Kevin Kelly Quotes
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The very long tail of the future is already here.
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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.
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Willingness to learn is important, but willingness to act on what you learn is critical.
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It is easy to make a dollar but it is hard to make a difference.
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Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
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We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.
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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.
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Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.
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The smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.
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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
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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.
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Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.
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Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.
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The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All othertopologies limit what can happen
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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.
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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."
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Clearly, we are self-made. We are the first technology. We are part inventor and part the invented
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Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.
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Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.
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Managing bottom-up change is its own art.
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In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.
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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.
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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.
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Softball isn't just a game it's away of life.
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We are infected by our own misunderstandin g of how our own minds work.
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The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
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The organization and the environment are in concert.
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It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.
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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.
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Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.
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