Kevin Kelly Quotes & Sayings

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Managing bottom-up change is its own art.”

“All imaginable futures are not equally possible.”