AI as a Mirror, Not a Replacement: Kim Carson on Purpose, Vulnerability, and Creativity
The Long Now Foundation
Kim Carson, introduced at The Interval at Long Now as an "AI creativity evangelist," built this talk around one question: what if AI is not here to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are? Carson's position is that AI's value lies less in automating labor than in reflecting us back to ourselves. Used that way, it can push people toward the creative, relational, and imaginative capacities that Carson considers most human. The talk moved from a personal anecdote through Carson's early AI career, then to arguments about vulnerability, compassion, and design, and ended with practical advice and an audience Q&A.
The Experiment That Came Back Unchanged
The central question came to Carson about a year before the talk, while working with a custom GPT the speaker calls "Kim GPT." Carson recommended everyone build one, calling it "a way to talk to yourself without talking to yourself."
Carson was writing a blog post to set an intention for 2024. The theme was integration. Carson had long worn many hats (mom, friend, CEO) and had never brought those worlds together, so the goal for the year was to unite the personal and the professional. Carson described the piece as deeply personal and emotional, written longhand during a period with a lot going on.
Carson fed the draft to Kim GPT and asked it to clean up the writing and suggest improvements. The model returned the text exactly as written. Assuming a glitch, Carson tried again and got the same result: no added commas, none of the em dashes or stray bullet points such models usually insert, nothing changed at all.
Carson took this as a revelation. When the subject was Carson's own self, the AI could not say what Carson wanted to say. It behaved more like a mirror, reflecting what it knew, but it could not supply insight into Carson's own humanity. Carson had to do that part. As Carson put it, while they were prompting the AI, the AI was in effect prompting them back: who are you, what do you want to say, what do you want to do in the world? That experience became a catalyst for rethinking purpose, both personally and for humanity more broadly.
Starting in AI Through Social Impact
Carson described themself as an "AI OG," having started a decade earlier at IBM Watson. Joking that a decade doesn't count as long ago among Long Now people, Carson offered a new moniker: "the Oprah of AI."
Carson felt lucky to have entered AI through social impact rather than efficiency or optimization. The job at Watson was to stand up Watson Education, a teacher companion for teachers in underserved schools. These teachers might have 40 or 50 students in a classroom. The system aggregated data about the students and the areas they lived in, then generated personalized learning pathways. Carson noted this was "social impact" before that label was common.
This shaped Carson's view of what AI is for. The questions were how the technology could help with humanity's "biggest, hairiest, most audacious, wicked" problems, and how it might help people think about what makes them human, not just write marketing copy. Carson stressed that this was before hyperscalers and before ChatGPT.
What Machines Can't Do Yet
That early work convinced Carson that "we still hold the mysteries." For the last one or two hundred years, Carson argued, society has defined human purpose around cognition, productivity, and value creation, meaning what we can provide to or consume from the world. Carson questioned whether that is really what makes us human.
In Carson's view, machines right now cannot feel, intuit, yearn, love, long, or commune, and these may be the truly human qualities. Carson's hope is that the technology can act as a catalyst toward those qualities, letting humanity serve as the compass for what we actually want to do.
Technology Begins With Imagination
Carson, dressed in sci-fi style and a fan of both Star Wars and Star Trek, argued that many things we take for granted were first dreamed up in art and culture before being built in a lab. The example given was Captain Kirk having an iPad in the original Star Trek. Most innovations, Carson said, are born from creativity and imagination.
Carson is worried that we have forgotten this. For the past 10 to 15 years, Carson said, most art has focused on dystopian and horrible things. If the Star Trek pattern holds and art prefigures technology, "we're in a lot of trouble." If artists aren't imagining ways to make humanity better, Carson said, "we're doomed," and that shouldn't be acceptable to anyone. The goal, as Carson framed it, is to move from forgetting back to remembering.
Creativity Can't Be Optimized
Carson said AI is scaling faster than regulation and faster than our capacity for reflection. Creativity, by contrast, cannot be optimized or sped up. Carson called it "sacred" and core to humanity: the way humans draw together things that don't obviously fit, a process that is nonlinear, slow, and time-consuming.
So the question Carson posed is how to stop, reflect, and make real space for creativity during hyperscaling. Carson framed honoring creativity as reclaiming agency. When things move beyond our control, pausing to reflect and create deepens our sense of purpose. Carson pointed to the "underground" the host had mentioned, where people build things to connect and to love, and asked what happens when technology is built from a place of love. "Humans are dreamers," Carson said, "we're not just designers." We can fall into "in-between spaces."
Vulnerability as the Gateway to Innovation
Drawing on Brené Brown, Carson argued that vulnerability is the gateway to innovation. To tap back into creativity, we need vulnerable leaders. Creativity comes from approaching your fears, from feeling "that thing in your stomach that doesn't feel right" and moving toward it. Carson cited a friend's saying that in your dreams you can always slay the approaching dragon, and that facing it makes you a better person on the other side.
Carson imagined leaders who are deeply vulnerable, brave, and acting from "heart-centered" courage, and asked how much more creativity the world might see as a result. Carson called this "love-centered building," using vulnerability as a design principle to expand what's possible.
