Best 73 quotes of Kevin Kelly on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Attention deficit is no longer the supposed domain of Generation Y's who were brought up on a diet of social media and new technology. A recent study revealed 65 percent of 55-64 year olds surf, text and watch television simultaneously.

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.

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.

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.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

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

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

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

Find the minimum amount of technology that will maximize your options.

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.

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

In 2007, Stanford Business School Advisory committee asserted that self awareness was the most important attribute a leader should develop. The challenge for the modern entrepreneur is to take that path.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I work in a "you scratch my back, and I'll stab yours" kind of a place.

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.

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.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

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

My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq

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

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

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.

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.

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on

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.

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

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.

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

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

Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

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.

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.

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.

The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.

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.

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

The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All othertopologies limit what can happen