Quotes By Kevin Kelly
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
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
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
In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.
Kevin Kelly
The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.
Kevin Kelly
Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.
Kevin Kelly
Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.
Kevin Kelly
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
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
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
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
The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
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
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
The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.
Kevin Kelly
The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient.
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
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
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
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