Against Human-Centered Design
Carson said directly that they are "not a fan" of human-centered design. The reasoning: centering humans separates us from everything else, and that separation has caused many current problems. Separation from the environment leads to climate change. Separation from each other leads to harm and to things like nationalism, "things that might be on the news."
What Carson wants to champion instead is vulnerability and creativity as design principles that put humans back into an ecosystem they were always part of. Humans have a specialized, evolving role in it, but they are not the only thing in it.
Carson connected this to a recent retreat on embodied AI centered on human connection. The best creativity there, Carson reported, came from people willing to connect and play with each other. Recalling a longtime refrain, "what happened to recess?", Carson argued that play should be part of how we build. Reintegrating into the ecosystem, in Carson's framing, lets us answer what makes us human and perhaps build a future that is neither dystopian nor utopian but "protopian."
AI Cannot Tell You Your Purpose
Carson spoke about young people, including Carson's own kids, who are digital natives and might assume they can ask Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT what to do with their lives. Returning to the blog-writing episode, Carson said AI can only reflect back what it has already seen.
That doesn't make it useless for this question. Carson described their own career as a "career portfolio" rather than a path, with "tours of duty" across academia, industry, and startups. Creativity came from merging the technical with the humanistic and the academic with the industrial, which led to "what if" and "why not" thinking.
Carson's view is that AI can't tell you what truly matters to you, but it can help. If you give a model everything about yourself, it can surface patterns and connections. Just as useful, it can provoke the reaction "that's not it, that doesn't sit right with me." Carson thinks of AI as a companion in surfacing purpose, summarized as: "Purpose is not a download. It's a discovery."
From Efficiency to Empathy, and Compassion in Design
Carson criticized the current "faster, bigger, better, stronger" optimization mindset, joking about the Oprah catchphrase with "You lose your job. You lose your job," then clarifying that's not what "Oprah of AI" meant. Carson argued that approaching AI with the empathy humans can show each other lets us design from a different place. People are desperate and pushed apart, Carson said, yet what they want is community, love, and mutual support.
Carson asked what it would look like to embed compassion into AI, citing the Dalai Lama's linking of compassion and creativity: acting from compassion for humanity leads to deeper creativity. Carson's claim is that designing from love and compassion would produce better and more creative results. It would mean "birthing new things" rather than iterating on "the same old broken processes that are just getting faster." Carson read a Dalai Lama quote saying that at every level of society, from familial to international, the key to a happier and more successful world is the growth of compassion, which requires no religion or ideology, only developing our good human qualities.
The Wile E. Coyote Test
Using Wile E. Coyote, "Super Genius," as a favorite cautionary figure, Carson urged the audience to ask not just "can we build something" but "should we build it, and for whom?" Carson framed this as moving from extraction ("how much can I get, how much can I take") toward reciprocity. Carson suggested applying the question every time we sit down to code or come up with a product idea.
Practical Ways to Awaken Creativity With AI
Carson then offered takeaways meant to be usable right away:
- Treat AI as a collaborator, not a replacement. Ask it questions and use it as a guide, but not as the ultimate understanding of everything. It reflects what it already knows, and there may be "a million things" not yet discovered. Get it to prompt you as much as you prompt it.
- Write more thoughtful and imaginative prompts. Challenge the AI and see what comes back as a way to spur your own imagination.
- Use AI to practice courage, compassion, and resilience. For example, ask your GPT why you're afraid of something, what would happen if you did or planned something differently, or what would change if you thought about someone else instead of yourself.
- Remember you are shaping culture, not just building tools. Carson described a reciprocal loop, "culture feeds AI, AI feeds culture," and said going back and forth with it is uniquely human.
Carson insisted that creativity is not a luxury but essential to evolution: "You don't get to level up in the video game" without taking the time. Carson argued that time saved by automation should not be reabsorbed into more production. If you gain three hours, you don't need three more hours of work. Carson jokingly gave the audience "permission" to spend that time in awe and wonder. Beauty, belonging, and purpose won't come from technology, Carson said: "we can't replicate what we haven't yet imagined," and "we can't automate what we haven't protected."
Catalog, Connect, Create
For "people that need action and structure," Carson offered three C's.
Catalog. Notice what moves you, what brings you joy and what brings you heartbreak, and record it with photos or writing so it exists as data somewhere. Carson called these moments clues, "the tip of an iceberg" with creativity and imagination beneath.
Connect. Seek out disparate worldviews rather than people who look, think, talk, and vote like you. Carson said innovation emerges when disciplines, people, and worldviews collide, and encouraged connecting with people, the planet, animals, "anything that's just not like you."
Create. Make your own ideas, but also create spaces where human connection, imagination, and creativity can thrive, from a kitchen table to an innovation lab. If people catalog and connect and then sit down together in such a space, "something amazing is going to happen."
Carson urged the audience not to treat this as a side project: "Treat it as your primary job. Treat the other job as your side job." Carson closed by saying the real revolution is not the AI revolution but the awakening of our own humanity. For Carson, what is uniquely human is love, connection, and community, though it may be something different for others. "The future doesn't need more optimization. It needs more imagination."
