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Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.
Kevin Kelly
9,967 posts
Kevin Kelly
@kevin2kelly
Senior Maverick at Wired, author of bestseller book, The Inevitable. Also Cool Tool maven, Recomendo chief, and radical optimist.
- I just turned 70. Here is my advice which I wish I had known earlier.
- It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.
- None of these faces are real. All made up by AIs. The end of photography as evidence. Research by @nvidia arxiv.org/pdf/1812.04948…
- Long-term thinking: When I was 17, I planted an acorn in my backyard hoping that 50 years later I might return to see a huge oak tree. Here it is 55 years later (center). The best time to plant a tree is yesterday.
- A charming esoteric subculture in Japan: gardens in beds of mini trucks. Only in Japan.
- I occasionally get to hang around people with real wealth, and those on their way to real wealth. I've notice there is a rising scale of how wealth is experienced. As your income gains more zeros, you ascend through this scale.
- We crave experts for the new thing but almost all experts are expert in the old thing.
- Gave a significant contribution to @ACLU. First time. I am a Christian who respects all faiths, and demand my government do the same.
- The scary AI future is not Terminator where the AIs kill us or take our jobs. The scary future is one where AIs run all the bureaucracies, they can’t explain their decisions, and there is no appeal to humans.
- 1/4 Additional new bits of advice I wished I had known earlier (not in my book), as my gift on my 73 birthday: • The best way to criticize something is to make something better. • Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person. • Forget
- Anyone can accidentally kill a bicyclist by opening your car door at the wrong time. Learn the "dutch reach" way to open your door (taught in Holland for 50 years) and save a life. dutchreach.org
- When you see the adjective "smart" applied to things, as in smart home, smart clothes, smart toys, smart phone -- substitute the term "hackable." They always come together.
- Kelly's Law: Old technology fails frequently, but in a reliable way: new technology fails less often, but when it fails, it fails in an unexpectedly new way we are not prepared for.
