Kevin Kelly
Senior Maverick, Wired. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
2shows
4appearances
47statements
2resolved
1supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
28said about them ↓ Everything Kevin Kelly said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kelly: AI will never escape human control
“I don't believe AI is ever going to be out of our control in the sense of, yes, I mean, there may be occasions when it does something, but we're going to be quick to correct it and say, no, no.”
Kelly: Bottom-up neural nets will never achieve full AI without top-down control
“That bottom up
Will take you much further than you thought you could go, but will never take you all the way to where you want to go. So Wikipedia, this classic bottom-up thing, over time, there's a more and more top-down editorial control, and eventually, ov…”
Kelly: AI-based religions will inevitably emerge first in China and Russia
“It would not surprise me to see
Some new religions based around AI emerging in the kind of vacuum of the waning of the established religions.
And let me say one last thing.
And I would expect it to see these first in China and maybe Russia because they have a …”
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: 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.”
Kelly: Unpredictable thinking prevents individuals from being imitated by AI
“If you're unpredictable in that way, you're much less likely to be taken over by an AI. You want to live your life in a way that the AI cannot They predict what you're going to do. They cannot kind of fake you or cannot imitate you.”
Kevin Kelly: LLMs represent the epitome of average wisdom-of-the-crowd thinking
“Right now, the best way to think of these AI is the chat. Training, the LL, the LLMs, is that they're the epitome of wisdom of the crowd. Ok, they're wisdom of the crowd thinking. That's what it is. It's the collective, all the average people in the world, and…”
Kelly: Worst Crimes in History Stem from Trying to Eliminate Evil
“In my view, and this, again, took me a long time to kind of realize this, but in my view, the worst crimes against humanity have all been done in trying to eliminate evil.
And so, the lesson to me is, like, if you are in the business of trying to eliminate ev…”
Kelly: AI is humanity's biggest invention since the scientific method
“This is by far our biggest invention after the scientific method”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
Kelly: To survive AI, aim to be the only, not the best
“Don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only. So if you are in this category that it's hard to imitate you, that's a That's a really good place to be in the human world, and also a really good place to be in the AI world, because AIs will have difficulty in im…”
Kelly: Highly correlated opinions across subjects indicate ideological conformity
“If your views on other things can be predicted from your views on one thing, you need to be very careful that you're not in the grip of an ideologue, because that's what it is. It means that you, your opinions are too highly correlated with each other, and tha…”
Kelly: AI is the most powerful technology ever made and will be weaponized
“This is the most powerful technology we've ever made. It will be abused. I'm sorry to say it will probably be used, will be weaponized, and those are always something to worry about.”
Kelly: Advanced rogue AI is impossible because complex technology requires IT support
“The fantasy, the Hollywood fantasy of the lone villain on the mountaintop who has all this technology that works, and there's no IT support, it just works the first time, and they can gain control of these very complicated, that's just, it's like dragons. It's…”
Kelly: AI has synthesized pattern recognition but not symbolic reasoning or deduction
“So far we've synthesized basically two varieties, a pattern recognition and a little bit of kind of generative ability. There's this logical deduction
You know, symbolic reason. None of these things have we come close to synthesizing.”
Kelly: A rise of nationalism in China is almost inevitable
“Nationalism is something bigger than yourself to believe in, and so that's why there's going to be a rise in China of nationalism. That's sort of almost inevitable, because that's bigger than yourself, and you can believe in that.”
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…”
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: 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.”
The other half of the tape: Kevin Kelly's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 24 times in 12 episodes across the shows. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Hugh Howey 8Neil Pasricha 5Steven B. Johnson 2Sonal Chokshi 2Derek Sivers 2Sriram Krishnan 1Sam Arbesman 1Matt Ridley 1
Statements about Kevin Kelly, by other people (4)
Sivers: The best plan maximizes options to change plans later
“The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans. For example, renting a house is buying the option to move at any time without losing money in a changing market.”
The best plan is one that preserves the option to change plans
“The best plan is the one that lets you change your plans. For example, renting a house is buying the option to move at any time without losing money in a changing market.”
Pasricha: Wired Founder Kevin Kelly Uses Desktop Lifespan Countdown Clock
“Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine keeps a clock on his desktop that has expected lifespan, subtracts his current age, measured in days. So, if the average lifespan, which it is, in North America is 30,000 days, and he happens to have lived 21,500 of them,…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Knowledge Project 17
the a16z Podcast 7
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 17 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- #63 Hugh Howey: Winning at the Self-publishing Game
- #72 Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits
- a16z Podcast | Seeing into the Future -- Making Decisions, Telling Stories
- a16z Podcast | Building Crypto, from Vision to Reality
- a16z Podcast | Companies, Networks, Crowds
- a16z Podcast | Building Worlds with VR, Art, and Narrative
- a16z Podcast | When Humanity Meets A.I.
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Kevin's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Senior Maverick, Wired | 2 | 24 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Senior Maverick, Wired | 2 | 23 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |