Welcome to E Con Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is he contact dot org's or you can subscribe comment on this podcast and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done. Going back to 2006. Our email address is melody contact dot org's We'd Love to Hear from You. Today is June 10 2016 and my guest is Kevin Kelly. His latest book is the inevitable Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. Kevin. Welcome back to E Con Talk.

No, it's always so good to talk to you.

This is a great book. I don't say that very often. It's a book I read every single word of which I all I always try to do. But don't always succeed at as host, and this time I never really was able to do it despite the short amount of time I had to read the book, but I savored it. It's a vivid snapshot of the president. Beautifully written speculation about where we're heading its provocative and mind blowing and might even be true. We're going to try to touch on all 12 trends, but we'll see where we go. And I'm going to start with the first chapter, which is called Becoming You argue that looking back on today, in 30 years, it will feel like the way we look back. It's a 1985 that although I would have been great to be around them, there was so much low hanging for It was so easy to come up with new stuff. And yet there's a certain Malays I feel in,

um, in our look at Technology Day, some people that, you know, it just didn't pan out. We didn't get the flying cars, just Twitter. It's just a bunch of social media. Why are you so optimistic about the president and the potential for the future?

Because I read a lot of history, and it seems to me that, uh, you look at what's really going on. We should be very optimistic about the improvement we have and that we tend to overcome many of the problems that are introduced and by the way, this new technology will introduce the host of new problems that we haven't had before. Um, in general, I think the more you look a history of them or optimistic, I'm allowed to become looking into the future.

But Demery really kind of this Internet thing. Isn't it overrated? Just so what if I can tell people what I had for lunch, what my cats doing? I mean, where's the where's the big payoff?

Well, um, I was, I think if we get to talk to about AI and things like that, I think that the impact of that is actually being underestimated at the moment. But it just in general, I think, um, Internet in all the custom, is a communications medium, and we're amplifying and hands saying, leveraging and always multiplying. The power of communications and communications is the foundation of society. It's not just like another sector. This is the This is the essential thing that makes us human in many ways. So we're really tweaking the primary core button, and, um, that's why this is the big thing. That's why all this stuff is so important is because this is sort of the essential nature of what civilization is

But you do have to concede, I think. And I find your book. I'm an incredible optimist in general, and your book made me feel like a pessimist because they cure much bigger optimists than I am. But yeah, you are. But I loved it. And just to be play pessimist for a minute. We think about artificial intelligence, for example, today and you mentioned both these kind of things in your in your book. Is it really that exciting that our thermostat gets to know us? Is it really that exciting that my car beeps at me when I'm going out of my lane? Or compare Low Park? Which is great for my 16 year old? Worried about his is driver's license tests. But these are not transformative applications.

Yeah, I mean, it seems at first very invisible. In fact, you know, if you well, you might not recall. But in the 1922 something Sears, Roebuck, the mail order catalogue company, was selling the home motor in the home motor. Listen immense. You know, £15 motor that was going to sit in the center of your home and automate all the appliances. What? Not in your home. And,

um, we have that industrial revolution thing work because it became invisible way don't have the big motor turning everything we have, like 50 motors in their homes, they became invisible. So to some extent, this stuff is working because we don't see it because it's not something that is visible, and it succeeds to sense that it transforms while we don't see it. So that's one thing. And the second thing I would say about that is that you know, we're sitting on this huge wave of the first industrial revolution, which, you know has brought this incredible prosperity to us. All that we see around this is the fact that we no longer in the agricultural hunter gatherer era work, we had to do everything with human muscle. O r. Animal muscle,

animal, Power Way invented something called synthetic artificial power, and we harness stop fossil fuels and carbon fuels to give us additional power that we couldn't do. And all that that we see is basically a result of this artificial power. When we drive down the road in your car, you have 250 horses. He's working

for us. That moment

it turned a little knob. You've got 250 horses power you down to do whatever you want to do. And then we distributed that power through a grid to all every home farm in the country. And so farmers could employ that artificial power to do all kinds of things. And factories could use that artificial power and everything that we had built around us because of the artificial power that we made. Well, now we're going to do the same thing with artificial intelligence. So instead of in addition to having 250 horses driving you down the road, you could have 2 50 mine, which is what we're going to get from May I from artificial intelligence and that we're also gonna put that onto a grid and distribute it around the country so that anybody, like any farmer, could just get and purchases much artificial power and artificial intelligence as they want to do things. And just as that, artificial power was incredibly transformative, incredibly progressive, incredibly powerful platform to t give us all that we enjoy. Now this artificial mine that we're going to get on top of the artificial power is good to transform it into equal way. It's gonna touch everything that we dio. And I think actually, it will transform. It's more than the first industrial Revolution

