Top 180 Kevin Kelly Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

104. “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

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

108. “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

109. “A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten.”

— Kevin Kelly

110. “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.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

112. “For better or worse, our lives are accelerating, and the only speed fast enough is instant.”

— Kevin Kelly

113. “But the general trends of the products and services in 30 years are currently visible. Their basic forms are rooted in directions generated by emerging technologies now on their way to ubiquity. 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

114. “Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A.”

— Kevin Kelly

115. “Heavily cognified, incredibly smart filters can be applied to any realm.”

— Kevin Kelly

116. “Do you own your own thoughts, or are you merely accessing them?”

— Kevin Kelly

117. “The industrial age was driven by analog copies – exact and cheap. The information age is driven by digital copies – exact and free.”

— Kevin Kelly

118. “Your greatest job is shedding what you don’t have to do.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

120. “The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.”

— Kevin Kelly

121. “Technology is all the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.”

— Kevin Kelly

122. “Bits want to move. Bits want to be linked to other bits. Bits want to be reckoned in real time. Bits want to be duplicated, replicated, copied. Bits want to be meta.”

— Kevin Kelly

123. “The value of experience is rising.”

— Kevin Kelly

124. “If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.”

— Kevin Kelly

125. “Even a very tiny amount of useful intelligence embedded into an existing process boosts its effectiveness to a whole other level.”

— Kevin Kelly

126. “At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.” Medicine.”

— Kevin Kelly

127. “Software eats everything.”

— Kevin Kelly

128. “A good question cannot be answered immediately.”

— Kevin Kelly

129. “The switch from “ownership that you purchase” to “access that you subscribe to” overturns many conventions. Ownership is casual, fickle. If something better comes along, grab it. A subscription, on the other hand, gushes a never-ending stream of updates, issues, and versions that force a constant interaction between the producer and the consumer.”

— Kevin Kelly

130. “Get the ongoing process right and it will keep generating ongoing benefits. In our new era, processes trump products.”

— Kevin Kelly

131. “We are constantly surprised by things that have been happening for 20 years or longer. I.”

— Kevin Kelly

132. “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

133. “Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.”

— Kevin Kelly

134. “We are infected by our own misunderstandin g of how our own minds work.”

— Kevin Kelly

135. “Since it is the last scarcity, wherever attention flows, money will follow.”

— Kevin Kelly

136. “Our greatest invention in the past 200 years was not a particular gadget or tool but the invention of the scientific process itself.”

— Kevin Kelly

137. “This is the curse of the postscarcity world: We can connect to only a thin thread of all there is. Each.”

— Kevin Kelly

138. “We can’t save it up or hoard it. We have to spend it second by second, in real time.”

— Kevin Kelly

139. “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.”

— Kevin Kelly

140. “These startups try to exploit inefficiencies in novel ways.”

— Kevin Kelly

141. “The organization and the environment are in concert.”

— Kevin Kelly

142. “I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power.”

— Kevin Kelly

143. “What we want instead of conscious intelligence is artificial smartness. As AIs develop, we might have to engineer ways to prevent consciousness in them. Our most premium AI services will likely be advertised as consciousness-free. Nonhuman.”

— Kevin Kelly

144. “Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”

— Kevin Kelly

145. “If Jefferson gave you his house at Monticello, you’d have his house and he wouldn’t. But if he gave you an idea, you’d have the idea and he’d still have the idea. That weirdness is the source of our uncertainty about intellectual property today. For.”

— Kevin Kelly

146. “Long ago I learned that even the most inanimate things we know of – stone, iron columns, copper pipes, gravel roads, a piece of paper – won’t last very long without attention and fixing and the loan of additional order. Existence, it seems, is chiefly maintenance. What.”

— Kevin Kelly

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

— Kevin Kelly

148. “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

149. “In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant – it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.”

— Kevin Kelly

150. “The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All othertopologies limit what can happen.”

— Kevin Kelly