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Quotes from Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World — Kevin Kelly

born 1952 United States

← All quotes by Kevin Kelly

61 quotes

Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Animals are robots that work. Toons are simply robots without hard bodies.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost. Like the transient form of a whirlpool held upright by a million spinning atoms of water, it can be scattered with a fingertip.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

In network economics, more brings more.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Any highly evolved form is beautiful.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

The future of machines is biology.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Life is a verb not a noun.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not.

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Kevin Kelly (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.