did. Yeah, So one of the things I loved about the book is that, uh, we have a temptation to think I have a temptation to think that you know what's transforming about the Internet. Oh, Aiken, I can look up a line of poetry I can't remember the author of It's really fantastic. Um, so Google Search is just amazing for for just quick answers to things that nag in my brain or help me find ideas or whatever it is. And similarly, if you'd said to me So what else is important? I was so well, you know, business to business Computing is phenomenal. The opportunity to shop online and that what that does to pricing and the way we've overcome trust issues. Those are all great,

but you actually identified something I wouldn't have thought of, Which is I want you to talk about for a minute, which is the early days the Internet people realized he was gonna b'more stuffed for entertainment instead of having three channels or 45 We're gonna have 5000 but no one could figure out how that content was going to be generated to Philip. 5000 channels 24 7 or 18 7 or whatever was gonna be the broadcast time. But you pointed out that we actually have a lot more than 5000 channels, and the people produce that content or us.

Right? That was the big thing that even we at Wired missed. When we're trying to imagine what say the Web is going to be in its very early days on, um, that kind of bottom up week now call it user generated content we call it appeared appear production the pro Sumer revolution that Alvin Toffler talked about and predicted in the eighties. All that was something that seemed to be unexpected. And so we have We heard this harness of the power of of everybody sort of making things which, um, we didn't really have before and where we're headed is actually to keep extending the scale that so a lot of these sort of miraculously things I have to call the miraculous in the sense that they seemed they seem to be magical, like Wikipedia, which cannot really work in theory. I mean, the theory of how this works is this really absurd? But there it is. Secretary of anybody can change, right? But that that is come about because we have enabled with communications this this simple kind of obvious,

boring communication technology to allow large scale numbers of people to collaborate in real time in ways that we couldn't before. And if you think about what Facebook is doing, a 1.5 billion people connected together doing something together at the same time. That's just the beginning. We're going ahead into the next 20 or 30 years. We're going to enable every person connected with a phone potentially to be collaborating, doing something together in real time that has never before been possible on this planet. And these kinds of almost planetary scale collaborations, planetary scale cooperation, planetary scale, synchronisation, whatever you want, all these things are going to be explored that a new power that we haven't seen before that is driving a lot of this excitement while we still have the mom and pop grocery story is not going away. We'll still have the solo consultant. They're not going away while we'll still have you know that 2000 employee company they're not going away. We also have, in addition to that, all these new forms of working and doing and accomplishing things together. And that's really worthy excitement.

And I think as you point out, many times we have no idea where that ability is gonna take us. It's we haven't even tapped in the most Manu in the most minute way. And although it makes me uneasy, is an economist to say something that is, um, conclusive? It strikes me that if the only thing we got out of the Internet was Wikipedia might be worth it. Um, it's just such an extraordinary thing that now we just sort of take for granted. You point out, we'll get to this later. But as you point out, of course, it was impossible. We've talked about this on the program before, can't happen and won't be any good.

But not only did it happen, it's great and it's free, and it's just it's remarkable. A lot of people worry about the impact of artificial intelligence on employment we've talked about. This is now becoming a recurring theme and of course it's ironic we're having this team when unemployment, United States is 5%. But put that to the side. I think people are legitimately worried about what might be replaced by what. But you talk about it at length that we just don't talk about two points. You make you talk about the fact that there are jobs that we didn't know we wanted done. I'm gonna read a little excerpt here. Before we invented automobiles, air conditioning, flat screen video displays and animated cartoons. No one living in ancient Rome wish they could watch pictures move while writing toe Athens in climate controlled comfort. I did that recently.

100 years ago. Not a single said. Is it of China would have told you they would rather buy a tiny glassy slab that allowed them to talk to far away friends before they would buy indoor plumbing. But every day, peasant farmers in China without plumbing purchase smartphones crafty a eyes embedded in first person shooter games have given millions of teenage boys the urge. The need to become professional game designers, a dream that no boy in Victorian times ever had in a very real way, are inventions a Sinus our jobs. Anyone add anything to that?

I think that I think maybe elsewhere. I also kind of maybe say it this way. Is that our jobs right now? I mean, now our jobs into the future will be to invent job we can automate and give to the robot. So we're on a kind of on a path of this kind of escalator that we're going to keep inventing new things that we desire to be one to do. We'll figure out how to do them. And once we kind of figure out how to do that will automate them, basically giving the eyes in the box. So, in a certain sense, our job to invent jobs that we can automate. And I think that part of the venting job, maybe our job human job for a while because we have better access to our Layton desires than the A. I do, although eventually even perhaps that job is affected by

I'm gonna read another quote which takes, says what you just said, but it's so beautiful. You say, when robots and automation to our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, closed and sheltered than were free to ask. What are humans for? Industrialisation did more than just extend the average human life span. It led a greater problem percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan fiction authors and folks with one of a kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines,

we could take up these roles. But of course, over time machines will do these as well will then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question. What should we do? It will be every generation and many generations before a robot can answer that. I love that. But I do have to raise the question, which I thought of occasionally is a read your book, which is your books? A little bit, uh, San Francisco centric. Yeah, so in the Bay Area, and I go out there in the summer every year and hangouts with some of them, and it's it's really inspiring and about all the creative stuff going on,

and it's It's just it's wonderful, but it is a unique collection of talent that comes from all over the world. And it's not representative for better, for worse, to the general population. Is it really true that most or all of us can do these glorious things? Or is it just going to be a small sector?

