Tag Archives: Kevin Kelly

The Post-Productive Economy

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A few paragraphs from an inspiring and thought-provoking post by the always-brilliant Kevin Kelly:

“These homes have no running water, no grid electricity, and no toilets. They don’t even have outhouses. But the farmers and their children who live in these homes all have cell phones, and they have accounts on the Chinese versions of Twitter and Facebook, and recharge via solar panels.”

“The farmers in rural China have chosen cell phones and twitter over toilets and running water. You can go to almost any African village to see this. And it is not because they are too poor to afford a toilet. As you can see from these farmers’ homes in Yunnan, they definitely could have at least built an outhouse if they found it valuable. But instead they found the intangible benefits of connection to be greater than the physical comforts of running water.”

“The 3rd Industrial Revolution is not really computers and the internet, it is the networking of everything. We have only begun to connect everything to everything and to make little network minds everywhere. It may take another 80 years for the full affect of this revolution to be revealed.”

Better Than Human

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In this Wired article, Kevin Kelly challenges us to ask and think about, “What are humans for?” A few excerpts:

“Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. Before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation.” 

“The highest-earning professions in the year 2050 will depend on automations and machines that have not been invented yet. That is, we can’t see these jobs from here, because we can’t yet see the machines and technologies that will make them possible. Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done.” 

“This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that seems like drudgery will be done by robots.”

“Why the impossible happens more often”

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Kevin Kelly is one of the brilliant thinker/writers I look to for hope (along with Scott Adams, Clay Shirky, William Gibson and a few other). Following are from a post on why the impossible happens more often these days:

“Collectively we behave differently than individuals. Much more importantly, as individuals we behave differently in collectives. This has been true a long while. What’s new is the velocity at which we a headed into this higher territory of global connectivity. We are swept up in a tectonic shift toward large, fast, social organizations connecting us in novel ways. There may be a million different ways to connect a billion people, and each way will reveal something new about us. Something hidden previously.”

“Most of what “everybody knows” about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible.”

“My prediction is that in the coming years our biggest surprises — the ones that aren’t predicted — will be the result some new method of large scale social interactions. While we will get good at predicting the next advance of technological innovation, we won’t get very good at predicting what happens with the hive mind. And exploring the hive mind — the thousands of ways in which we can connect and reconnect ourselves — will be the chief activity of our civilization in the near term. If I am right then we’ll have to get better at believing in the impossible.”

God as software engineer

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“When we make these virtual worlds in the future —worlds whose virtual beings will have autonomy to commit evil, murder, hurt, and destroy options— it’s not unthinkable that the game creator would go in to try to fix the world from the inside. That’s the story of Jesus’ redemption to me. We have an unbounded God who enters this world in the same way that you would go into virtual reality and bind yourself to a limited being and try to redeem the actions of the other beings since they are your creations. So I would begin there. For some technological people, that makes the faith a little more understandable.”

— From a piece titled “Geek Theologian” Kevin Kelly talks with Christianity Today’s Katelyn Beaty.

Difficult to noodle on such things and not recall the scene with The Architect in the later Matrix films.

“A planetary soul”

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“I think we should prepare ourselves for all kinds of new religions based around the idea of a planetary soul. As in a single web of electronic neurons around the globe, connecting all sentient beings. The Noosphere will go from a hypothetical speculation by a Catholic priest to an outright competitor to the Catholic faith. We will see the rise of Noosnics, Globalists, Overminders, Bit Monks, Quantumarians, and a hundred other sects and cults that take seriously the idea of a glorified planetary spirit as a reflection of the divine.”

“The internet will become a religion in part because everything will happen on it, including all other religions. But mostly because it will be the first platform for true Otherness that will appear on the planet. Not Other as in other variety of human, or other variety of animal, but Other as in an agent not like us, yet bigger than us. A true alien being. Of which we are part. This conundrum will trigger so many spiritual and religious buttons that it will also shake the established religions.”

— Kevin Kelly interview in CHRISTIANITY TODAY

Bonus Link: AI, God, and the Future of Faith: A conversation