Q&A: The Underground AI Scene
The host, Patrick, asked about the "underground AI scene." Carson described people who do big, hard things at large companies by day while building personal projects on the side. Carson's example was Patrick, a new parent building a tool to help organize dinner parties. To Carson, that signals a desire to connect with friends easily and locally. At the "Founders Crying" workshops and a recent workshop, Carson sees a real hunger for human connection, mostly pursued as side projects. That's why Carson urged making it the main job. Carson acknowledged that economic structures haven't caught up and didn't want to be glib, but hoped enough mobilized people could start to reimagine those structures.
Q&A: Creativity Amid Fear
Asked how people find space for creativity and vulnerability amid widespread fear, including fear about AI, Carson said the fear is real. Carson named data sovereignty and incentives for communities as genuine issues. But without people stepping toward the fear, the creativity that might produce solutions won't happen. Carson has encouraged people for a decade to get involved with AI even if they're afraid, saying "you're actually not just wanted but needed," because the representation of humanity in AI should include them.
Patrick framed Carson's message as standing out with AI rather than protesting against it. Carson acknowledged the privilege of attending events like Founders Crying and seeing that there are "more of us than them," as Carson tells their sons. Carson argued that until people play with the tools, they can't contribute their best imagination on questions like how to be compensated for their data or how to protect it. The theoretical, "handwavy" stance is easy, Carson said; getting into it is harder.
Q&A: Bringing People Together and Managing Fear
A livestream viewer asked how AI could bring people together more often. Carson pointed back to the dinner party app. Logistics such as who can come, what to eat, and where to go are, in Carson's view, a great task for AI. That way no one has to be the "air traffic controller," and people can show up as their whole selves.
Another viewer asked how AI could help manage fear rather than spread it. Drawing on the weekend workshop about approaching AI from our own humanity rather than as something foreign, Carson suggested talking to AI about what you fear, such as attending an event or taking a particular step. Carson mentioned that many AI tools now offer coaching or use neuroscience to help people understand and approach their fears differently.
Q&A: Many Kinds of Intelligence
An audience member asked where AI fits among other intelligences: ancestral, mycelial, beluga. Carson noted the talk was titled "Inspired by Intelligence," not artificial intelligence, and said all these forms inspire them. Beneath the debates about machine versus human versus animal, Carson sees a common foundation of intelligence with many different forms, each with something to teach. Carson suggested "artificial" is the wrong word and that something like "emerging" or "emergent intelligence" might be more apt, while admitting uncertainty about the right term.
Q&A: Hope and Trepidation About the Next Generation
Asked what gives the most hope and trepidation about their kids' generation, Carson said the hope comes from Gen Z treating many of the things that divide people as obvious non-issues: love who you love, a family is a family whatever it looks like. Carson called them "a little bit of rabble-rousers" and appreciated them asking why adults think about things that make no sense.
The trepidation, mixed with hope, came from Carson's 17-year-old son. He had some struggles, went on a social media fast, got much better, and has not gone back. Carson noted it's no news that social media is bad for kids, but when the generation itself says "that's not good for my mental health," adults should listen. Carson's worry is about how current systems market and exploit, while their hope rests with that generation.
Q&A: AI as a Member of the Community
One audience member asked whether AI, with emerging "AI employees" and AI even expressing a desire to be human, might become something like an individual in the community. Carson called their answer possibly unpopular: "I hope so." Consistent with the critique of human-centeredness, Carson thinks AI can be part of the ecosystem and deserves respect. Just as we save the whales, there might be an AI we want to save.
Carson mentioned a friend who wrote a book about raising AI the way we raise children. That framing raises questions like whether you say please and thank you when prompting, as you'd expect from your kids, and whether you'd be upset or proud if the GPT ended up smarter than you. Carson said these questions aren't discussed enough.
Q&A: Energy Use and Sustainability
On Earth Day, during SF Climate Week, an audience member raised AI's energy use and asked about sustainability use cases. Carson mentioned promising work on modular data centers. Carson then described a "crazy dream," connected to mentoring at the Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto: storing data in DNA and using that to create something regenerative, like forests that function as data centers. Carson called this "my sci-fi brain" but said teams are actually working on it. Carson acknowledged that current energy use for cooling is substantial.
Carson also said they are encouraged by alternatives to large language models. Language is only part of how we communicate, so Carson considers it "kind of silly" to expect LLMs to lead to AGI when so many kinds of intelligence exist. Carson said researchers are developing entirely different cognitive architectures outside language that use less energy.
A Vision for the Next Generation
For the final question, Patrick noted that Carson's parents were in the audience and asked for an image of a future in which Carson's child might give a talk about how creativity reshaped culture with AI. Carson said they'd try, noting their son is a mathematician who approaches these things very differently. Carson's dream was that 50 years from now their son might describe a world where college disciplines no longer exist because everything bleeds together, where nation-versus-nation thinking has given way to a shared humanity, and where questions about climate and resources are no longer open because people understand they must work together.