Yeah. I mean, I traveled to China and Asia as much of the can in part to try and wear off some of my deficit disco centric view, which, you know, it's very hard to not be an American if you're an American. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, I do try. But But I think, Yes, I I am. I am, um, tainted in that sense. But to answer your question,

I I do think that there is a lot of urban for for these new occupations, it's called in these new roles these new applications that are not just liberal and privileged and, you know, in Leet and, uh, professional, I think that one of the things that we cherish and in fact one of the things that is going to be hard for the guy to do it a lot of the human interaction and so having somebody did it when you're sick having another person sit with you. I know if they're gonna be bots trying to do some of them, but I think we will prefer to have a human there and we will get there that pay them mawr to do that until I think there are lots of interpersonal human centered relation Relationship based, ah, things that that we that we has humans value and are, if we value them, will be willing to pay for them and therefore there will be an occupation for people. So, uh, later in the book of talk about interaction in V r.

And how were moving from Internet of, ah, information to the Internet of experiences where experiences are the currency And I think experiences are often, uh, for us anyway, humans much mawr elevated and enhance way when human real humans are involved. And I think, uh, for all the the improvements in virtuality, I think there will always be a difference between that and reality and real human. We will have teleconferencing, virtual avatars, but we will prefer and I think therefore we will pay mawr to be around humans. And so, while VR will continue to boom, I think travel meeting someone in person well,

actually increase in value at the same time that we spend more time in virtual places. And so I think even for those people who are not as, uh, professionally oriented who don't even who don't desire to kind of keep learning new computer language, etcetera, I think that there's gonna be plenty of room for for people in doing things that we as humans will find preferable then to been having a lot too. So So I think, Yeah, I think not. Just centric. I think, really, where we're going to go.

So some extent, what you're talking about there is I would describe his authenticity, right? We're still gonna have it to me, and we're still gonna have a demand for authenticity. But I have to say, And that's been my feeling of the last five years. Something about these issues. But I have to say, reading your book, which opened my mind a great deal about what the next 20 years might look like, say, or 10 maybe five. One of the things I learned and you talk about this is the blurring of authentic and inauthentic. So when you are knee contract listener, recently let me experience VR virtual reality. As I prepared for this interview,

I told him I was, um, gonna be doing and I'd read your fantastic article, put a link up to about some of the advances in VR. And so I want to thank that lister. But in doing that, I found myself, you know, on a Venice ST tossing a stick to a a mechanical dog. And while I was talking to this guy and I found myself continuing to throw the stick to the dog even I know he's not really getting any exercise out of it. And I have a feeling that is, I hang out with avatars. I'm gonna have trouble keeping a distinction between the real ones and the and the and the not so real ones. And similarly, as I start patching together media, which is another one of your theme's our ability to edit and remix and credible things, they're coming in music and visuals. It's gonna be hard to keep the truth distinct from the not so true.

I have not found that myself and other people who have spent a lot of time and er in the most advanced versions of it also report the same thing to me, Which is that when they take the goggles off, when when they come back out. So all the constantly kind of refreshed by the power of this version of reality that I would like you kind of like you. You, um uh well, we seem to be really well tuned, kind of sniff out those the differences when we want to a lot of times. Okay, we're going to go to a movie. You kind of your suspending that temporarily. Um, And while you're in its, you're enjoying that full sense of immersion. But if you were kind of questioned, it mattered. You say no,

it's obviously a man can tell it's a movie, but way could have willingly give up some of that. But I think that if it becomes critical that we know it's actually not difficult to tell. And I think for very, very long time we'll be able to tell the difference when when we want to. But I think the thing is, this is that maybe the discovery is often we

don't want Yeah, that z spent. It's easier. It's more vivid and certainly tragically way

Yeah, right. You're entering into a novel and you're forgetting everything up all the other obligations. And your you just caught up in the story and you don't wanna you kind

of escaping. We talked

about that. And so in that sense, while you're in there, Yeah, but I think that that that in the same way that you know, people were very, very worried about romance novels When they

first came out, there

was a whole slew of people just scolding young kids, hiding it in the room, reading all day long. So? So I think the our fear of that is still there. But, um uh, yes. And the young are often obsessed by these things and seem to retreat into that. But that's just the phase. And I think, uh, uh, I'm not worried about that issue because I think there's lots of things worry, but that's the one I'm not really worried too much about,

Uh, you describe the Internet is the world's greatest copy machine. What do you mean by that?

