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"It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy.

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

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Work: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World, 1995
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The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abudance is human attention.

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There's nothing more addictive than being a god.

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Every time a closed system opens, it begins to interact more directly with other existing systems, and therefore acquires all the value of those systems.

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The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control.

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As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world.

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The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.

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The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.

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

One of the chief chores in the next economy is to restore the symmetry of knowledge.

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Topics

Philosophy

More quotes by Kevin Kelly

The technium expands life’s fundamental traits, and in so doing it expands life’s fundamental goodness.

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The technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness.

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And whether we like it or not, we stand at the fulcrum of the future. We are in part responsible for the evolution of this planet proceeding onward.

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Urbanization is the advent of edge species.

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Not every success needs to be abandoned drastically, but every success needs to be questioned drastically.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

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There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped.

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Every morning
I shall concern myself anew about the boundary
Between the love-deed-Yes and the power-deed-No
And pressing forward honor reality.

Martin Buber Power and Love (1926)

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended.

John C. Lilly The Human Biocomputer (1974)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Kevin Kelly (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.