A biography for Kevin Kellyhasn’t been written yet.
“The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.”
“Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants:Increasing efficiencyIncreasing opportunityIncreasing emergenceIncreasing complexityIncreasing diversityIncreasing specializationIncreasing ubiquityIncreasing freedomIncreasing mutualismIncreasing beautyIncreasing sentienceIncreasing structureIncreasing evolvability”
“Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.”
“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.”
“One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.”
“An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.”
“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.”
“The organization and the environment are in concert.”
“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.”
“We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.”
“Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.”
“Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.”
“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.”
“The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.”
“When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at.”
“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.”
“Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.”