Kevin Kelly Quotes

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

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.'

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

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

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.

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

Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.

We have to get better at believing the impossible.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

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

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

The very long tail of the future is already here.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The organization and the environment are in concert.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.

Technology is anything that doesn't work yet.

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

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.

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

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