Kevin Kelly Quotes - Page 2

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.

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

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

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

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