17 Quotes & Sayings By Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly is a journalist, author, and the founding editor of Wired magazine. He is also a senior Maverick Scientist at Google and an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information. In the past, he has been a columnist for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fortune magazine, and Esquire magazine. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.

1
Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come. Kevin Kelly
2
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology. Kevin Kelly
3
Extrapolated, technology wants what life wants: Increasing efficiency Increasing opportunity Increasing emergence Increasing complexity Increasing diversity Increasing specialization Increasing ubiquity Increasing freedom Increasing mutualism Increasing beauty Increasing sentience Increasing structure Increasing evolvability Kevin Kelly
4
...the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea. Kevin Kelly
5
‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?... The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection? In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. Kevin Kelly
6
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
7
We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work. Kevin Kelly
8
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
9
All imaginable futures are not equally possible. Kevin Kelly
10
An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous. Kevin Kelly
11
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
12
Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design. Kevin Kelly
13
Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far. Kevin Kelly
14
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
15
It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially. Kevin Kelly
16
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