Explore Quotes by Kevin Kelly

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.

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.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

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

Softball isn't just a game it's away of life.

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.

‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror? ... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon.

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

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.

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

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

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