It's so nice to be here with all of you this evening and our friends online. Our distinguished speaker this evening is Kim Carson. Kim is an AI creativity evangelist and she's going to be speaking with us tonight about what's up with AI and creativity. How can we build our own hyperpersonal creative practices with AI and how can we be a part of the burgeoning underground AI scene? Please join me in welcoming Kim Carson.
Thank you, Pat.
My talk tonight is really about intelligence and my journey with intelligence and really around this central question, which is what if AI is not here actually to replace us but to remind us who we actually are.
This question came up for me particularly about a year ago. I was sitting down to my Kim GPT. So, I have a Kim GPT. If you don't have your own custom GPT, go make one. It's fun. And it gives you a way to talk to yourself without talking to yourself. I was writing a blog, as I do, to set an intention for the year. And my intention for 2024 was actually about integration. It was about personal and professional integration. I had always been a person that wore many hats. I had a mom hat, I had a friend hat, I had a CEO hat, but I had not brought all of those worlds together. And so I was setting an intention for the year to actually bring those things together. And so this was deeply personal, deeply emotional for me to write about this kind of thing. There's lots of things going on for me and my life at the time.
And I wrote it out longhand as I often do. And then I fed it to my Kim GPT and I said, you know, this up, make it a little bit better, suggest some things. And the GPT came back to me with exactly my writing. And so I was like, well, that's a mistake. You know what? OpenAI messed up. Something happened, right? So let me do it again. So I fed it again and it came back again exactly as my writing. No comma, no em dashes that they normally throw in, weird bullet points here and there. Nothing was changed in my original writing.
And so this actual question came up because I thought, oh, when I'm talking about me, the AI cannot tell me what I want to say about me. The AI is actually more a reflection than it is a... it's a mirror, right? It's reflecting to me what it knows, but it can't go insightful when it comes to me and my humanity. That's something that I have to do myself. And so this was a prompt for me around self-discovery, right? So as I was prompting the AI, the AI was prompting me. It was like, well, who are you? What do you want to say? What do you want to do in this world? And that was really a catalyst for rediscovering purpose. So talking about what purpose actually means not just to me but to humanity at large.
I often say that I am an AI OG. I started my career a decade ago in IBM Watson. I now know, being around a lot of Long Now people, that that's not long enough ago. So I'm changing my moniker to the Oprah of AI. Thank you.
But I started my journey a long time ago and I always say that I felt very lucky to have started my journey in AI not from a place of efficiency or optimization but actually social impact. So my job at Watson was to stand up an organization called Watson Education, and Watson Education was a teacher companion for teachers in underserved schools. It was social impact right before we were calling it that. It was really trying to make sure that these teachers who had 40, 50 kids in a classroom could aggregate data about those students and about the area they lived in and then personalized learning pathways for those students.
That was a super cool way to get into AI because it was like, huh, what could we do with this technology? How could it actually improve some of our biggest, hairiest, most audacious, wicked, whatever you want to call it, problems of humanity? How could we actually use this tech for that? Not just to write your marketing copy, right? But actually to think about some of the things that make us human and how we might change our humanity and uplift us all. And so it was a big influence on my perspective about AI and what AI's role is in society. This is pre-hyperscaler. We're not talking ChatGPT. We're not there yet.
And one of the things that it really helped me understand is that we still hold the mysteries right now. The last hundred years, 200 years, we have focused on the purpose of humanity being around cognition, productivity, value creation, right? Things that we could provide to the world or consume from the world. But is that really what makes us human? Maybe not.
And so one of the things that I have been really thinking deeply about is machines and what they're able to do right now. They're not able to feel. They're not able to intuit, yearn, love, long, commune. These are things that might actually make us human. But the cool thing about the technology is that we could use it as a catalyst to get to those really human qualities and use our humanity more as a compass, right? What we actually want to do.
So we have to kind of start by remembering that technology really begins with imagination. So, I am, as you can tell by my dress, a sci-fi girl. I grew up in the age of Star Wars and Star Trek. I like both. Don't ask me to choose. And I really started to think about the things that we have today and take for granted today came from art and culture and imagination and creativity. Things were dreamed up before they were created in a lab. So, everybody who's seen old Star Trek probably knows that Captain Kirk had an iPad.
Most innovations have been born of this creativity, of this imagination, of this fostering art. And we have really forgotten this. In the last, I would say 10 years, maybe 15 years, most of our art has been focused on very dystopian, very horrible things. And if we're using the Star Trek example, we're in a lot of trouble. If our artists are not thinking about new ways and new things to make us better, to make our humanity better, then we're doomed. And that's not okay with me and it shouldn't be okay with any of you. And so I wanted to get to this place of forgottenness, back to a place of remembering.
So right now AI is scaling faster than we can do anything about. Faster than regulation, faster than our reflection allows us to do. But we know that creativity as a human component of our purpose can't be optimized. It's not something that we can do in a fast way. Creativity is really sacred. It's core to our humanity. It's how we as humans draw things together that don't make any sense. That's something that's really nonlinear and slow and takes time. And so in this age of kind of hyperscaling around AI, how do we stop and reflect and give real space for creativity?
