Test Your Knowledge of Kevin Kelly's Fascinating Ideas!

Kevin Kelly on Long Bets, Population Peak, and Complex Adaptive Systems

• Kevin Kelly is a writer, editor, and co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, which encourages long-term thinking.

• He helped launch and edit Wired magazine, has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and authored several books, including The Inevitable and Excellent Advice for Living.

• Kelly is a senior maverick at Wired, has a daily blog, a weekly podcast, and a weekly newsletter, Recomendo.

• The Long Now Foundation is building a clock in a mountain that will tick for 10,000 years.

• Kelly made a Long Bet in 2003 that the global human population would collapse by 2060, which means the population would be the same as it was in 2003.

• The peak of human population is moving closer, and the height of the peak and projections of population increase are being revised.

• Falling birth rates are the primary cause of the population decline, and there is no evidence that anything we have tried to counter this trend has worked.

• Although environmentalists may see the declining population as good news, rising living standards have always been associated with rising population.

• We have a poor understanding of global resource availability because we lack a global census and a global view of resources.

• Kelly's book Out of Control is based on a conference he attended at Los Alamos and the Santa Fe Institute in the late '80s, which was the beginning of the complex adaptive system view of the world.

• The world of the made and the world of the born are two faces of the same dynamic, and complex adaptive systems can be applied to machines and AI.

• Biomimicry is the field of using biological models as a framework for making mechanical things.Kevin Kelly on AI, Graphic Novels, and Discovering All Species on Earth

• Kevin Kelly believes that the dynamics powering biology are the same as those powering technology and the technium.

• Los Alamos was chosen as the location for the Santa Fe Institute because of the physicists left over from the Manhattan Project who liked living there, with Murray Gell-Mann being the prime mover and instrumental in finding funding for it.

• Kelly spent 11 years creating a graphic novel called Silver Cord about interdimensional beings called angels who were made of light and looked down on humans, weeping because we were squandering our embodiment, and some of these beings became embodied into robots, which were unhinged and rogue.

• The graphic novel was written as a screenplay script, with the aim of nudging people to appreciate their own lives more.

• Kelly's "1,000 True Fans" is his most popular piece of writing, and he believes it resonates with people because it offers a viable alternative option for success that was not spoken of before, and it is possible and would be good for people.

• Kelly would modify "1,000 True Fans" by emphasizing that it is not for everybody and that tending to fans and interacting with them can be a halftime job at least, and that it is a good place to start.

• Kelly's failed campaign to discover all species on Earth involved hiring local indigenous people to be barefoot taxonomists and go out and discover, catalog, and count all the living species on the planet, which would distribute money down quickly.

• Kelly believes that the campaign failed because it was too big and ambitious, and there was no established organization to carry it out.

• Kelly believes that AI is not imitating biology but actually has the same dynamics powering it, and there is a huge amount of influence from looking at the neurology and neuronets.

• Kelly's graphic novel, Silver Cord, was too big, with 300 pages, and they made the mistake of trying to do the whole thing instead of doing little 20-page things.

• Kelly's aim with Silver Cord was to write something that would have some appeal for making movies, and they tried to write the script as if they were writing a movie, with some of the associates working for Pixar.

• Kelly believes that success can look different, and most people associate success with hitting it big, but success can also be having a more modest-sized scale, and this idea was not on the radar before "1,000 True Fans."Kevin Kelly on the Importance of Optimism and the All Species Inventory

• Stewart Brand, inventor of The Whole Earth Catalog and a close friend of Kevin Kelly, inspired the All Species Inventory project.

• The All Species Inventory aimed to create a comprehensive catalog of all species on Earth using new technology.

• The Whole Earth Catalog was a pre-internet information guide for finding information on various topics such as building a house, repairing a car, starting a homeschool, or keeping bees.

• The project aimed to digitize existing known species and identify new species using technology such as Merlin and Seek.

• The Encyclopedia of Life is the most comprehensive catalog of known species on Earth.

• The All Species Inventory failed to achieve its goal due to lack of funding and the unavailability of technology at the time.

• Kevin Kelly is an optimist and believes that optimism is crucial for making good, complicated things work.

• He distinguishes between passive optimism and active optimism, with the latter being more valuable in terms of actively solving high-leverage problems.

• The Kevin Kelly Institute for Active Optimists does not exist, but he believes that people should choose and prioritize their concerns.

• The B1612 Foundation tracks all asteroids and is actively working on deflecting them.

• Kevin Kelly believes that the probability of an asteroid impact is low and should not be a factor in national policy-making.

• Kevin Kelly participated in the Revive and Restore program, which aims to bring back extinct species such as the woolly mammoth using existing elephant DNA.Kevin Kelly on Progress, Degrowth, and AI

• Kevin Kelly believes that acknowledging the reality of progress can help people become more optimistic.

• Progress, according to Kelly, means that overall, on average, this is a better place to live than at any time in the past.

• Kelly defines progress as the increasing order and complexity of a system, which gives people more choices and options.

• He argues that there is a momentum in the trajectory of progress, and it's possible that it could stop, but highly unlikely.

• Kelly acknowledges the degrowth movement, which aims to stop the addiction to growth and shift towards a more sustainable way of living.

• Degrowth means stopping the growth of the economy and instead focusing on increasing the quality of goods and services.

• Kelly believes that AI will replace many tasks but not jobs. The job will shift, and people will have different tasks.

• He challenges the notion that AI will cause an increase in unemployment and offers a $200 bounty if anyone can provide the name of a person who lost their job because of AI.

• Kelly's experience of living in a remote town in Afghanistan in 1975 made him realize that development and technology give people choices and options.

• He believes that we need new metrics to measure progress and shift our understanding of what we aim for.

• Kelly argues that the reality of progress and the increasing order and complexity of the system should give us reasons to be optimistic about the future.

• He believes that AI will alter how we design just about everything, but not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology.