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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.

— 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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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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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.

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

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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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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.