2009, almost nobody in the singularity crowd wanted to talk about wisdom. The conversation was all about how and when. Rarely why.

Back in 2023, I sat down with Kevin Kelly for the third time. Co-founder of Wired, co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, and the most stubborn optimist I know. He had just written Excellent Advice for Living, 450 proverbs he wished someone had handed him earlier.

I brought him the question that still bothers me most: our power keeps growing faster than our #wisdom. What happens when that gap gets wide enough to swallow us?

Kevin has a definition of wisdom I haven’t been able to shake. It turns on time, and on how many people you’re willing to take into account.

From there we went everywhere. Christianity and creationism. Selfies, Zoom and narcissism. The cult of personality in the East versus the West. Whether #AI, nuclear weapons, or climate change really qualify as existential risks. I won’t tell you where a radical optimist lands on that one.

Three years later, with AI moving faster than anyone’s ethics, the conversation feels less like #futurism and more like a to-do list.

One line from Kevin I still carry around: work on something that has no name.

Full 90-minute conversation with Kevin Kelly (audio and video): [ https://snglrty.co/415rEjK](https://snglrty.co/415rEjK)

‘Work on something that has no name.’ That’s just 1 of the 450 seeds of wisdom from Kevin Kelly’s latest book ‘Excellent Advice for Living.’