Kevin Kelly Quotes

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A

The organization and the environment are in concert.

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

This is the culmination of a lot of people's vision. I think this is just another step towards making Central Michigan football among the elite programs in the Mid-American Conference.

Our existence here, he says, is a case of "not we the accidental but we the expected." Mathematician Manfred Eigen wrote in 1971, "The evolution of life, if it is based on a derivable physical principle, must be considered an inevitable process.

This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.

Communities saturated with anonymity will either self-destruct or shift from the purely anonymous to the pseudo-anonymous, as in eBay, where you have a traceable identity behind a persistent invented nickname.

So I now see upgrading as a type of hygiene: You do it regularly to keep your tech healthy.

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

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.

You'll always have enough reasons not to execute, not to do: not enough time, not enough money, not enough will or skill.But what matters isn't what you lack. What matters isn't your idea but what you do with it. What will you do?

The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient.

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.

Entrepreneurship is about freedom, financial freedom but it also about what you leave behind.
Guibert Englebienne, Co-founder of Globant

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

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

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You'll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of - stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper - won't last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What

We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.

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

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.

For better or worse, our lives are accelerating, and the only speed fast enough is instant.

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.

Well, here's what you can do, and that's about it.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

The young are always coming up with the good ideas; it's because they waste time. They follow their passion and do something, not looking for a payoff, just doing what's interesting.

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.

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.

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

The largest, fastest growing, most profitable companies in 2050 will be companies that will have figured out how to harness aspects of sharing that are invisible and unappreciated today. Anything that can be shared - thoughts, emotions, money, health, time - will be shared in the right conditions, with the right benefits. Anything that can be shared can be shared better, faster, easier, longer, and in a million more ways than we currently realize. At this point in our history, sharing something that has not been shared before, or in a new way, is the surest way to increase its value.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Simon's insight is often reduced to "In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention." Our

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

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.

Paranoia is acceptable in the new friendship paradigm. Worrying that your best employees or customers might leave is ok, as long as you put in place an active strategy to offset any possibility of that scenario.

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

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

Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.

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.'

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

Every self is an argument trying to prove its identity

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.

Every year I own less of what I use. Possession

Simple machines can be efficient, but complex adaptive machinery cannot be.

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

We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.

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

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."

Evolution doesn't care about what makes sense; it cares about what works

Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented

Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products. This

The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.

The industrial age was driven by analog copies - exact and cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies - exact and free.

But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.

Tim believes that entrepreneurship isn't based on an idea or a plan, or even a model - it is based on having a strong competency in something. The way to overcome fear, he claims, is by testing your competency.

the journey of going from 'I' to 'We'. "When two indigenous Quechuans meet sixteen thousand feet atop a mountain in Peru for the first time, often they set a challenge. Let's say the challenge is a race. In their society, whoever wins the race is duty bound to coach the loser until he has attained a similar competency. In return, the loser teaches the victor a new skill. This interdependence helps both people. Both win, as does society. Ayni, the art of reciprocation, ensures that their society as a whole grows together.

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.

What is clearly happening inside this glass capsule is happening less clearly at a great scale on Earth in the closing years of this millennium. The realm of the born - all that is nature - and the realm of the made - all that is humanly constructed - are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered. That's banking on some ancient

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

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

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.

Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.

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

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.

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.

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

Seeing our world through technology's eyes has, for me, illuminated its larger purpose. And recognizing what it wants has reduced much of my own conflict in deciding where to place myself in its embrace. This book is my report on what technology wants. My hope is that it will help others find their own way to optimize technology's blessings and minimize its costs.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

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

Questioning is simply more powerful than answering.

The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.

Death is the only teacher in evolution

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

We have no certainty we'll contact extraterrestrial beings from one of the billion earthlike planets in the sky in the next 200 years, but we have almost 100 percent certainty that we'll manufacture an alien intelligence by then. When we face these synthetic aliens, we'll encounter the same benefits and challenges that we expect from contact with ET. They will force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our goals, our identity. What are humans for? I believe our first answer will be: Humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology could not evolve. Our job is to make machines that think different - to create alien intelligences.

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.

A distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs.