Kevin Kelly: Historian & philosopher of the technium

Kevin Kelly was the founding editor of Wired magazine, and before that, editor of the Whole Earth Review. He continues to be a fascinating and provocative writer and speaker on the cultural changes being wrought by rapidly increasing computing power and technological advances. Like his old cohort Stewart Brand, Kelly is a prototypical Driver, championing the breakthroughs that he sees on the near horizon.

Kevin Kelly’s website is an embarrassment of riches, including the Technium, where he delves deep into the technological present and future, the Lifestream, a collection of his writings, and Cool Tools, a small-scale variation on the old Whole Earth Catalog tradition of crowd-sourced recommendations.

Video: How technology evolves.
Tech enthusiast Kevin Kelly asks “What does technology want?” and discovers that its movement toward ubiquity and complexity is much like the evolution of life.

Article: Three Breakthroughs that have Finally Unleashed Artificial Intelligence on the World.
A great recent (late 2014) summation of the dawning of utilitarian machine “smartness”—not necessarily intelligence, certainly not consciousness, but rather many “species” of task-specific AI.

 

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