"I believe that what many young people have learned through ChatGPT has surpassed what they learned in school. With ChatGPT, getting answers becomes easy. If you want to get the answer, just ask the machine. When the answer becomes at your fingertips, there is real hope What’s valuable is the ability to ask the right questions and the ability to think the right way,” said Kevin Kelly.
In his latest speech, he once again discussed the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, as well as his motto for the new generation of young people. "If you're a young person, your jobs in two years' time haven't even been created yet. When you graduate, you're going to be in jobs that didn't exist when you went to school. So 'learning how to learn' is going to be core skills for future graduates,” he suggested.
Kevin Kelly, the 72-year-old founding editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, has observed changes in the global network for almost half his life. His book "Out of Control" is known as the bible of the technology circle - as early as 1994, Kevin Kelly predicted the future direction of the Internet in this book, including cloud computing, the Internet of Things, virtual reality, and sharing and collaboration. wait.
In the 1990s, when touch screens had not yet appeared, Kevin Kelly boldly predicted: "Keyboards are not user-friendly enough. One day there will be touch- and voice-controlled portable computers, and people can directly interact with the computer to store data." It wasn't until 13 years later that Jobs' first-generation iPhone with a touch screen was officially released. Kevin Kelly was also one of Jobs's favorite authors during his lifetime.
In addition, Kevin Kelly also predicted: "Any flat surface can become a screen. The era of reading has entered the era of screen reading. In the future, when AI is everywhere, we can talk to artificial intelligence. VR will be closely related to the Internet experience. Blockchain It allows for large-scale cooperation between us..."
Looking at it further, from AI, VR to blockchain, these are hot concepts today. As a result, Kevin Kelly was dubbed a "futurist", "Internet prophet", "World Internet Godfather" and "Silicon Valley Spiritual Father", and even influenced a generation of Chinese Internet tycoons, such as Ma Huateng, Zhang Xiaolong, Lei Jun, etc. .
Having witnessed decades of changes in network technology, Kevin Kelly still often thinks about technological, social and economic issues. He has unique insights into issues such as the emotional bond between AI and humans and the impact of AI on the global workforce. He once wrote in his new book "Precious Life Advice", "A life goal worth pursuing is to become influential and behave in a manner that is incompetent." People who are predicted. That is, do things that are difficult for AI to imitate. Be a person who cannot be modeled by algorithms, so you will be irreplaceable.”
When answering a question from a Chinese netizen recently, Kevin Kelly believed that artificial intelligence is as important as fire, printing and the industrial revolution. This will be a broad and huge change. But it will take at least a century to achieve, possibly even longer, and it cannot be achieved overnight.
“Humanity is reshaping civilization through artificial intelligence.” Kevin Kelly said that maybe for a million years, we have been the only intelligent species on this planet. But now we are creating artificial "aliens", as if they come from distant planets to visit us. These "alien" ideas will be introduced into our world, creating a new culture.
Regarding "which jobs will not be replaced by artificial intelligence in the future", Kevin Kelly believes that just as there are almost no jobs today that do not require the use of some kind of energy, almost all jobs in the future will use some degree of artificial intelligence, but This does not mean that they will be completely replaced by artificial intelligence.
On September 5, Kevin Kelly delivered his latest speech at the Bund Conference in Shanghai. He pointed out that when artificial intelligence profoundly affects the economy and culture, three major trends will inevitably emerge: globalism, innovation acceleration and AI-driven generation.
The following is the transcript of Kevin Kelly’s speech (abridged):
Trend One: Globalism
Today I want to talk about the future of culture: What does this mean for us as we become more and more dependent on artificial intelligence?
The three core themes I will discuss are globalism, innovation acceleration, and AI-driven generation—the three trends we are sure to see as AI impacts economies and culture.
Let’s talk about globalism first. Globalism is advancing rapidly as we collectively build a technology-based “superorganism.” Simply put, we are connecting the world's mobile phones, laptops and all data servers into one giant computing system. Each device is like a neuron in this giant computer. This supercomputer operates at high speeds on an unprecedented scale and can almost be considered the only supercomputer.
What I want to emphasize is that although we may have different choices - Apple vs. Windows, iOS vs. Android, American content vs. Chinese content - it is still basically the same machine. These different choices are basically just based on how we interact with them in different ways, but underneath it all, this is a machine. And this machine is the new platform on which all technologies run.
We are building a huge, global, planet-scale machine, and we will run all the digital technologies in the world, including artificial intelligence, on this new platform. Based on network effects, we know that individual success—the success of your own efforts—actually depends on the success of the platform. So we all want this platform to be successful. We all want this planetary machine to succeed because our success depends on it.
What this globalization machine brings is an economic and cultural community. This is a rising culture, a culture that brings together everything in the world today.
You can ask any young person in the world today and they learn basically the same things in school: chemistry, math, science, history, and the local language. Such a unified curriculum is forming a global culture.
The way we live and dress is converging. People wear jeans and T-shirts and live in concrete rooms, which are often equipped with air conditioning, running water and Wi-Fi. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – we all converge at the bottom. Our most basic needs now are shelter, clothing, and Wi-Fi. So this is the new global culture.
In this process, artificial intelligence will achieve real-time translation. We can put on a little earphone and I talk to you in English and you hear Chinese. You respond to me in Chinese and I hear English, and it all happens in real time. It’s like iFlytek’s technology, but it’s embedded in our ears without any delay. Once this becomes a reality, we will have the ability to have a virtual presence on a global scale. Combined with augmented reality, this means a globalized workforce for the first time. This will also affect China. Whether it is Chinese residents working overseas because the language barrier has been eliminated, or foreigners coming to work in China, it is also because the language barrier has been broken down. This is a big deal – it’s one of the most important things that artificial intelligence will bring.