Well, it is. There's something in the physics of how messages transmitted across it, that where everything is being copied constantly and on re distributed in that kind of a super liquid way. And, uh, just in the physics of of how information works in computers that they have, things were copied so anything that can be copied like a you know, movies song book that if it touches there and it will be copied and indiscriminately and permission week promiscuously and then, you know, sent across the entire range of the Internet forever. And so if, um, you know, if you don't want somebody copy, don't don't touch it only in it, but if it is touching,

it's going to be copied forever. So there's, I would say, a bias in this technology to copy things. And for many years, some of the big businesses, like music, have really tried to work against that. They've tried to institute copy protection, Ah, copy vigil white management laws to prove to outlaw copying that sue their most avid customers who are copying. And that has never worked because there's a bias in the technology that facilitates this easy copying. And only now, after three decades have they served, started to to finally accept the fact that you cannot stop it from copying. You have to kind of work with the copying And,

uh, you know, they were the music. And if you would have been way ahead in their own interest if they had kind of tough to that 30 years ago and tried to work with. And this is sort of my message about the internal biases of these technologies that are founded on in the very physics in the very dynamic of how they work. And I think the same thing's happening today with tracking, I think the Internet, the world's largest tracking machine, that anything that can be tracked will be tracked and will be tracked war. And therefore, when we deal with things like privacy, we have to deal with the fact that I don't think we could be able to stopper diminished the tracking of the Internet in the same way the music companies couldn't stop the copying. We actually have to work with the tracking in some way.

You say at one point, when copies air free, you need to sell things that can't be copied, and I, you know, just 10 years ago, people said we're going to be the death, this Napster and other forms of copying Kevin stopped despite Napster's death thing. Napster's bounce back a little bit, but it doesn't matter, does that could be more music? Not anymore. Just gonna be a bunch of amateurs, you know, banging away on their guitars. It's gonna be lousy because you can't make money at it. Well,

they figured out ways to make money. And, uh, you know, my favorite example is Hamilton the show, which I recently saw, which you can listen to all the songs I think for free. Any time you want all kinds of different ways, you want to read the lyrics, and they're making so much money on this show itself that they lose $60 million to scalpers and StubHub and resellers every ah, every year, which is mind blowing. They're making so much money, even with that leakage or their decision to let it leak whatever you want to call it,

right, right way. Think of it as a taxation for success that Tim O. Reilly's formula of piracy piracy is a taxation for success. If your book whatever is so successful that they're pirating it, that is the little tax or success Most people, most authors mode musician, are dealing with obscurity.

Yeah, they would lie swelled. I would be

thrilled to have enough that they're gonna be Pirated.

Oh, this son would put my book up is a pdf. I think that's right.

Exactly. So, yeah, So the idea of what I call generative meaning that when copies are free, then you have to shift to something that can't be copy very well. So there's a bunch of things, like immediacy or personalization or trust, which cannot be copied or store and the kind of what you're selling. So it's possible. Like you said, if you wait or look hard enough, you can get a copy of the Hamilton musical. But if you want to be present and which can't be copied very well, then you're gonna pay $1000 for a ticket. If you want tohave the Mozart Symphony, you could be able to find it free online. But if you wanna have a tailor to the acoustics of your living room, you'll pay for that. You're in a sense, not paying for the music you're paying for the personalization so that

people understand business. Those those janitors, as you call the things that you can add to the the easily copied item that by me worth the price of the book alone. And you're not getting it here on the free contact podcast. You got a by the book putting that, actually free on my web play. Don't tell him. OK, so, um, you say at one point that we used to be the people of the book human beings and now we're people of the screen, which, of course, it does not mean the death of reading. As you point out, I was like to point that out as well. More people reading now,

probably every human history, By order of magnitude, more. They're just not reading full blown novels and history books. They're reading all kinds of other things, some of which are wonderful in some less so but, um, one point you make an observation about how we differ when we look to solve problems people, the book versus people, the screen law versus technology Talk about that.

Yeah. So the general pieces of people The book is that the book? It's kind of fixed. Finished? Um uh, precise. Um, immutable. Monumental. In some cases, text is the foundation of Western civilization into some extent, even Eastern civilization. So So So we have the founding documents in our country of you know, of the Constitution of the Bible Law books. Um, and also we have these authors which are name ruedas authority. So ever authority come back to the the authors.

And so that is that kind of orientation having cheap access, access to these books in public libraries and literacy and reading and writing and all it produces Incredible. I don't know, 500 year, um, explosion of civilization. I mean, we everything around us to serve in many ways been derived on the success of that, but that now we are moving away from those, um, the monumental, um, enduring mode of books. There were people, the screen

and

screen. We're not reading quite reading that, watching something in between the screen, the screen and their screens are everywhere and on the screen. Things are not fixed. You have the Wikipedia, which is the process is constantly being changed. We have the flows of data to come across. We have the streams of movies and streaming music, and we're streaming our instagram accounts in the Facebook wall. So it's all flowing past us on the never ending, um, ocean of of stuff. It's been very liquid. Um, the different versions were constantly being updated. Things don't aren't there for very long.