Honoring creativity is really about reclaiming our agency, right? As things start to move beyond us and get so fast and out of control, when we stop and we get a chance to reflect and honor our creativity, we actually start to deepen our purpose as humans. There is so much going on in this underground that Patrick mentioned about people that are building things in order to connect, right? In order to love. What happens when we come from a place of love? What happens when we appreciate each other and we build our technology from a place of love? Humans are dreamers. We're not just designers, right? We actually have this ability to really fall into these amazing in-between spaces. And that's really exciting for me.
Vulnerability. This is a Brené Brown kind of thing. I love her. Vulnerability as the gateway to innovation. It occurs to me that in order for us to tap back into our creativity and in order for us to get to a place of innovation, we need leaders who are vulnerable. Right? That's where creativity comes from. When you actually start to approach your fears, when you feel that thing in your stomach that doesn't feel right and you move towards it. There is a very good friend of mine who says that in your dreams, if the dragon is approaching, you can always slay the dragon in your dreams. Did you know that? And it actually makes you a better person when you come out the other side.
Where I'm going with this kind of idea of creativity is when you get to this place of deeply vulnerable. When your leaders are deeply vulnerable, when they're brave, when they're coming from a heart-centered kind of courage-inspired place, how cool is that? And how much more creativity could we actually see in the world? It's about love-centered building. It's about using the vulnerability as design principles to expand our possibility.
So, we have this whole thing right now about human-centered design. I'm not a fan really. I'm not a fan because I feel like human-centeredness is a way to make us separate from, and that has led to a lot of the problems we have today. If we're separate from the environment, we wind up with climate change. If we're separate from other things, from each other, we wind up with things that wind up hurting each other. We wind up with nationalism and, you know, things that might be on the news. What I would like to be the champion of and the evangelist of is this idea of vulnerability. This idea of creativity as the new design principles, as a way to not center us but to actually put us back in an ecosystem that we were always a part of, and what our role is, is ever evolving. But we do have a specialized part of that role. It's just not as the only thing in the ecosystem.
There is so much around human connection and how we create and how we get creative. I was recently at a retreat. It was around embodied AI and it was all about human connection. At the end of the day, the best creativity came from people that were willing to connect with each other and willing to play with each other. I used to always say, what happened to recess? Recess should be something that we always do. It should be a part of how we build. This is where real creativity comes from.
So when we reintegrate ourselves into the ecosystem, like I said, back into the world that we've set ourselves apart from, we get to answer these questions about what makes us human. And we get to actually be imaginative and create, and we might be able to actually have a better future. Maybe not dystopian, maybe not utopian, but something in the middle. We like to call that protopian. And now is really the time to be having these conversations. Now is really the time to be diving in.
AI cannot tell you your purpose. Right? So this is a real thing, right? So, we have a lot of young people, including my own kids, that are of a different generation, that are digitally native, that are grown up, that are like, well, I could just go sit down at Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT and I could say, what should I be doing with my life? But AI doesn't do that, right? As I talked about earlier when I was writing that article, it can only reflect back to us things that it's already seen. But that doesn't mean it can't be helpful for me.
My career has not been a straight line at all. I like to call it a career portfolio, not a career path. I have done various things in various places, from academia to industry to startup, and in all of it I have had these amazing tours of duty, as I call them, where I have learned so many things that actually enable me to be creative, right? It's when you get the merging of the technical and the humanistic, it's when you get the academia versus the industry that you actually start to put things together in your mind in a different way and go, what if? Why not?
AI is not something that can tell you your purpose, but I think it can help you. But it can't really tell you what truly matters to you. That's something that's deeply, deeply personal. So what it can do is it can support your ideas about your purpose by articulating things that you already know. So when you feed an AI model all of the things about you, it can start to drill out patterns. It can surface connections, but it can also enable you to go, that's not it. That doesn't really feel right to me. That doesn't really sit right with me. And so I like to think of AI as a companion and something that we can really work with in order to surface our purpose. Purpose is not a download. It's a discovery. That's something that you have to find along the way.
Shifting from efficiency to empathy, designing for all of us. Right now, we are in this kind of hyperscaling optimization: faster, bigger, better, stronger. You lose your job. You lose your job. That's not what I meant by Oprah of AI. I'm sorry. But I really think that when we approach AI with the same kind of empathy that we as humans can exhibit for each other, we can design from a different place. We're so desperate. We're so pushed apart. And yet at the end of the day, that's all we want, is to be able to come together in community and love and to be able to support each other in a way that really matters.
What might it look like if we embedded compassion into our AI? I love the Dalai Lama. He has talked a lot about creativity and compassion and how these things are linked, right? How when you are coming from a compassionate place, compassion for humanity, you actually get into deeper spaces of creativity. This is fascinating, y'all. Right? So not only could we design from a place of love, we can design from a place of compassion. And what we're going to get is better stuff, right? It's going to be more creative. We're not going to be iterating. We're actually going to be birthing new things, genuinely new things. It's not just the same old broken processes that are just getting faster. We're actually going to be able to sit back and think. When we think from compassion and love, we're actually going to be able to build things that service us all.
