Wired founder Kevin Kelly on letting go of AI anxiety

I f anyone can calm fears of a robot apocalypse, it's Kevin Kelly. Over the years -- first as the founding executive editor of Wired, then as the author of books like What Technology Wants and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World -- he has become one of the 21st century's most prescient theorists not only on the future of technology but also on our constantly evolving relationship with it. In his latest book, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future, Kelly writes about the unstoppable trends that we often fear when it comes to technological progress. In a recent interview with Slack, he laid out his vision of the future of work and some simple reasons why we may want to reconsider some of our deep-rooted anxieties about it. Our intelligence is so central to our identity, that when someone suggests that we can synthesize it, and install into other things, it immediately empties us of our identity and we say, "What are we going to do?"