Timeless Wisdom Meets Artificial Intelligence
Staying smart in a world that's changing before our eyes
👋Hello, my friends, and greetings from Austin, Texas where I’ve just spent a long weekend. What a cool (and growing!) city full of culture, music and incredible food. I will be back.
I’ve got 4 things for you today:
The latest episode of the Intentional Wisdom podcast
A few pieces of timeless wisdom (from Kevin Kelly)
My top-10 current takeaways on Artificial Intelligence
A new (to me) discovery in the world of podcasts
Let’s do this.
Ep.18 – Kevin Kelly – Timeless Advice from One of Technology’s Leading Minds
Kevin Kelly is one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on all things technology.
Since co-founding Wired Magazine in 1993, he has consistently been at the forefront of predicting and interpreting technology trends from the advent of the Internet, to mobile telephony, to artificial intelligence.
In his latest book, Kevin has turned inward to compile 70+ years of life advice into a compact, highly readable, and incredibly enjoyable book titled Excellent Advice for Living, in which he shares bite-sized nuggets of wisdom covering the practical to the deeply philosophical.
I was lucky enough to discuss all of this with him—from his views on artificial intelligence to his sage advice on everything from careers to kids to mental health.
If you don't already follow Kevin on Twitter, you can find him @kevin2kelly and his latest book Excellent Advice for Living is available now for pre-order on Amazon.
Timeless Wisdom
(aka my Kindle highlights from Kevin Kelly’s new book)
Kevin Kelly’s new book, Excellent Advice for Living is full of exactly that—excellent advice. I suspect that anyone taking a tour through the book will have their favorites—and they’d probably be different than mine. Even so, I thought I’d share a few of the (many) nuggets that I highlighted as I went through an advance copy of the book:
Parenting / Personal Development
The thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult – if you don’t lose it.
For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.
We lack rites of passage. Create a memorable family ceremony when your child reaches legal adulthood, between eighteen and twenty-one. This moment will become a significant touchstone in their life.
You need teachers, parents, customers, fans and friends because they will see who you are becoming before you will.
Change
When you are stuck, make a long list of everything that cannot possibly work. On that list, will be a seed that leads to a solution that will work.
Whenever you can’t decide which path to take, pick the one that produces change.
Mindset
Writing down one thing you are grateful for each day is the cheapest form of therapy.
Embrace pronoia which is the opposite of paranoia. Choose to believe that the entire universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success.
When you forgive others, they may not notice but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
Worry is ineffective. It is certain that 99% of the stuff you are anxious about won’t happen.
A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.
Routines / Practical advice
Commit to doing no work, no business, no income one day a week. Call it a sabbath. Or not. Use that day for rest, recharging, and cultivating the most important things in life. Counterintuitively, this sabbath will prove to be your most productive act all week.
The natural state of all possessions is to need repair and maintenance. What you own will eventually own you. Choose selectively.
In 100 years, a lot of what we take to be true now will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong.
If you enjoyed these, you’ll love the book.
My top-10 takeaways on Artificial intelligence – Our future or our demise?
It’s no secret. Artificial intelligence is suddenly EVERYWHERE. In just a few short months, we’ve gone from “AI is coming” to “This thing is here. And I need to get smart on it fast.”
I relished the opportunity to ask Kevin Kelly about his views on AI—and honestly, I could have asked him questions for several hours on this topic. I was encouraged to hear him say that he is “wildly optimistic” about the potential future impacts of AI. And that all the fear-mongering is likely way overdone. That means a lot coming from someone who many rightly consider to be one of the top technological thinkers of our time.
Like many, I’ve been reading as much as I can on the topic and have been starting to experiment with tools like ChatGPT. I am no expert but here are my top-10 takeaways on AI at the moment—virtually none of this is original thought by the way—it’s me paraphrasing what I’ve learned from others:
AI probably is not going to take your job. But someone who knows how to use AI may.
AI is not going to lead to massive (net) job loss. Some jobs will go away but many others will be created—not dissimilar to what we saw with the Internet.
We are likely to see huge productivity gains (on the same scale as was seen with the adoption of the Internet) which means boring, rote tasks should virtually disappear over time.
Having access to AI will be like having a personal (digital) intern. You’re probably not going to take what your intern produces and use it “as is.” But a damn good intern can get a project, an article, or even an image 90% of the way there. Think of how much time that is going to save you.
Every big company will have its own personalized AI in the next 12 months. They are all scrambling now but plans are coming together incredibly fast—this is basically across all industries.
Ironically, the efficiency that AI enables will make joining a company less necessary in the future. Expect massive growth in “solopreneurship.”
The best AI will automatically integrate into your life without you having to learn anything new. It will be that intuitive.
The current “race” is for who can come up with the best prompts—basically commands to tell AI what to do. It’s become big business already. In the near future, AI will instead prompt us (basically ask us questions) and we will be able to do a currently unimaginable amount of tasks just by answering its questions.
In the very near future (1-2 years), we will all have personal AI’s to plan our travel itineraries, draft and send our messages, assist us with our health, fitness and nutrition… basically anything we do on a computer or phone today will get much faster and easier.
You will see lots of fear-mongering. People will tell you AI is going to destroy humanity or our kids or our culture. And yes, there will be bad things that happen. Just like with any new technology. But the vast majority of developments will be incredibly positive and beneficial to humanity.
I lied. I have 11. This is all going to take place much faster than you think. What you might intuitively estimate to be years based on how fast you’ve seen technological change in your lifetime is more likely to be months based on the current pace of change. Buckle up!
Could I be completely wrong about all of this in 100 years (as Kevin Kelly suggests we asks ourselves) or even 1 year? Absolutely. But if I had to wager, my guess is that I will be wrong on the side of not being nearly optimistic enough about how AI is going to improve the human condition.
Content Diet
How did it take me this long to find David Senra?
Somehow I’ve made it to this point in my life without yet following the work of David Senra. That changed this past week. I heard David’s appearance on Invest Like the Best and was so intrigued, I then binged a 3-hour interview with him on the Acquired podcast. Who is David? He makes a podcast called Founders Podcast. Here’s what he does: He reads up on famous entrepreneurs from history (think: Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, etc.). Once he learns their entire story, he tells it to you in his one-man podcast. And by the way, the energy and enthusiasm that David brings to his work is absolutely infectious. After listening to the two interviews above, I came away feeling super-inspired and ready to re-double my efforts on my own podcast. So cool to see someone absolutely thriving doing work he loves. You should check it out.
…….. and finally…….. if listening to my conversation with Kevin Kelly is not enough for you… don’t worry. You can watch the full video of this hour-long exchange on YouTube. If you’re not yet following me there, please subscribe so you don’t miss any of my new videos – and I’m doing a lot more there these days!
That’s it, my friends. See you in two weeks!
Greg