They just pass through. So all this makes it very hard to have authorities and authors. And, um, we have to kind of, Ah, instead of doing to an authority for truth, we actually kind of have to assemble it ourselves from many different sources. And the interesting thing is that for every source out there for every expert, there's a counter expert for every fact we can kind of dig around. There's an anti fact. And for every, um, thing that we think, um, it's true someone else ah is denying it.

Oh, are suggesting little parent of and this makes it very, very difficult to know what it's true. And so we need a new skill, the hold of skill set for ascertaining for constructing our truth in that sense and their other implement Kate if imitations or excuse me, other consequences of this shift to the pixels which are just flowing across, and the very liquid, um uh, sensibility that that life on the screen is giving us, not the books go away because books are kind of, ah, long narrative or non a long argument. Those can still be made, but they'll be version. They'll have multiple versions. They'll be unfinished.

They will be amendable. They'll be personalized. Herbal, whatever. And so these this error that were into is, um, uh gonna be marked by, I think, a culture that revolved around the liquidity.

Yeah, I'm reminded of a Robert Klein comedy routine. I don't know if you know him, but remember, rhyme I remember you are I know you are just too. I want to test your cultural knowledge. But he used have a comedy routine. I was a parody of a late night advertising infomercial where they would say, you know, they'd be these records who could buy over the TV that they'd advertise. You could call a number in order a set of music or whatever. And this was this was the parody of it. It was you can get every record ever recorded. A truck pulls up to your house, and it was supposed to be funny that, you know, Polish,

Polish music, bagpipes, classical opera, everything. And, um, we actually live in that world, and I'm gonna read if I may another really glorious passage. You say you talk about the knowledge that we have access to you. Say this is a very big library from the days of Samarian Clay tablets. Until now, humans have published at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies,

a 1,000,000,000 hours of video TV shows and short films, and 60 trillion public Web pages. All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed to current technological rates onto 50 petabytes hard disks. 10 years ago, you needed to building about the size of a small town library to house 50 pedicure petabytes. Today, the Universal Library would fill your bedroom. With tomorrow's technology, it will fit onto your phone. When that happens, the library of all libraries were ride in your purse or wallet if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords, some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen. And others, mostly the young,

want to know what's taking so long. And that passage gives me goose bumps that I love, that it literally moves me. And what I want to know is what's stopping that? Besides two questions, the technology is might be slowing down. Does that worry you? And secondly, what regulatory barriers, intellectual property barriers, air keeping me from carrying the sum of human creativity and knowledge in my pocket?

Um, there are the regulatory hurdles, but actually, I think the only thing stopping it is that, um there's another chapter I in the book called Accessing. I think that there's no reason for you to carry it around when you can have access to it. Um, um uh, I don't want to carry

it around, but, uh, annexes Teoh. Almost all of it is you say through my book through my phone. But what's gonna get what the size of it from being what it could be?

Well, because most people don't It's sort of like, yeah, you could put it all into one thing and carried around, but, um, you don't need to do that.

I can't get it all of it now because of intellectual property. It's not just that, uh, I don't want to Physically carried around. I can't stream it either. I can't.

Oh, yeah. OK, do your point. Basically, um, all the books have not been digitized yet, and that's that, maybe more what you're talking about. There's a whole set of orphan books. They call him working out books in the sense that their out of copyright But the who? Well, it's unclear whether they're in copyright or not. And so, um, uh, they they being the powers that have been scanning the books,

including libraries, are reluctant to scan them because their ownership is uncertain and so therefore they haven't been scanned. And, um, that's a significant portion of the library. And then then there's a bunch of things like journals, scientific journals where, um, they want people to pay Jackson toe. They're not They're not on this during the library, but they're not accessible to you. So what will take, um, I think you know, it may be another many years before people understand slowly that, um,

they get more value out of things when they're shared. Then when they're hoarded and This has been a kind of slow dawning for a lot of publishers. Um, I think they're also might be some legislation where people people were agencies. Countries decide that the public good demand a certain level of easy access to scientific literature on, but that's just kind of like a civilized duty in a certain things, Um, so that we may take that. But you're right that there is a lot of that universal library that's not really accessible right now. Um, and that I think fair use, which is often a, uh, often used, I think was for a while kind of cramped. So we had the famous thing,

that Mickey Mouse Extension Act, Which is that Mickey Mouth? Um, copyright keeps being extended. Disney doesn't have to put into public domain, even though what didn't he died 100 years ago? Whatever it was

long ago and even well, could be. And even though he took his first Mickey Mouse cartoon was in a deputation of a Buster Keaton movie.

Well, not only that, but most, although didn't a great are all rip off of public domain. Perry health.

Exactly.

