Kevin Kelly on Wisdom and Excellent Advice for Living

When I started blogging and podcasting back in 2009 topics like wisdom were near-invisible, if not considered irrelevant to the conversations of AI, transhumanism, genetic engineering, human enhancement, and so on. So bringing ethics to the technology conversation became my longstanding goal and unique selling proposition for both Singularity Weblog and Singularity.FM. At the time, most conversations were about the how and when – i.e. the technicalities and timeline, not the why – i.e. the wisdom and ethics related to the technological singularity. The prevailing romanticism was the belief that utopia is within our reach and the main obstacles were of scientific, technological, or legislative nature. So if we were to let inventors, entrepreneurs, markets, and Moore’s Law do their thing without any government or other interference we would reach THE Future – a place that is “better than we think” – with abundance, freedom, flying cars, robots, space exploration, and immortality for all. Fifteen years later, the Singularitarian romanticism has been replaced by popular skepticism, if not outright cynicism. Given that the gap between our collective power and our ability to use it in a non-destructive, net-positive manner is growing, we need wisdom and ethics more than ever. I believe that this is not a mere philosophical exercise but one of life and death for many species, possibly all life on our planet. That is why I want to discuss wisdom and ethics more than ever. And there are few better people for this kind of conversation than Kevin Kelly. Kevin is a radical optimist who has been twice before on my podcast when we discussed his books on technology. This time around his most recent book aims to provide Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. During this 90 min conversation with Kevin Kelly, we cover a variety of exciting topics such as: wisdom as the long-term view of the true, good, and beautiful for the maximum people and time; consistency, ideology, and thinking; learning from those