Digital insightsLauren Crystal

5 Awesome Digital Lessons from Kevin Kelly

At Your Creative HQ we choose a podcast a week to inspire us during dark admin times. It allows us to get out of our learning comfort zone. Even though as a start-up we are continuously learning, the medium & subject matter is often predetermined by our project. Podcasts, for our team, are a method of securing maximum knowledge with minimal input, out with our comfort zone.

 This week’s podcast/admin session featured ‘The Tim Ferriss Show’ hosted by the almighty efficiency entrepreneur Tim Ferriss as he bro-ed down with Kevin Kelly. For those who don’t know who Kevin Kelly is, he is the Founder of Wired Magazine and an incredibly knowledgeable on all things digital culture.

Here’s a summary of the top 5 things we learnt, as cultural fends and as keen VR experimenters:

  • 1. Human value lies in questions and creativity.

    In the not-so-far away AI future “productivity is for the robots”. Kelly predicts that jobs based on repetition and efficiency will be machine operated. On the flip side, AI won’t replace the work of a human – we are here to question, to think, to innovate and to create outside of the functionality of artificial intelligence. 

    2. Innovation is terribly inefficient, and so it should be. 

    The crux of our importance lies in our ability to innovate. The process of innovation in its purest sense involves many, many mistakes. The lesson behind this statement, let the mistakes lead and refine your project – innovation is a process not a catchphrase.

     

    3. AI is as exciting as electricity to digital inventors.

    It takes an expert to really get the experimenters excited. Kevin gives a great analogy of industrialisation and commodification of things mimicking the potential for the breadth of AI. If you can use it now, you can probably apply product-specific intelligence to it.

    4. No one is has mastered virtual reality yet.

    This isn’t just a time for experimentation within the technology industry, these technologies will be immersive, widespread and adaptable. It’s been a while since a new technology has opened the floodgate to commercial innovation but VR and AI is certainly doing so. For Your Creative, we see huge potential in cross-industry collaboration & inspiration for moulding our own VR creations.

    5. The Internet of information will become the Internet of experience.

    Kevin predicts new virtual reality technologies will create a shift in the expectations of the users – from information to experience. The internet of information is easy to enter, people’s views and information can be disseminated with vary little barriers to entry. The internet of experience won’t have these ‘easy to enter’ characteristics in it’s initial stages. Therefore the internet of experience will initially be defined by the early VR inventors and creators who can utilise the new tools. The digital responsibility to provide the right experiences is clear.

     

    Bowie said in 1997, if he was born in the early 1990’s he would have been a blogger not a musician, he said the internet had provided an extremely powerful platform for those with something to say. Your Creative wonder – would Bowie have been a virtual reality experimenter?

     

    What makes Kevin Kelly so engaging is his ability to predict the digital path of tomorrow. The undertone of his interview was really clear to us – you can predict the digital path but the footprints themselves are there to be defined by the inventors & creators.

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