Interview #2 with Wired Magazine’s founder and world-renowned technology optimist
New York — Kevin Kelly has been famous for his sense of the direction of all things technological since the 1980s. His books on the subject published over a span of decades are consistent best sellers. When something new comes over the technological horizon, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, the world is eager for his opinions, and HistoryDAO has the privilege of having his opinions directly for the second time this year.
In the first interview, HistoryDAO spoke with Kelly on the subject of “what technology wants,” and a good deal of the conversation covered specifically “what blockchain technology wants,” and the role of nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
“The fact that you know London is the capital of England is just a consensus,” said Kelly in the earlier interview. “The very thing itself is a consensus. Not just the representation of it.” This part of Kelly’s discussion brought to light the role of consensus in truth, implying that the Platonic ideal for truth may have been consensus all along. NFTs and blockchain, of course, are founded on the codification of consensus.
Taking these insights from Kelly to heart, the HistoryDAO team came to realize how important consensus has always been considered all the way back to the founding of Western philosophy by Plato, who believed that while objective truth existed, it could only be revealed through “dialectic,” which bears significant analogy to the modern concept of consensus.
In the coming weeks, HistoryDAO, represented by founder and CEO Sky Harris, and Kelly will add a favorite and increasingly critical topic to the dialectic: AI. Does AI have a role to play, or will it soon have a role to play, as a participant in dialectic itself? Do blockchain and NFTs have a unique touchpoint with truth? The conversation will pursue such questions with reference to lessons from history and technology’s role in the future. Kelly’s perspective on AI will be explored as well in the context of another passion of his art as a universal and uniquely human endeavor.
Look for the conversation on HistoryDAO’s YouTube channel in the coming weeks!
About HistoryDAO
HistoryDAO is where the world records history in Web3. The Web3 community comes together on the HistoryDAO platform to mint historic and current events immutably on the blockchain to be preserved — unchanged and indelible — as HistoryNFTs. The decentralization and democratization of history with blockchain and NFT technology are governed by you, the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), the people. Write, record, analyze, adjudicate and mint our world as it unfolds across the globe every day with HistoryDAO and HistoryNFTs.
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About Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly is renowned for his seminal role in the history of the internet. It can be said that he “was there from the beginning.” Kelly co-sponsored the first Hackers Conference in 1984 under the auspices of the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, which also supported the oldest digitally based community bulletin board, The Well, founded in 1985, and still operating today. In the early 90s, he became the founding editor and “Senior Maverick” of Wired Magazine. In his career as a chronicler observing the relationship between human beings and technology, he became famous for making dependable predictions about what that relationship would produce in the future.
Kelly has published several best-selling philosophical books on technology over the past decades, and his most recent work is a labor of love from the time he first arrived in an Asian country with a camera in hand. It’s called “Vanishing Asia,” an anthology of more than 9,000 photographs he took while traveling through Asia since the 1970s.