The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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 …”
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”
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: Large language models epitomize the collective average thinking of the crowd
“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…”
Kevin Kelly: Allocate Two-Thirds to Optimization and One-Third to New Exploration
“So you actually want to spend two thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you want to go deeper and better, and then a third trying, trying new things, and that's been shown in many, many ways to be roughly true.”
Kelly: Aim to be the only, not the best, to resist AI
“Really, what you want to be able to do is to have a style, so to speak, to have something that's unpredictable, that's imitable, that you can't be imitated. And this, again, goes back to my other piece of advice about don't aim to be the best, aim to be the on…”
Kelly: Spend two-thirds of your time optimizing and one-third exploring new things
“You actually want to spend two-thirds of your time trying to optimize things that you want to go deeper and better, and then a third trying, trying new things, and that's been shown in many, many ways to be roughly true.”
Kelly: Time is the only constraint creators control against infinite perfectionism
“The amount of work to write a book is infinite. It just could go on and on, and that's true of almost any project in terms of perfecting. It's bottomless. So really, the only thing you control is your time. You say, I have this much time to give to it. I'm goi…”
Kelly: Forgiveness means accepting the apology you will never receive
“So, so that's what forgiveness is, is you accept the apology you're not going to get.”
Kelly: The Amish evaluate technology by whether it enables daily family meals
“For the Amish, what they're trying to use, one of the reasons how, how, one of the ways that they decide which technology they're going to use or not use is they have a very clear idea of success. And so their goal is to have a lot of kids and to have every me…”
Kelly: Algorithmic exposure to superlative human achievement diminishes everyday self-worth
“We're being exposed to the superlative world. We're seeing lightning strikes, striking people. It's like things that we would never see. It's not ordinary, but we're seeing this extreme superlative version of the world, which does several things. One is it kin…”
Kelly: Parents should spend half as much money and twice as much time on kids
“Spend Half as much money on your kids as you think you need to, and twice as much time, because that's what they're gonna value”
Kelly aimed to provoke a rotating one-fifth of Whole Earth Review readers
“When I was running a magazine called Co-Evolution and Whole Earth Review, I was the editor, and we kind of ran a little, maybe provocative kind of articles, and my goal was to piss off One fifth of the audience, but keep rotating. Make sure it wasn't the same.”