Tag Archives: Kevin Kelly

You can’t purchase trust

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From an essay by Kevin Kelly:

In the digital world, copies are so easy to make perfectly, they are free. The internet is basically a copy machine. The copies flow so fast and easily you could think of the internet as a superconductive fluid that transmits copies everywhere, all the time. Once a creation is brought into contact with the internet, it will be copied forever, and those copies never leave. With copies free and freely distributed, the traditional livelihood of creators selling copies is gone. When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied. Well, what can’t be copied?

Mr. Kelly enumerates eight “generatives” better than free, but my favorite was trust.

You can’t purchase trust. You can’t duplicate it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded. Or faked. Or counterfeited (at least for long). If everything else is equal, a stranger will always prefer to deal with someone they can trust. So trust is an intangible that has increasing value in a copy-saturated world.

We seem to have figured out how to make AI ever more intelligent. I wonder if it’s more difficult to make them more trustworthy?

Here’s a prediction from the World Economic Forum in 2017:

“Distributed trust, combined with technology, also means that within the next decade, we’ll be comfortable trusting well-trained bots, whether they’re driving us around, giving us financial advice, or telling us if we have cancer.”

Kevin Kelly: My Exoself

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“Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself.

While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated.”

— Quiet, My Exoself by Kevin Kelly

[see link below for more posts about Kevin Kelly]

The Forever Book

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“I recently gave Claude the task of selecting a seed library: the best set of books for rebooting civilization from scratch. It curated 200 books across fields as diverse as medicine, metallurgy, and mathematics. It did a remarkably great job. Many of its choices were classics, ones I would have chosen myself. It also pulled in obscure tomes that only a real student of do-it-yourself would be familiar with, and hauled in from far corners some very informative books of practical knowledge I had never heard of. Overall, it accumulated a strong list, among the best I have seen.”

— From an essay by Kevin Kelly

Why are LLMs smart?

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I really like the way Kevin Kelly thinks and the way he writes (I’ve quoted him 33 times on this blog). In a recent Substack post he shares some ideas on why LLMs are so smart.

“There appears to be a seminal, fundamental relationship between language and thinking. Human writing is thus not only a reflection of the structure of language, but to some degree also a reflection of human thinking.”

“Imitate human writing and conversation, and you can imitate human intelligence — at least in part.”

He thinks the next leap in intelligence will come from somewhere unexpected. I wonder if we’ll know it when we see it.

Consciousness or Not

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“The biggest benefit from language was not the ability to communicate with others but the ability to communicate with ourselves. Language allowed us access to our own minds. It gave us a way to manipulate our thoughts. To reflect, to operate on memories, to predict. It gave form to ideas.”

“In the next 25 years we’ll learn more about ourselves than in the last 25,000 years. One hundred years from now we will have a very different idea of what we think humans are.”

— Kevin Kelly