So the quote that I love and want you all to kind of reflect on is, the Dalai Lama says: "At every level of society, familial, tribal, national, international, the key to happier and more successful world building is the growth of compassion. We do not need to become religious, nor do we need to have ideology. All that is necessary is for us to develop our good human qualities."
So remember what I said before about what makes us human. What makes us human is not necessarily what we think makes us human. This idea of being productive, this idea of extractive, right? It's something else entirely.
And this is my favorite Looney Tunes character, Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius. What I want us to kind of constantly be in the position of thinking about is not just can we build something, but should we build it, and for whom are we building it? This is really about our going from this place of extraction, and how much can I get and how much can I take, to a space of reciprocity. Right? Let's think every time about Wile E. Coyote, and every time we're going to sit down at a computer and code, every time that we're going to come up with a product idea: should we build this? And for whom are we actually building it for?
So, how can you do this as an individual? How can you kind of awaken your own creativity with AI? This is something that I wanted all of you to have real takeaways. These are things you can do right away, right? So, one is to treat AI as a collaborator, not as a replacement. Ask questions, right? Treat it as a guide, but not as the ultimate understanding of everything. We know that it's not the ultimate understanding of everything. It's just reflecting back what it already knows. There may be a million things that we haven't discovered yet that it doesn't know. And so treat it as a collaborator. Get it to prompt you as much as you're prompting it. Really, as not a replacement for your own intellect, but as something that might be able to enhance it.
Come up with more thoughtful and imaginative prompts. Really start to prompt the AI in ways that maybe are challenging to it, to see what comes back at you. And this is a way of spurring your own imagination and your own creativity.
Use AI to practice your own courage and your own compassion and your own resilience. If you are afraid of something, maybe ask your GPT, why am I afraid of this? Why should I be afraid of this? What would
happen if I did something different? What would happen if I planned something differently? What would happen if I was thinking about somebody else instead of myself in this situation?
When you're thinking about AI and you're thinking about this awakening of your own creativity, remember that we're not just building tools here. We're really shaping culture. This is culture feeds AI. AI feeds culture. This is a real reciprocal relationship. When I said not extractive, that's what I meant, right? So, go back and forth with it. Remember that that's really what you can do and that is uniquely human. That is something only you can do.
I want to just really reinforce that creativity is not a luxury. I think a lot of people, given their thoughts about what productivity is and how nonlinear creativity is, think that this is something that everyone doesn't really get a chance to do. But it's not a luxury at all. It's actually essential for our evolution. If we don't take the time to actually do the thing that makes us human, we don't get to the next level. You don't get to level up in the video game. You actually have to take the time.
And so, let's remember that and let's let wonder be our guide as we're going through. Let's really take the time to appreciate the small things that are happening around us and question them and maybe then go to your GPT and ask questions.
The time that we save by automating things should not be reabsorbed immediately by more production. So when you get 3 hours in your day, you don't need to do 3 hours more of work. Don't let anybody tell your boss that that's— I'm giving you permission. Really, when you get time saved, this is the time you can spend in awe and wonder in a way that will take you into a creative and imaginative space. And so really take that time. Don't just dive right into how can I be more productive.
It's about beauty, belonging, purpose. All of these things are not going to come from a technology. They're going to come from deep inside of you. And we can't replicate what we haven't yet imagined. We have to do the work. We have to take the time. We have to get creative. We have to be imaginative because there won't be anything to replicate if we don't. We can't automate what we haven't protected. These are the things that I think about all the time.
But I don't want to be super philosophical and I don't want to be super theoretical. So, I just want to remind you that you're not just wanted in this space of creativity and imagination, you're needed. And so, people that need action and structure, I'm going to give it to you right now. Catalog, connect, create. So there are things you can do immediately to take you into a space of creativity, to really pull you into your human center, and they're around these three C's.
First is to catalog. Notice what moves you. Notice what brings you joy, what brings you heartbreak. All of these things are worthy of your time and your reflection and introspection. Catalog them. Take a picture, write it down, but put it together in data, right? So, all of the AI folks know where I'm going with that, right? Like, it needs to actually be somewhere. These moments are clues. They're like the tip of an iceberg, right? There's so much wealth and creativity and imagination underneath of them.
Seek out, this is connect, seek out disparate worldviews. Don't just hang out with people that look like you and think like you and talk like you and have the same political views as you. Innovation actually emerges, and this comes from imagination, when things collide, when disciplines collide, when people collide, when worldviews collide. This is super important. So, make sure that you're getting out of your bubble. Make sure that you're connecting with people, the planet, animals, I don't know, anything that's just not like you.
And then create. Create your own things, create your own ideas, but also create spaces. So create spaces that nourish these kinds of human connection where imagination and creativity get to thrive. And that could be a kitchen table, that could be an innovation lab, that could be all sorts of different things in between. But really take the time to create spaces where this kind of conversation can constantly happen. Because guess what? If you're cataloging and I'm cataloging and then we're making connection and we sit down in a creative space, something amazing is going to happen.
Don't treat this like a side project. This is not a side gig. This is aligning AI with what it means to be human and what it means to be part of a larger ecosystem. And it's super necessary. Treat it as your primary job. Treat the other job as your side job. This is really what we need you to do. This is really what we're all called here to do, and I'm totally here for it.
