How to Predict the Future Like Kevin Kelly

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

Kevin Kelly is a time traveler. He’s spent his career journeying to the frontier of technology—and then returning to tell the rest of us about it.  

He used to do this through Wired, the magazine he cofounded 32 years ago. Now, as the publication’s “senior maverick,” Kelly doesn't write as frequently—but he hasn’t stopped traveling through time. He calls his project for 2025 the “Desirable 100-year Future,” an attempt to imagine what the next century could look like, shaped by technologies like AI and genetic engineering, in a world he’d actually want to live in.

On this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper talks to Kelly about what he’s learned from examining the growth of technology for three decades. They get into why the most valuable relationship with technology isn’t about living at the cutting edge—it’s about knowing when to return; how studying the discovery of electricity can help us make sense of AI; Kelly’s belief that human intelligence isn’t a singular force but a multifaceted compound we don’t fully understand; and how he used ChatGPT to write a novel that he’ll never publish.