For a long time, until Disney bought Pixar. They had complete the complete flops doing their own stories, and their entire wealth and greatness came from public domain stories that they redid with, you know, in public main work. And, um, there was just ironic that they, you know, they were trying to extend the one thing Mickey Mouse that they had come up with. So I think that, um, that, you know, changing copyright law would certainly be part of it.

Yeah, I will say it. SSM vested interest there that make it a

little bit. I mean, way could have a whole conversation about that, but

not this idea.

I believe actually, the natural home for invention is actually in the public domain and that we give them temporary monopoly to create of incense, the creators and that those should be short, very, very short. And I should then return to its natural home of the public domain. So that's a little bit different idea that the natural domain of an idea is in the inventors first, and that then we kind of then we kind of opened up. I think that the natural domain of all the inventions and everything great is in the public domain first because there is almost no new ideas because, um, that's where most ideas are coming from. And so I think they naturally reside in the public domain, and we only give him a temporary individual motley that have to be very, very short.

I'm afraid you're gonna have to pay a royalty to the author of Ecclesiastes, who said, There's nothing new under the sun You obviously just stolen that line eso. Anyway, while I was reading your book and thinking about these ideas about the extraordinary access we're gonna have, I couldn't help but think about what I sometimes think about. Is this when I watch my kids and how differently there spare time is from my spare time when I was a teenager and I worry about contemplation, I worry about, um, introspection. We're so bombarded and we choose to be bombarded by stuff, and it's so much fun. So interesting. And it's so much as you point out, the extraordinary nous of human capabilities is on display in a way we didn't have access to before. And so I'm thinking that of course, later on in the book, you don't only say that we are losing the art of contemplation, but it's a good thing. So talk about that.

Well, there is during a certain sense of of interior reading space that literature and words things could bring us to. And I think we get less of that when we even reading on a well, I made it kindle some some exit, but we're reading online where there's lots of tons and tons of the distractions. But the thing is that we often kind of dismiss those distractions as just distractions. But I think to some extent, that flitting around that kind of surfing the Web, that kind of quick skipping from one idea to another inhales a certain amount of engagement. And I think in some ways is the proper response to this flood of information that's around us and that you kind of have Teoh. In some ways you have to be paddling faster than the rivers going order to steer. And I think, um, what I have observed in my own reaction to this kind of stuff is that I feel that Ah, when I encounter something new, I have now ah, have a tendency to kind of do something to it.

I have a tendency to kind of engage it toe, look it up to respond to it to, um, form an opinion quickly to, uh, search for things to in some ways react and, um, discuss it, conjure with it. And I think that's a very different thing than kind of the going deep in contemplating and sitting with something. But this response is a valid Ah, that I think is a valued and proper response to the environment. I think there are There is a law and there and there is a need for contemplation. And my my hunch is that this is part of techno literacy. This is part of what we have to learn how to do, and and we may need technological assistance to actually help us do that.

And I think a lot of people attend to try and limit where they could go while they're reading or other things are just the beginning of that. So I think that we, um I promote something protective literacy, which is this idea that just as it took you and I four years or so toe learn how to read very deliberate practice, we just didn't learn it by us most This we had to be taught it, and we had to spend time learning it. I think there's going to be certain, Gil, um, in in the future that we actually have to learn whether they serve, hang out online and assume that people will get those things we may have to be taught them. They may be things like, Well, here's how we do contemplation in this kind of environment here, the technological things that we need to assist us to go deep when it's necessary to go deep. So I think while there is a diminishment of that kind of contemplation, I don't think it's lost forever. And I do think that the alternative that we have now is a proper response to this incredibly fluid environment that we're in

for me. Personally, I think my attention span has gone down. Aziz the with the Internet. But I actually feel I'm probably fooling myself, but maybe not. Hello, My brain goes faster. I feel like I see connections between things right that I didn't see before because I've got more stuff in there from exposure to all these ideas and thoughts and, um It's as you point out. We all know our brain works when we're not thinking about so there's other. There is some definitely compensations. You ventured twice, and I think in the book and passing Ah, shocking thing. They just sort of I think it gets a sentence or two each time. You know,

maybe there'll be some power outages in Well, you know, some enormous part of the Internet will go dark. And, um, do you worry about losing the library of libraries? As things go digital talked about this recently with, uh, Abby Smith. Rumsey is what's going to protect us. Is it just the distribution? Do you worry about this? You didn't seem too much, But you're an optimist. So maybe what should

be Yeah, yeah. Um well, I'm one of the co founders of the Long now foundation. Where when the very first project we looked at with the perseverance of digital information because it is so bound to the platforms which go up very fast. I mean, who even if you get a TV room today, what would you even do if it the baby raw may last forever? But the readers vote Okay, so This was an issue that we were trying to say. How do you How do you do a digital bits over the long term? And, um, it is kind of a horrifying scenario based on what we've done so far. And, um, I think that long term transmission of digital information is a challenge.

