin2Kelly ↗kk.org ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗Instagram ↗

Kevin Kelly co-founded Wired in 1993, serving as its founding executive editor for its first seven years, after earlier editing and publishing the Whole Earth Review. He is widely known for championing technological optimism and authoring influential books on technology and systems, including Out of Control and The Inevitable.

24statements → 16claims → 1claims resolved → 3.67/5average certainty → 2.62/5average debate potential → 7said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 15 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

14 predictions · 2 assertions · 7 insights · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 15 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Kevin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:55 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

258 words/min while actually speaking · 14.1 um and uh per 1k words · 25.9 false starts per 1k · 41% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Kevin Kelly: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 6,502 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Kevin Kelly said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:02 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:43 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:17 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:14 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:22 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Insight
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.”
Kevin Kelly Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:50 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Kevin Kelly Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 40:48 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kelly: Real-time universal voice translation will integrate millions into the global economy
“And we could very quickly have universal language translation of speaking over yours, and I think people underestimate the change that that would bring about in the world. You'd have millions of people who are highly skilled in everything except the skill of E…”
Kevin Kelly Dec 12, 2019 ▶ 12:45 Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future
Insight
Kelly: Technology leapfrogging is a myth for developing nations
“The idea of leapfrogging technology is a myth. It doesn't really work. You actually have to, if you want to have a high tech infrastructure, you actually need the intermediate roads, clean water. You can't skip over that, and so they all need to be built out i…”
Kevin Kelly Dec 12, 2019 ▶ 38:32 Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:09 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Insight
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:53 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
What-if
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:09 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Assertion Supported
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:55 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Insight
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.”
Kevin Kelly Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:34 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Kevin Kelly Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:55 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:17 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 31:05 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 36:35 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Insight
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:26 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Insight
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:28 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Insight
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.”
Kevin Kelly Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:16 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:44 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:13 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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 Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 38:26 a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly)

The other half of the tape: Kevin Kelly's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 6 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Steven B. Johnson 2Sonal Chokshi 2Sriram Krishnan 1Chris Dixon 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00336520192020202120222023episodesmentions
03520192020202120222023episodes it came up in
000.82.51.5520192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future Dec 12, 2019 6m
a16z Podcast | Not If, But How -- When Technology is Inevitable (with Kevin Kelly) Jan 2, 2019 26m
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