Trend 2: Acceleration of innovation
The second trend is "innovation acceleration". New technologies bring about an acceleration of innovation. This acceleration manifests itself in several ways. First, innovation is accelerated as new inventions and ideas spread faster and faster thanks to communications technology and video content platforms.
New technologies also allow us to use technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality to train people, allowing them to learn skills immersively, making learning more efficient.
We can use devices like Meta Quest and Vision Pro to study, allowing us to truly be "all in". These new technologies are especially important for somatosensory learners who prefer hands-on learning to traditional reading. Therefore, this also accelerates the pace of innovation.
Bringing these technologies into the enterprise, AI can perceive the world through machines, through the eyes of robots, and through other sensor inputs, which also accelerates the pace of innovation and learning. In addition, there are artificial intelligence-assisted learning and AI tools like ChatGPT, which also greatly speed up people's learning.
Today, I believe that many young people are learning more through ChatGPT than what they learned in school. In the process of using ChatGPT, we found that obtaining answers became easy. If you want an answer, just ask the machine. When answers become readily available, what is truly valuable is the ability to ask the right questions and master the right way of thinking.
In fact, as these technologies emerge, answers become ubiquitous, accelerating our pace of innovation.
I think if you're young, your job in two years' time hasn't even been created yet. In two years, the training you received in school for the current job market will change. When you graduate, you'll be working in jobs that didn't exist when you went to school.
As a result, learning how to learn will become a core skill after graduation, all accelerating cultural change. Part of this culture is that we now expect innovation, especially in technology. Part of the new global culture around technology is to expect innovation to happen in all areas of society, and these technological tools will enable that innovation.
Trend 3: AI-driven generation
The third technological and cultural trend is AI-driven generation, using AI technology to generate everything. An important part of human work is generating new tasks.
First, AI allows us to get rid of things we don’t like to do manually. For example, we don't like counting change. Therefore, change, accounting, and cashiering no longer require manual labor. Likewise, we don’t like mechanized work in factories, and this type of work may no longer require humans to complete it in the future.
Second, AI generates tasks that we cannot do alone. These are tasks we cannot do on our own, but they can be done.
Finally, artificial intelligence is generating new things that we have never thought of, never been exposed to, are completely new and beyond our imagination.
For example, we don’t want to drive or drive a taxi all day, so with Waymo driverless driving, it has already appeared in San Francisco, and similar services will happen in other parts of the world. This is what we're doing now but don't like it. There are other similar jobs like driving long distance trucks and a lot of other things that people don't want to do.
But it will take ten years to achieve this because we need to address infrastructure issues. You can't simply integrate self-driving cars into existing transportation systems. Everything must change. So it might take some time, maybe another decade, before it's really widespread, but that's the general direction.
And then there are things we can’t do on our own. For example, consider an AI robot working in precision agriculture. It applies the exact amount of fertilizer and water to each plant, remembering how much has been applied, and checking each plant to deliver the exact amount. This is something no human farmer can do. Such AI robots could reduce the amount of fertilizer required, improving farm health and productivity.
But most importantly, we will generate something we never thought of. We know we crave new desires and new ideas, and that’s where the truly massive revolution of AI-driven generation comes. These AI systems are generating new things—they’re not perfect yet, but they’re getting better. I also want to emphasize that AI is diverse; it’s not just one.
There are many kinds of intelligence, and these intelligences will fill many possible fields of intelligence, and filling human intelligence is only one of them. We will create many different ways of thinking and artificial intelligence.
Importantly, they are not similar to human intelligence. They are strange, different, weird, foreign because they think differently than humans and that is their main advantage, they have different ideas that we don’t have, as Steve Jobs said "Think Different". They help us think differently. This is where innovation and wealth come from. Therefore, I think that in the fields of finance, economics and science, there are many very important ideas that we humans cannot solve on our own, and we need these artificial intelligences to help us see them from different perspectives and solve problems together.
This is a two-step process. First, AI needs to help us solve problems. So from this year and a half of experience using ChatGPT and other big language models, the people who benefit the most from these AI tools are actually employees who are average or deviant performers.
So these tools aren’t just for the smartest people, they also help the less brilliant people do their jobs better – and that’s really good news for us. So I think that robots and artificial intelligence will generate new jobs for us, jobs that we don’t even know if we can do, want to do, or if it’s even possible to do. This is a real frontier in the world of generative artificial intelligence.
These are the three trends in the development of global science and technology culture.
The first is globalism. We are on the path to running on the same global machine. This is the new platform on which all technology will run. Of course, there may be different versions and different interfaces, and it may vary from country to country, but there is always one big machine behind it. If you want to succeed globally, you have to run on this platform.
The second is innovation acceleration. This acceleration does not only happen on campus, but across society. New technologies are driving and accelerating innovation, such as artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality technologies. The more we adopt these technologies, the faster innovation will accelerate.
The third is that AI-driven generation is on the rise, which will first improve efficiency and handle tasks we don’t want to do. It will then help accomplish tasks we cannot accomplish on our own. Finally, it will help us create completely new tasks that we want to do. This is the change we are making.
I'm very excited about the future and the changes it will bring. I think we need to imagine where we are going. So, I leave you with a question: After describing this world of pervasive artificial intelligence, globalization, and acceleration, can you imagine a future 100 years from now that you would like to live in?
Just think about it - because only by first imagining and believing that it is possible can we truly move towards that future.