And there is a a worry in in that, um, You, uh there are a couple of people who are doing interesting things, That alternative. There is one person, Basically, I like safe one person. There's one person backing up the Internet.

I mean, this guy booster Kale, he is

backing up the Internet. He personally started doing it, and I worked in his little office where he had the tape machines. And now it's a big, you know, he has sort of like a whole institute home on profit doing it. But it's him, You know, Benjamin, he's still financing it. And, um,

we gotta protect who's monitoring his health. Exactly.

The same guy is actually have ah wear out in Richmond, California, and in this huge, huge unmarked where her off a freeway is rows and rows of containers, and inside the containers are stacks and stacks of books on pallets wrapped in plastic. And what these are is these are the original copies of the book said that are scanned digitally into the anarchist. So there is a there is like and you can find if you want to find the The book that Tom Sawyer's CEO is his, uh, his book, though there'll be a copy of it, you know, in dinner five. Power three this high up. And so we do have the means to do, you know, a back up the Library of Congress kind of a thing. And so,

um, I'm not so worried about losing it. Um, I am were more likely to lose track something and to lose it. But I think, um, uh, I think it's a I think it's the access to It is something that we have to work a little harder to make sure that we always have up. So I'm as you say, I'm concerned, but not worried.

Uh, in the filtering chapter, you talk about experiences. Why are they what are they and why are they increasingly important?

Um way dis inherently full bodied. We use our full bodies for things We don't realize how much we depend on the other senses, too. Both learn and to enjoy. And that's what enough one of lessons that virtual reality has been teaching us very quickly is that you know, more than half of that power that we get from being places is actually not in our eyes. It all these other bodily presence is feeling touch, smell, um, hearing. And so, um uh, what we're doing with our technology, it is, actually. Right now, we have a kind of a very limited interaction with them.

I mean, way type with their fingers. And we read and, um, we're going to kind of explode that and put much more of our gestures and their whole body in our in our tactile offense as we interact with things that because that's what we like to do in the real world, that's how we evolved. And that's that's a huge step for us. So I think will come to see the idea of kind of, you know, interacting or being on your computer. People sitting and typing is being very archaic, and we very dated when we're gonna be conversing with our computers and using our hand gestures in our body and our body language and that much like, you know, we would talk to each other and, um uh, definitely lift. That's very liberating and also very exciting. And there's lots of huge opportunities going back to the very first thing they say about, um that were at the beginning because we're just at the beginning of being able to do that and knowing how to do that.

What is rewind ability? Why is it important? And how might it change how we live?

Yeah. So the short version is that E for a very long in our own evolutionary history and even in the very beginning of civilization was the oral culture. Somebody said something and it was gone and you develop People developed a very good memory for recalling that, and they could do We re site that Can we cite long ballads and poems? Um, and they had other, you know, the Memory palace. Another kind of devices to try and recall what had been said. We'll print Gutenberg revolution easy, well, writing with the beginning. But then, having you know, ubiquitous copies made, it made the kind of easier to um, offload that so we could write something down and you could re read it.

Well, now we've extended that, that re reading that rewind ability, going back and going back to, of course, things that our voices do record. But now, with video, almost everything being videoed and that allows us to kind of scroll back to rewind it again and seeing things again, which was sort of things that way we did in the Gutenberg world of text allows you to study things and they transform it. If you have seen the Jif or GIF loop with some small gesture, is just circled and repeated and created it kind of. The more you see, it kind of starts to elevate into something big. This is amazing that it has a that that loop curate, um, intense focus that moves it up into something

else. It's eventually

and my ability yeah, that ability to kind of go back to whatever politicians have said

and hear what they

said earlier, that ability to take that 32nd commercial and study it and then or see it again and again whenever you want that ability to take a very complicated plot line from, ah, long ongoing Siri's and dissect it all these ability to kind of retrieve things, not just the text but this other visual ality, not just literacy thing. This other world of images and experiences will be able to rewind. Are virtual reality experiences a replay them in? Well, most I think that is huge. This is kind of a huge benefit that we had with text. Now we're gonna have with the rest of what we create.

It's amazing. I've discovered reading your book that you were consulting with with a group of people on Minority Report one of my favorite movies of all time, and we could spend at least an hour talking about that. We will not. But one of things, of course, that visually makes that movie. Just so interesting is the way that Tom Cruise physically interacts with his computer the way that screens spread out through the world or customized for you, the traveler and I was that that was so clever and probably true. And now I understand why, because a bunch of smart people working on things were, yeah, advising Steven Spielberg. Um, right, But your theme at this that in his chapter is interacting. And,

um, I think most people think that virtual reality is just the thing for that's gonna make games better. But having have that small sample of the experience myself and you've been in other more, even more immersive experience than I have, it's going to change everything. Uh, talk about that.

