Is There a Future for AI?

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Dawkins: Why aren't planes falling out of the sky from terrorists? Well, maybe it's just much harder. And airplanes are online. Dawkins wrote a great essay after 9-11 in which he kind of invoked Skinner's experiments in the 50s and then set up this device where the pigeon would guide the missile. But you have to convince them that they're going to go to the next life if they do this. The most fundamental one is, I think, a misunderstanding of what intelligence is because we don't know what it is. There will be various kinds of AI's that will exceed us in certain dimensions and others that won't.

On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly began to write down for his young adult children some things he had learned about life that he wished he had known earlier. To his surprise, Kelly had more to say than he thought, and kept adding to the advice over the years, compiling a life’s wisdom into the pages of his book: Excellent Advice for Living.

Shermer and Kelly discuss: protopian progress • ChatGPT • artificial intelligence; an existential threat? • evolution • cultural progress • self-driving cars • innovation • social media • putting an end to war • compound interest and the long term effect of small changes • why you don’t want to be a billionaire • beliefs and reason • setting unreasonable goals • persistence as key to success • probabilities and statistics, not algebra and calculus • investing: buy and hold • how to fully become yourself.

Kevin Kelly helped launch and edit Wired magazine. He has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. His previous books include What Technology Wants, and The Inevitable, a New York Times bestseller. He is known for his technological optimism. Currently he is a Senior Maverick at Wired and lives in Pacifica, California.