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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Kevin Kelly Quotes

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.

– 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.

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

An organization’s reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

– Kevin Kelly

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly

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.

– Kevin Kelly

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

– Kevin Kelly