Yeah. Um, I think I spent five months trying all the current VR experiments in commercial models and content and hardware, and I came away with this idea that, um before the the U There's something one of the VR works on your brain or your body of the different level than your conscious intellect. Um, in the same way that that there's something deep in our in our perception system that allows us to see something moving across the screen when actually nothing is moving. We're just looking at a bunch of still images and sequence. Um, that happened very deep in the same kind of there's a sense of presence of another person being president of this world being riel, and it's all happening deep in our brains that you were doing the work. We are our brains are kind of doing that? That that that magic that speak? Um And so there's a kind of a real symbiosis between the human brain and the technology together producing these experiences, and there are experiences that we truly really feel. And that's the thing that surprised me is something we know things which is Internet, right?

It's a place that we know stuff. Now we're gonna feel things, those a way of doing kind of artificial feeling. Maybe I wanted to say, or something virtual feelings And that and the fact that these these air working kind of at a lower level, lower meaning amore, primitive and a more basic level of than just intellect that is, that I think this extremely powerful because we're so human. And so I think a lot of the social stuff that we're doing online will move to the kind of er kids will have a level of experience in that in that social interaction that will be very, very powerful. And, um uh, and and then the virtual nous is again be applied to, you know, education, training work.

Um, the military sport. It's really, really big, and I think in conjunction with the AI AI is gonna be an essential part of this to be able to actually track people and understand what they're doing in production with cheap ai. I think this is This is the the platform that followed Smart from this is where we're gonna go after our smartphones were even with our smartphones. So I think this is, like have find it hard to think of something that isn't going to be affected by being able to You have this version of reality that, uh, easily testable, and I think it's gonna be very, very powerful. There'll be a lot of social problems caused by it, but the overall benefits will be huge.

I just I think it's so hard for us to adapt to it as creators, and I think we obviously we will. What? I'm struck by how poorly we've adapted to the Internet. Still, you know, we have still have a temptation to write books and put him on the Internet, but with pictures on, we haven't really captured that. But when I think about say, I don't know, uh, trying to understand what my daughter understands about our daughter understands a lot of things about her that I don't so she can write me an essay. She can write a book about it that has illustrations of art. You can put a Web page up about art, but the idea that I could go to the Luv or the National Gallery and hang out with her there and look at the paintings and turned my head and see and get closer and move back it's just mind boggling. I just that my body is not the right word for it. There isn't. We don't have a word for it. It's good. It's going to change everything.

It's often the best work Silicon Valley has.

Your book ends with a gorgeous, powerful vision of how much we're going to know when how we're all gonna be connected and how that's gonna transform our lives. And I couldn't help but get the feeling, as I read it, that it's a religious vision. It's a vision. It's a human religious vision of an all knowing, all watching thing. It's not God, but it's this you called the whole owes this web of our connections, the knowledge that we have and there's a certain Messianic feeling. You know, some people call this the rapture of the nerds. That's a different version of the singularity that some people have. But do you ever think about the content? You ever contemplate this, Um, this idea that we humans air creating something larger than ourselves, That sounds something like God.

Yeah, well, I mean, I have a pretty big, um I mean, my God, pretty big toe. My, my, my guys. Much bigger than the whole of So I don't think in my mind not much confusion. But I do

agree

that there is survey a spiritual element of this when we we collectively humans connect all seven billion of a nine billion over in the future, together with our nine billion phones with our nine trillion, you know, machines of the nine gazillion other Internet of things together. And we make this very large thing, and I don't know, I call Hollows, but it was not. A machine is a super organism. It's something large. And there was going to be, um it'll behavior will be emerging things out of it that that will be very difficult for us to access. And so there is a sense in which we, um in which that might be spiritually sense is bigger than a much, much bigger than us. I don't think its biggest God, but I think it's in that direction of kind of like,

uh, yeah, we're spiritually sense that is touching something beyond that we beyond our normal day to day lives outside of that level. And it may be mysterious, and some people may turn it into religion. That's also possible to, um, in fact, it's probably very likely, but But I do think that, um, this is the really big news that we're going that is actually kind of unseen right now, which is that we are connecting ourselves together in a way that has never been for possible, that will allow all kinds of amazing and difficulty and horrible things to happen on most of it. Many of it will be things that will never probably really understand. Like,

you know, there was a couple years ago the flash crash, which is sort of all around the world, all the stock markets together on the globe kind of made a dip and then came back and nobody knows why they did that. It was this unit. Is this kind of globally syncopated beat a pulse. And that's the kind of thing that I think we're gonna see more more off because we're going to be operating. We were. We've made something that will operate at a different level and that scary to some, out of control. We don't know what's happening, And it could be. We may just to others,

the ultimate emerge in order. Yep, my guest today has been Kevin Kelly. His book is the inevitable Kevin. Thanks for being part of the contact.

It's really, really great. Read. I always enjoy conversation. Thanks for having me.

This is E contact part of the Library of Economics and Liberty for Maury. Contact Jodi contact dot org's where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. Sound engineer. Free contact is rich guy, yet I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening.