Top 180 Kevin Kelly Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq.”

— Kevin Kelly

52. “While anonymity can be used to protect heroes, it is far more commonly used as a way to escape responsibility. That’s why most of the brutal harassment on Twitter, Yik Yak, Reddit, and other sites is delivered anonymously. A lack of responsibility unleashes the worst in us.”

— Kevin Kelly

53. “Our appetite for the instant is insatiable. The cost of real-time engagement requires massive coordination and degrees of collaboration that were unthinkable a few years ago.”

— Kevin Kelly

54. “If it were a nation, Facebook would be the largest country on the planet. Yet the entire economy of this largest country runs on labor that isn’t paid. A.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

56. “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

57. “Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed.”

— Kevin Kelly

58. “When you keep people waiting they begin to think of all your flaws.”

— Kevin Kelly

59. “The Internet will be the CB radio of the ’90s,” he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC’s argument for ignoring the new medium: “You aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”

— Kevin Kelly

60. “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

61. “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.”

— Kevin Kelly

62. “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

63. “Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever. Pretend.”

— Kevin Kelly

64. “We are, and will remain, perpetual newbies. We.”

— Kevin Kelly

65. “The very long tail of the future is already here.”

— Kevin Kelly

66. “Ironically, the best questions are not questions that lead to answers, because answers are on their way to becoming cheap and plentiful. A good question is worth a million good answers. A.”

— Kevin Kelly

67. “We should really call AIs “AAs,” for “artificial aliens.” An.”

— Kevin Kelly

68. “Pablo Picasso brilliantly anticipated this inversion in 1964 when he told the writer William Fifield, “Computers are useless. They only give you answers.” So.”

— Kevin Kelly

69. “The truth is no online database will replace your newspaper,” he claimed. “Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.” Stoll captured the prevailing skepticism of a digital world full of “interacting libraries, virtual communities, and electronic commerce” with one word: “baloney.”

— Kevin Kelly

70. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.” Our.”

— Kevin Kelly

71. “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.”

— Kevin Kelly

72. “As the old joke goes: “Software, free. User manual, $10,000.” But it’s no joke.”

— Kevin Kelly

73. “Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.”

— Kevin Kelly

74. “Yet the paradox of science is that every answer breeds at least two new questions. More tools, more answers, ever more questions.”

— Kevin Kelly

75. “We are morphing so fast that our ability to invent new things outpaces the rate we can civilize them.”

— Kevin Kelly

76. “We are particularly susceptible to bias when we are hurting or desperate. An.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

78. “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. You.”

— Kevin Kelly

79. “That monopoly of a persistent identity is the real engine of Facebook’s remarkable success.”

— Kevin Kelly

80. “A distributed, decentralized network is more a process than a thing. In the logic of the Net there is a shift from nouns to verbs.”

— Kevin Kelly

81. “Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think.”

— Kevin Kelly

82. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

84. “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

85. “As a tool, evolution is good for three things: How to get somewhere you want but can’t find the route to. How to get to somewhere you can’t imagine. How to open up entirely new places to get to.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

88. “This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.”

— Kevin Kelly

89. “Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Unwavering honesty will help seal in trust.”

— Kevin Kelly

90. “We are reaching deep within ourselves to adjust the master knob.”

— Kevin Kelly

91. “Looking back, I think the computer age did not really start until this moment, when computers merged with the telephone. Stand-alone computers were inadequate. All the enduring consequences of computation did not start until the early 1980s, that moment when computers married phones and melded into a robust hybrid. In.”

— Kevin Kelly

92. “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

93. “The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn’t changing.”

— Kevin Kelly

94. “Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained. The number of factors and possibilities we have to attend to rises each year almost exponentially. Thus our seemingly permanently distracted state and our endless flitting from one thing to another is not a sign of disaster, but is a necessary adaptation to this current environment.”

— Kevin Kelly

95. “In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.”

— Kevin Kelly

96. “Shutting down civilization is actually hard. The fiercer the disaster, the faster the chaos burns out.”

— Kevin Kelly

97. “Every self is an argument trying to prove its identity.”

— Kevin Kelly

98. “Not only did we fail to imagine what the web would become, we still don’t see it today. We are oblivious to the miracle it has blossomed into. Twenty years after its birth the immense scope of the web is hard to fathom. The total number of web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request, exceeds 60 trillion. That’s almost 10,000 pages per person alive. And this entire cornucopia has been created in less than 8,000 days.”

— Kevin Kelly

99. “So I now see upgrading as a type of hygiene: You do it regularly to keep your tech healthy.”

— Kevin Kelly

100. “A universal law of economics says the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation suddenly inverts. When nighttime electrical lighting was new and scarce, it was the poor who burned common candles. Later, when electricity became easily accessible and practically free, our preference flipped and candles at dinner became a sign of luxury. In.”

— Kevin Kelly