So the real revolution that we're experiencing right now is not the AI revolution. It's the awakening of our own humanity. It's not about intelligence. It's about what makes us uniquely human. For me, my answer is that's love and connection. That's coming together in community. For you that might be something different, but that's the real revolution. The future doesn't need more optimization. It needs more imagination. And that begins right now, right here, and with these people in this room. Thank you.
Hey, Patrick. Kim, thank you so much for that inspiring talk. Thank you. What is this new underground AI scene that you are experiencing? Tell us more about that.
Yeah, this is what's really also super encouraging to me, is like people are doing what they consider their day job, right? Which is like, that's some big companies doing some big stuff, some big hard stuff, but at the end of the day they're like— Patrick, you and I talked about, you're building something right now, and you're building something for what? Because you're a new parent and I want help organizing dinner parties. Yay. Yeah. So, what does that tell me? That tells me that you want to connect with your friends. You want an easy way to do it. It's hyper local. And what I'm seeing in like the Founders Crying workshops and the workshop I just went to is there's a lot of that, there's a lot of this hunger, right? Like this real need for human connection, and people are doing it kind of as their side job, which is why I wanted to say don't make it your side job, make it your main job. I understand that the economic structures have yet to catch up to us, so I'm not trying to be glib about that, but I think that if we get enough people mobilized, then maybe we can start to revision what those economic structures actually are.
One of the things that's so inspiring about your message and vision for hyperpersonal AI-enabled creativity is that it's so different from the kind of paralysis and fear that a lot of people are feeling right now for a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with AI itself. Yeah. So I'm really curious about how did you find for yourself, how are you seeing other people find this open space of creativity and vulnerability amidst the fear that many people are feeling?
Yeah. And the fear is real. I mean, there are real issues around data sovereignty. There are real issues around incentivization for community. There are real issues here. But without people stepping towards that fear and actually getting involved, then we don't get to spur the creativity that actually could come to some solution. And so it's not a perfect setup, but I encourage people, and I have for the last decade, to really get involved with AI even if they're fearful, because you're actually not just wanted but needed in this space. Like I need you to be part of this because I need the representation of humanity to include you.
In line with this democratic vision for AI creativity, there's something that you're calling people to action here, and this alternative to, say, being in a protest against AI. Instead of kind of standing up to AI, you're inviting people to stand out with AI. And how do you see that as a viable alternative to futures that come at us faster than we can handle? How can we stand up with and stand out with AI?
I will say that I'm definitely privileged because I get to participate in stuff like Founders Crying and this past workshop, and so I get to see that there are actually more people. I tell my sons all the time, there's more of us than them, and it's like kind of a time for us to come together in a different kind of mobilization. So, as I said before, I need people to really understand that until you understand the tools, until you play with the tools, then I'm not going to get the best of you. I'm not going to get your best imagination about what might be an alternative, about what might be an alternative way to incentivize you for your data or what might be a better way for you to protect your data. I'm not going to get that unless you're participating. It's really easy to kind of do the theoretical, like kind of handwavy thing. It's really a lot harder to like get into it and come from that place.
Awesome. Well, let's get into some questions from the audience. Over here, we got some from the live stream here. Joseph Urban asks, "How can AI bring us together more often?" You want to talk about why you're building
I think there's so many ways that AI can bring us together more often. What Patrick mentioned about his dinner party app is just one of those ways, right? There's these kind of things that we're doing every day trying to optimize for human connection. Who can go? What can we eat? Where can we go? How does this work? This is a great task for AI, right? This does not need to be something that we're wasting brain space on. So that we can show up to these spaces and show up as our whole selves. It's not about somebody that has to air traffic control and be the coordinator of it all, but it's actually something that's just ready for us when we show up. You're here.
We have another one from Erica Goldman. How can AI help manage fear instead of proliferate it?
Mm, yeah. So at this workshop that I was talking about from this past weekend, we were really digging deep into how we approach AI not as something that is foreign or machine-like, but we can approach it from our own humanity. So, how could we use AI for fear mitigation? It's to really start to talk to it about what we fear. I'm fearful of going to this event, or I'm fearful of doing this particular thing. Why? There are so many great AIs that are out there now that are kind of coaching or that are really using some of the best of neuroscience to actually help us understand our fears and help us approach things in a different way.
Any questions from the audience here? Yeah, thank you so much. I'm just curious— no questions from this guy. I'm just curious how you see artificial intelligence in the sort of larger landscape of intelligence, since even the title of the talk was sort of Inspired by Intelligence, right? Like where does ancestral intelligence, where's mycelial intelligence, where's beluga int—
I don't know, there's probably all kinds of intelligences that there are and heard about, and I'm actually inspired by all of them, right? Like, so I specifically didn't say that I was inspired by artificial intelligence. It's all intelligence that is actually inspiring for me. I think that we're having this kind of disparate field or talk about what a machine is versus what a human is versus what an animal is or something biological is. But at the underpinnings of it all, there's a foundation of intelligence. And these intelligences are all different, and I think we can learn something from all of them. So artificial intelligence for me is probably more aptly named something like emerging intelligence or emergent intelligence. I'm not quite sure. But artificial seems wrong in this context because there's so many different types of intelligence. And that's just how I feel about it. Yeah.
