When the Future Was Fab
Kevin Kelly is known by millions as an oracle of optimism. But what he really believes is far more interesting and critical for our times, and for the future
“The future is there... looking back at us.”
- William Gibson
As I launch this new column about possible futures, I imagine people in the future looking back at us. What would they tell us? Would they be pleased with us—their parents and ancestors—or angry, or somewhere in between?
We can’t know what’s going to happen in the future. But we can see trends emerging from the past and present, and what seems to be portending at this moment are two powerful and contraposed potential futures. In one, we optimize the ingenuity and better nature of our species to create a better life for everyone, and we protect our planet. In the other, we do not. This comes at a moment when innovative technologies from artificial intelligence to gene editing are moving at warp speed even as Pandemic traumas linger, summers get hotter, and megalomania, greed, partisanship, culture clashes, and shooting wars swell and spiral in unsettling ways.
In this column I draw off 30+ years of researching, reporting, writing about possible futures. It’s a continuing conversation about where we may be headed in technology, health, science, politics, business, love, beauty, ecology, and anything else that moves me and hopefully moves you. I plan to write about extraordinary inventions, mostly in the life sciences, my primary beat as a journalist. I’ll also share stories that I hear about or experience. A major feature of this column will be to ask thoughtful people I know and meet to describe how they imagine the future may unspool out of our present day—what they are excited about and what they fear.
To kick things off I asked one of the wiser humans I know what he is thinking about the future—the futurist, bestselling author, and Wired magazine Chief Maverick Kevin Kelly.
On Zoom, Kevin Kelly’s gentle face and white, Mennonite beard float against a background of the ultimate workshop. It’s a space my woodworking grandfather might have called home, or Norman Rockwell. What it doesn’t look like is futuristic. There are no computers or robots; no slick, shinny, composite surfaces; no consoles brimming with buttons and lights; no holograms; and nary a smart device in sight.
“I asked Midjourney to come up with the perfect workshop,” explains Kelly. “It took some work and many prompts, but here it is.”
What Kelly means is that he asked an artificial intelligence program named Midjourney to draw from the vastness of online images to create a workshop that he, Kevin Kelly, considers perfect. Which happens to be pulled not from worn out tropes from sci-fi films and comic books, but from the past, a seeming contradiction coming from the ultimate futurist that’s also a perfect pivot into the question I have Zoomed Kelly to ask—a deceptively simple one that I’m planning to ask to anyone for this column who will take the time to answer.
What are you most excited about in the future and most afraid of, and why?
For decades, the now 71-year-old Kelly has been considered an oracle of the future. He has written bestselling books with titles like What Technology Wants and The Inevitable, about the inevitability of certain technologies, plus a slew of articles and talks that espouse tech’s wonders and possibilities.
He also has delved into the nature of technology, suggesting that major technologies exist as part of something he calls the “Technium”—a world of inventions and their impact that is evolving and adapting on its own, almost like a living organism. Just last year Kelly published a book that takes the oracle idea literally—a widely read collection of aphorisms and bits of advice called Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier, which offers the following advice:
Over the long term
The future is decided by optimists.
Kevin Kelly started out his adult life disdaining technology and the accumulation of stuff. In the early 1970s he dropped out of college and bummed around Asia, proudly owning almost nothing except a backpack and a camera. Returning to the States in the late seventies, he was hired by futurist and visionary Stewart Brand to help edit and later to serve as publisher for the Whole Life Catalogue, a kind of Internet of Everything printed on newsprint before the Internet existed. Soon after he joined forces with Brand and Larry Brilliant to help start The Well, one of the first online virtual communities.
In 1993 Kelly helped launch Wired with co-founders Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rossetto, becoming its first Executive Editor and a key driver of the magazine’s clarion voice of techno-cool during the early days of the Internet. For a quarter of a century his blog “Cool Tools” has covered the latest gadgets and tech, and in 2022 Kelly published a 1000-page, three-volume tome of photographs called Vanishing Asia, which he funded online (of course) by raising over $600,000 on Kickstarter.
