Kevin Kelly Quotes

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

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

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.

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

Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable.

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

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

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 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.

Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.

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.

We have to get better at believing the impossible.

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

The very long tail of the future is already here.

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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