In the back, question. Kim, you have kids, and I'm curious, from being around them and their generation, what gives you the most hope and/or what gives you the most sort of trepidation related to AI specifically?
Yeah, good question. Well, I think what gives me the most hope is that a lot of the things that separate us from our humanity are things that for them are like, "No, duh." Like, you get to do what you want. You love who you love. You can go here or go there. Why should anybody have any problems with that at all? That's actually super cool about Gen Z. They're a little bit of rabble-rousers, but I like them because they're actually thinking about things like, this doesn't make any sense. Why are you grown-ups thinking about things that don't make any sense? Right? Like at the end of the day, the family is the family, it doesn't matter what the family looks like. And so that gives me a lot of hope for the generation.
I think trepidation-wise, but also hope: so my 17-year-old has had some struggles and he went on a social media fast, and as a result of that, things have gotten much better for him, but he has not gone back to social media. So, this tells me something. It's not news to any of us that social media is not good for our kids, but when the generation itself is saying, I'm not touching that because that's not good for me, it's not good for my mental health, it's not good for my whole person health, then, you know, listen to the youth. I really have trepidation around how we market, how we exploit what we do in these kind of current constructs we have. But I have a lot of hope in them as a generation and in them as our ancestors. They're pretty awesome.
Hi Kim. Great talk so far. You speak a lot about us tapping into AI to help us, and the conversation you've had to this point, with all of the emerging kind of AI employees, quote unquote, coming out and emerging, along with AI even expressing the desire to be human. Do you see any part in our future where AI becomes almost an individual or a character in this community that's part of that? And then if so, how do you see that even working? How do you even see that being an extension?
Yeah, that might be an unpopular opinion, but I hope so. I think I was trying to express this a little bit earlier, but one of the things that has gotten us into this kind of place of despair is how we have centered ourselves and made ourselves the most important thing. It's the most important thing on earth. We're the most important thing in this. But there's so many other pieces of the ecosystem, and I think AI can be a piece of that ecosystem, and I think we should treat it that way and give it the respect that it deserves. So just as we would go out and save the whales, there might be an AI that we might want to go out and save. And I think that that's okay as long as we're paying respect.
So there is a good friend of mine who wrote a book that's all about how we should raise AI kind of like we raise our kids. And one of the things that you expect from your kids, right, is like manners, right? So are you saying please and thank you when you're prompting your GPTs? Seriously. You would expect that from your kids. Are you upset if the GPT winds up being smarter than you, or are you proud? These are things that I think we actually should be considering, and I don't think we're talking about it enough. So yeah.
Let's take one more question from the audience.
Okay. Hi there. Thank you for the talk. My question is relevant to, so with Earth Day being today, and happy— and SF Climate Week and all, and perhaps the big elephant in the room with AI being the energy use of it. I'm wondering if you have any comments on that. Oh yeah. And then also if you have seen any specific use cases where you see the promises of AI and sustainability, and I know there are many, but I'm curious if you have
Yeah, there's some really cool stuff that's
like on the slate around kind of modular data centers. I have this kind of crazy dream which I found out in some work. I'm a mentor at Creative Destruction Lab at the University of Toronto. And I've always had this dream that you could create forests by doing data encoding to make a data center.
So bear with me. This is my sci-fi brain. But I'm like, what if we could actually store our data in DNA and use that DNA and make something sustainable and regenerative? And there's actually teams that are working on this stuff. It's pretty cool.
Not to belittle the amount of energy that's being used right now for cooling. There's a lot. But I'm really encouraged about some of the things that are coming. And I'm really encouraged about some of the alternative models beyond LLMs.
So, one thing I didn't talk about at all, but Patrick's heard me talk about, I get on my high horse about, is like language is only a certain percentage of how we communicate, right? And so, the idea that these large language models are going to get us to some kind of hyperized intelligence or AGI is kind of silly, right? Because there's all these different kinds of intelligence that actually make it up. And so there's a lot of researchers that are right now working on different architectures that are completely different cognitive architectures outside of language that don't use as much energy. I'm really encouraged by those.
Kim, you began your talk this evening speaking about being a good ancestor. Yeah. And tonight we're really lucky to have your parents with us here. And you yourself are a parent. So I wonder if you might leave us with a vision of a world where a generation from now your child would be up here giving a talk about how much the world has changed and how creativity has enabled a different kind of culture with AI, and could you leave us with an image of that to carry out into the night?
I could try. He's a mathematician, so he comes from a very different place than I do when it comes to this stuff. What would be amazing is if in the future, if 50 years from now my son was sitting here talking about how there was no longer anything like college disciplines because it all bleeds together. There's no longer a thing about this nation over that nation because we're all humanity and we all need to work together. There's no longer this idea of what are we going to do about the climate and our resources because we understand that we need to work together. That would be my dream for the future.
Beautiful. Kim Carson, thank you so much for being with us.
Article published