3 points about AI with Kevin Kelly - Founder of Wired Magazine

This article is based on Kevin Kelly's keynote speech at the art and technology festival, STRP Biennale in Eindhoven of March 2017.

“There is an increasing unification of what is being born (nature) & what is being made (products of human construction).”

“This marriage between life and machines is one of convenience, because, in part, it has been forced by our current technical limitations. For the world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it. That is, the more mechanical we make our fabricated environment, the more biological it will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. Our future is technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. Rather our technological future is headed toward a neo-biological civilization.”

(Excerpt from ‘Out of Control’ by Kevin Kelly)

“There are more patents than species in the world.”

Thus with regards AI and the ever expanding genres of technologies, Kelly is always “very careful not to predict anything that’s already here.”

“Robots are smarter than humans? Well that’s not true.”

Not only do machines self driving cars possess a lack of consciousness, it’s important to note that their artificial power is in a specific and specialised area. Take for example a calculator, it’s artificial smartness manifests in the form of perfectly accurate calculation, and a search engine’s is total recall. Kelly said that we, as humans generally have a poor perception of what intelligence really is. Our own intelligence is telling us that intelligence is single-dimensioned, but it’s really not, because we have maybe 100 different kinds of intelligence - some of which include deductive reasoning, emotional intelligence and spatial intelligence.

“We already have AI, and often it works in the background, in the back offices of hospitals, where it's used to diagnose X-rays better than a human doctor. It's in legal offices,where it's used to go through legal evidence better than a human paralawyer. It's used to fly the plane that you came here with. Human pilots only flew it seven to eight minutes, the rest of the time the AI was driving.”

So if a self driving car is driving you to work, it’s inner workings (calculators, GPS systems, sensors) are totally focused on getting from A to B and avoiding obstructions. If you were driving, you may have a lot of your attention on whether or not you left the immersion on.

According to Kelly, there are so many possible ways to have cognition (have intelligence, as we would usually say), that we are going to use our ability to engineer things to cognify in faster, more efficient ways so human quality of life will be ultimately increased. Just like electricity was distributed along grids, we will distribute specific types of cognition along those grids, and this will lead to another industrial revolution.

Kelly commented that for the next 25 years, the formula for a good startup is going to be x + AI, and that 25 years from now, and emphasized that people will be talking about how good the year 2017 was to launch an AI startup.