Kevin Kelly offers a new way forward with A.I.

An introduction to the thinker's thoughts

Excerpt: "Every time I have started a new project over the last 30 years, pretty much the first person I go to for advice is tech guru Kevin Kelly. He is one of the most original thinkers I have ever met in a long career of talking to a lot of remarkable thinkers. I can honestly say that every time I talk with Kevin, I learn something that I had never thought about before.

Kevin (no one who personally knows him ever refers to him as Kelly) was the person who got me to San Francisco in the early days of the digital revolution to work with him and the other founders of WIRED. He was the magazine’s founding executive editor, and his instincts on the next big story made it a must-read global brand in that era and made WIRED Digital a groundbreaking pioneer of the early web. After reading my first attempt as a young journalist to look 25 years into the tech future, he sent a two-sentence email to hire me.

The man’s brain never stops churning and learning, so I keep going back to him as a mentor for insight into almost every iteration of the tech story, and in the last 10 years, many of our conversations have focused on artificial intelligence (AI). Whenever I launched a new event series or public-facing project, Kevin was one of the first guests I hosted to test the concept out.

The images and videos in this essay capture Kevin in action. The video above shows him speaking at my series The AI Age Begins in 2023 — that series was trying to make sense of the surprise arrival of generative AI. Below you’ll find one from 11 years ago, when Kevin hosted one of the first virtual roundtables for my second company, which pioneered the interactive group video format that we now know as Zoom. The topic? Early AI."