Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success

**Kevin Kelly** (0:00)
What I've learned with The Future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true. Jaron Lanier showed me VR in 87 I was completely blown away, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the future. The VR that we had back then is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that it was multimillion dollars, and it costs now $100.
I've been very, very surprised about how slow that has been. You could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment. Ai's 50-year overnight success.

**Dan Shipper** (0:50)
Kevin, welcome to the show.

**Kevin Kelly** (0:52)
It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to be seen.

**Dan Shipper** (0:55)
I am very excited to have you. In addition to being a personal hero of mine, I am a long time Wired reader. I had like a gigantic shelf of magazines growing up. So it's sort of crazy to get to chat with you. There's a lot of things I want to talk to you about, but I want to start with, we have a mutual love of Annie Dillard. We do. She's my favorite writer and I know she's your favorite writer as well.
Tell me why you like her.

**Kevin Kelly** (1:28)
For those who aren't familiar with Annie, she burst onto the scene with a meteorite of a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that for some reason it's a count of her spending some year on musing, kind of like a Henry David Thoreau intimate investigation of a creek in Virginia or West Virginia, I don't remember. And so it was just the writing and the style and the ideas and her blazing brilliance in being able to capture this into a few words. It was almost like poetry, those prose.
It somehow just worked on my brain. And I don't know enough about literature to describe her in relation to other writers and why it doesn't work for me as much. But there was something about her spirit as well as her writing, which was very expansive, cosmic, enthusiastic questioning. She talked about feeling as if at one point in the story that she was a bell that someone else had rung. And I felt exactly the same in response to her writing. It was like she was ringing my bell in a curious way.

**Dan Shipper** (2:59)
Yeah, lifted and struck. There's another part in the early part of the book where she talks about the tree with the lights in it.
And that moment is so very evocative of like one of her big themes, which is you can just be sort of walking around in ordinary life, in ordinary nature, and somehow like the veil is lifted from your eyes, and you can experience these moments of transcendence where everything feels like it's glowing from within.

**Kevin Kelly** (3:27)
Yeah, so there was this, her kind of cosmic poet, you know, ability to kind of take these moments. But then interstitial with that were these findings, these weird little trivia bits that you'd find in some obscure book that you would be grounded in before the next jump. And it was a very distinctive way of kind of wrapping rhapsodic ecstasy with very concrete science trivia or oddities. And that combination just somehow appealed to me.

**Dan Shipper** (4:12)
Yeah, the thing I remember is she spends a long time talking about Henle's loops, which are like this little part of the kidney. And it's just like, where does that even come from?
And yeah, I think she sort of zooms out to the biggest stuff and then zooms into the smallest stuff. But another thing that's really interesting about her writing, and I'm curious how you've thought about this in your own work, is she spends a lot of time talking about the beauty of the world, but she also spends a lot of time talking about the worst of the world. Like there's an entire chapter on insects and how gross insects are. She's also angry about it and not afraid to be angry about it. You know? And I think a lot of writers are usually either one or the other. Either you're like really angry or you're really, everything is beautiful and awesome and she does both pretty well.

**Kevin Kelly** (5:05)
That's true. I think either she said in the book or elsewhere that she wrote the book as if there was a patient of cancer dying in her room and she's talking to them. So yeah, it's not just saccharin. It's not just sweet kumbaya. It's, yeah, she can be pretty harsh too. And that is part of the attraction of the sweet sour flavor.