Recently, Kelly gave a TED talk titled “The Future Will Be Shaped by Optimists.” Watched by over two million people, the talk expands on the aphorism Kelly offers in his new advice book, arguing that optimism has always been the fuel for humans to power innovation and to solve problems. “Every great and difficult thing that has been accomplished,” he said, “every breakthrough, has in fact required a very strong sense of optimism that it was possible.”
I first ran into Kevin Kelly not long after I started writing for Wired in 1999. He had left by then, but we soon met as part of the Wired community in San Francisco, beginning what became years of conversations about life, technology, hopes, and whatever was on our minds. I was always deeply impressed and moved by Kelly’s warmth and interest in me, and fascinated by a mind that had the curiosity and playfulness of a child but also had gravitas and a down-to-Earth approach to everything, including technology.
Sometimes we had our chats during mountain bike rides we took together in the hills around Pacifica, south of San Francisco, where Kelly still lives. Pedaling up rugged trails where bobcats and mountains lions occasionally popped out of the brush and scrub oak, we exchanged ideas and challenged each other, with Kelly usually taking the optimist’s point of view, and me being more of a skeptic.
The tenor of these conversations is in part captured in my 2019 book Talking to Robots, which delves into different scenarios of how the future may turn out for various robots and AI systems, from Doc Bot and Sex Bot to Journalism Bot and Politician bots. For the book I asked “human collaborators”—including Kelly, physicist Brian Green, relationship guru Esther Perel—to help me imagine possible robot futures, with some turning out well, and some not so well. Kelly was my collaborator for the first chapter, called Teddy Bear Bot, which describes a robot he imagined might appear in the future that would teach, protect, and nurture our children.
“They will be part doll, part teddy bear, part pet, part security guard, part Aristotle, and part nanny,” said Kelly in a chat we had that ended up in Robots—adding that he wished his own grandchildren had a Teddy Bot to play with. “I want to get a Teddy Bot for them now,” he said. “I’d want to ask it questions about the universe, and philosophy, and what it’s like to be a very smart robot.”
Ever the skeptic, I countered with a question about who would program Teddy Bear Bot. White nationalists? Marine County liberals? The government? Kelly listened and nodded in his slow and deliberate way, meaning that he was seriously listening and considering what I had said. He finally answered with a nod and acknowledged that the programming of a stuffed, very smart bear might be abused in the wrong hands. “Whose morals would we use?” he asked about Teddy Bots. “Would they come from the corporations that make the Teddy Bots?”
This sort of pragmatism sets Kevin Kelly apart from many techno-optimists in Silicon Valley who believe that tech is unrelentingly good and will save us all. “Optimism is not just a sunny temperament,” Kelly told his TED talk, “or a kind of blindness to the world’s problems.” Instead, he said, optimism should be “where we expect the world to yield a little more good than bad… a little more hope than fear.”
On Zoom when I ask about what excites him about the future, his answer is artificial intelligence, which might have disappointed me given the obsequiousness of AI right now, although typically Kevin Kelly has his own take on the rise of smart machines. “I think AI right now is both underhyped and overhyped,” he says. It’s underhyped because most people still don’t get how it will impact everything. It's overhyped because it's going to take longer than people think to truly impact everyone,” a slow and steady roll-out that Kelly compares to the invention of electricity, which he calls “artificial energy”—“AE”—noting that the buzz about electric tech in the nineteenth century was as heady as it is for AI now. Yet it took a long time before electricity replaced muscle power and changed everything.
Kelly predicts that most near-tern changes from AI will be incremental and largely behind the scenes. “We’ll have personal assistants and all that,” he says. “But most of the AIs right now are in the back room and we don’t see what they’re doing. That's where more of the important stuff right now is happening, like using it to find target drugs, using it to search for new materials.” He suggests that large language models like CHAT-GPT will get better and more accurate and move from being informational to taking action. “They can't really take action now,” he says, “and a lot of people are afraid to let them take action. But we'll get over that.”
