Kevin Kelly Quotes

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.

We are infected by our own misunderstandin g of how our own minds work.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

Willingness to learn is important, but willingness to act on what you learn is critical.

A single thread of self generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made... The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

What technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an 'infinite game.' ... A finite game is played to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing.

Singularity is the point at which "all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes."

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. We multiply manufactured artifacts and spread ideas and memes.

Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency Increasing opportunity Increasing emergence Increasing complexity Increasing diversity Increasing specialization Increasing ubiquity Increasing freedom Increasing mutualism Increasing beauty Increasing sentience Increasing structure Increasing evolvability

The daily grinding of evolution, as accelerated by technology, churns out more and more complex organisms, with higher rates of energy use, and with increasing specialization. Minds are the ideal way to express complexity, energy density, increasing specialization, expanding diversity -- all in one system. Mindedness is what evolution produces. Mindedness is what technology wants, too.

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

How do entrepreneurs survive their early failures? They don't view their failures as failures - they view these experiences as feedback, and a prelude to future success.

A complaint is a unique opportunity to strengthen the relationship with the client.

All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers - what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. ... We're constructing a single, global machine.

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

Softball isn't just a game it's away of life.

The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

The very long tail of the future is already here.

Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.

The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? ... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.

In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

Since a relationship involves two members investing in it, its value increases twice as fast as one's investment.

Your greatest job is shedding what you don't have to do.

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.

Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it's bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals.

It is easy to make a dollar but it is hard to make a difference.

Wherever the Net arises, there arises also a rebel to resist human control...A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often. It is...fertile ground for learning, adaptation, and evolution...The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen.

Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.

And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.

In the context of your dreams,knowledge will always gives you enough reasons not to act. Act regardless and execute xceptionally