#669: Kevin Kelly on Excellent Advice for Living, Universal AI Assistants, Time Machines, and The Power of Fully Becoming Yourself

When you're in your 20s, you should spend a little bit of time doing something that's sort of crazy, insane, unprofitable, unorthodox, orthogonal because that's going to be... the foundation of your success later on ... Don't try for something successful or crude; do something very, very strange and weird.

You get 1000 true fans by accumulating them one by one. If you're focused on, like today, I will get one more additional customer, that is tremendously powerful. Customer by customer. Are they happy? Am I giving value to them? If you can focus on that, that is incredibly a superpower.

So, this is what AI does—it replaces tasks ... Most jobs are a complex of different tasks, and a lot of these tasks will go to the AI but not necessarily the job. The job will shift, and you'll have different tasks.

Don't aim to be the best; be the only.

I think goofing off, wasting time, sabbaticals... taking a sabbath are all essential to the creative life ... It's almost like sleep.

Your goal in life is to be able to say on the day before you die that you've fully become yourself.

If you were to be born randomly at any time period... what time do you want to live? What time period? And there's no way you'd want to be anything before at least 50 years ago— and maybe not even within 50 years.

You want to be doing something where it's hard to explain to your mother what it is that you do ... That's where you want to be. You want to be the only.

If all you need is 1000 true fans, then even if your interests are one in a million, given the population of the Earth... that means there's a thousand people, potentially, on the planet who will share your interests.

The third thing I would say about the AIs is that most of them will be unseen; they'll be behind the office operating things—the plumbing, the infrastructure. And that's actually a sign of their success. Technology will succeed when we don't see them anymore; we don't think about them; they become boring.

A vacation plus a disaster equals an adventure.

I think AI, overall, is under-hyped. But the current version, we won't even call AI in 30 years. We'll look back, and that wasn't it. And so, it means that there's no AI experts right now.

This is important lesson about technology is that we have to use it to figure it out.

You can find no better medicine for your family than regular meals together without screens.

It isn’t as if these mechanical systems are imitating biology. I’m saying they actually have the same dynamics. The dynamics that are powering biology are powering the technium and the technology.

I think the reason we should be as optimistic as we can is because it is how we make really good things, good complicated things.

I think just acknowledging the reality of progress would do a large huge step in helping our optimism.

I don't think there's anybody in any field that's lost their job because of AI so far. There's tasks that have gone away but not jobs.

Modern people, on average, are not having more than 2 kids per couple. And fertility is falling all around the planet.

The thing that we get is we get choices and options—that's ultimately what we get from the technology.