Kevin Kelly calls this slow and steady approach “protopic” as opposed to a “utopic” where everything is perfect. “I'm the Protopia guy,” he says, “which says things over the long run things get 1% or 2% better every year”—a steady progression that he argues has been the general trajectory for technology and civilization for the last 500 years or so. “I don't think there will ever be a singularity where suddenly our lives are transformed,” he says. “I reject that. That’s a fantasy. This is going to take several centuries to play out.”
This doesn’t mean that Kevin Kelly doesn’t have fears about AI. “I just don’t like to talk about this,” he says. “Not because I don’t believe things could go wrong, but because so many other people talk about it. I think we've been educated to be afraid of AI. We've had 100 years of imagining what could go wrong. And most of the best stories are about this. Terminator, whatever. We are predisposed to believe that it'll go wrong even though there's no evidence right now of it going terribly wrong. What we don't have is enough stories of it going right. That's what I want to spend my time doing.”
“In a way, AI has become the new ghost,” he says, meaning ghosts as being scary and malevolent. “It's a ghost, and people are afraid of.”
Like I used to do on our bike rides, I counter with the notion that AI is already very powerful and that we’re already seeing abuses in how it’s being used, including in social media. Automated and AI-driven warfare also is on the cusp, I say, which could go terribly wrong as I wrote about in Talking to Robots in a chapter called Warrior Bot, which describes a possible future that many experts in the field worry will be as Apocalyptic as anything in dystopic SciFi.
“I’m not saying there won’t be problems,” he says, noting that electricity had serious drawbacks and issues, too. It started fires and electrocuted people, and for a long time was available only to the rich, with most of the world living in the dark well into the Twentieth Century. Some still do. Fear of electricity also inspired one of the first ghost stories about high tech when Mary Shelley created the Frankenstein monster as a cautionary tale about how tech can go terribly wrong. “But we need to think we can solve these problems,” says Kelly, “or we won’t solve them.”
“My biggest worry about AI isn’t machines,” I say, “it’s people,” those aspects of human nature that are not noble or dedicated to solving problems and inventing helpful technologies. “Humans are writing the code and programing the bots, and there are always people driven by greed, prejudice, and fear. How does the optimist deal with this?”
“We’ve always had this aspect of human nature to deal with,” answers Kelly. “We’ve had civil wars and World Wars, and some awful things have happened,” he says, “but even when we factor in these periods the overall trend has been on average this incremental progress. We also learn from these
bad things that happen in the past, and from what we do right and wrong.”
As we finish our chat, I’m still not entirely convinced. As a student of history, I’ve studied periods when things go terribly wrong, and I can’t help but conclude that even if the general trend over the past 500 years is up on average, this is little solace to the people who were traumatized and killed during the many wars and genocides; by repression and slavery; and by environmental catastrophes caused or influenced by short-sighted decisions amplified, at times, by technology. It’s also possible that societies can go backwards, getting incrementally worse every year by 1% or 2%, and not notice it until it’s too late, the Roman empire being the classic example.
Still, I remain an optimist. But a skeptical one who believes we need to be realistic about humanity’s darker impulses as well as wowed by our accomplishments and possibilities.
Even if I do admit to yearning for the future according to Kevin Kelly, who is still floating in front of his enchanted, AI-generate workshop as he signs off. A future where optimists prevail and society makes slow but steady positive progress in solving the many perplexities we face, and in keeping the ghosts of our fears at bay.
David Ewing Duncan’s website is www.davidewingduncan.com. He writes for Vanity Fair, Wired, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, and more; his most recent books are Microland: The Future of Life on Earth (and why you think it’s smaller than you think), co-authored by Craig Venter (LittleBrownUK); and Talking to Robots: How machines and people will live together in the future (Dutton and LittleBrownUK).