Kevin Kelly Quotes

This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.

We need a bit of top-down as well. Every predominantly bottom-up organization that lasts for more than a few years does so because it becomes a hybrid of bottom up plus some top down. I came to that conclusion through personal experience. I was a co–founding editor of Wired magazine. Editors perform a top-down function — we select, prune, solicit, shape, and guide the results of writers.

You can eat any dessert you want if you take only three bites.

When we permit any object to transmit a small amount of data and to receive input from its neighborhood, we change an inert object into an animated node.

Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed.

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

We are, and will remain, perpetual newbies.

In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant — it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.

If you think that something “goes without saying,” it is usually best for everyone if you just go ahead and say it.

Write your own obituary, the one you’d like to have, and then everyday work towards making it true.

To be interesting, just tell your own story with uncommon honesty.

The more you are interested in others the more interesting they’ll find you. To be interesting, be interested.

Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.

The genes harbor their own wisdom and their own inertia.

It is not a compliment if it comes with a request.