A brand new episode of Google Firestarters is now LIVE, featuring the peerless Kevin Kelly, author and co-founder of Wired.
Kevin’s insights are fantastic in this. He talks about why technology optimism is the only way to make a future that we really want to live in and why we need imagination and a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to help us let go of embedded and unexamined assumptions. I loved this: ‘One thing we know about the future is that it’s not going to be reasonable’. He describes how imagination and optimism is a muscle that we need keep exercised (‘Optimism is less of a temperament and more of a choice…it’s almost a skill’).
Kevin sets out some useful tools and ways of thinking for doing this (including a game he plays with Brian Eno called ‘Unthinkable’), and how important it is to focus on enabling technologies, underlying shifts and deciphering the inevitable from the uncertain (‘AI is inevitable but who owns AI is not’). I also love his thinking around the characteristics of these enabling technologies – they are, he says, typically complex and intangible, and are the accumulation of many things over time (‘closer to a process than a finished product’).
Kevin also draws from his new book (‘Excellent Advice of Living‘) and discusses the benefits of lifelong learning, being playful, and why wasting time is more likely to produce breakthrough ideas than goal-oriented learning: ‘Don’t waste your life trying to minimise the number of hours spent doing things, arrange it to maximise the time spent doing things you never want to stop doing’. Think of curiosity as a fundamental skill, he says – stay interested, and prototype your life (as Esther Dyson would say ‘Always make new mistakes’).
It was a real privilege to speak to Kevin and I learned so much from our conversation so my thanks to him for his generosity and time. Don’t forget that you can view all 39 episodes of Google Firestarters over on the YT playlist, and you can subscribe to the podcast as well.
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