Kevin Kelly
Wired Co-Founder & Futurist
Wired’s founding executive editor and author of The Inevitable. Kelly casts generative AIs as universal interns, makes AI art daily, and preaches “protopia” — a future made incrementally better by technology, with AI mattering more than electricity or fire.
In his words
The long-term effects of A.I. will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire.
From the perspective of looking back 30 years hence, there are no A.I. experts today.
Biography
Kevin Kelly (born 1952) helped launch Wired in 1993 as its founding executive editor and has spent four decades as Silicon Valley’s house futurist — editing the Whole Earth Review, co-founding the WELL, and writing books like What Technology Wants (2010) and The Inevitable (2016), which predicted the AI-saturated decade before it arrived.
Universal interns and protopia
Kelly greeted generative AI as vindication. He describes today’s AIs as universal interns — in a 2023 Fortune interview he called them “best thought of as universal interns,” impressive in volume, in need of supervision, and transformative to anyone who learns to direct them well: “Some people are 10x and 100x better than others with these tools. They have become A.I. whisperers.”
They can replace a lot of the repetitive stuff. They can also help you magnify the 10% that only you can do as a partner.
He practices what he preaches, generating AI images daily with Midjourney and DALL-E and describing the craft of coaxing specific results from the models as genuinely hard creative work. His coinage “protopia” — not utopia, but a world one percent better each year — has become shorthand for the incremental techno-optimism he shares with fellow travelers like Tim Urban. Critics note Kelly has been professionally optimistic about every technology wave since the modem; he would answer that the optimists keep being right.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/kevin-kelly