Kevin Kelly Quotes

Even in the tropics it gets colder at night than you think. Pack warmly.

In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.

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.

Imagine that seven out of ten working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do? It’s hard to believe you’d have an economy at all if you gave pink slips to more than half the labor force. But that — in slow motion — is what the industrial revolution did to the workforce of the early 19th century. Two hundred years ago, 70 percent of American workers lived on the farm. Today automation has eliminated all but 1 percent of their jobs, replacing them (and their work animals) with machines. But the displaced workers did not sit idle. Instead, automation created hundreds of millions of jobs in entirely new fields. Those who once farmed were now manning the legions of factories that churned out farm equipment, cars, and other industrial products. Since then, wave upon wave of new occupations have arrived — appliance repair person, offset printer, food chemist, photographer, web designer — each building on previous automation. Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.

At the rate AI technology is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.” Medicine

Experiences are fun, and having influence is rewarding, but only mattering makes us happy. Do stuff that matters.

To be rich you don’t need to make more money; you chiefly need to better manage the money already flowing through your hands.

For marital bliss, take turns allowing each partner to be always right.

We tend to overrate the value of intelligence. You need to pair your IQ with other virtues. The most important things in life can not be attained through logic only.

Ask funders for money, and they’ll give you advice; but ask for advice, and they’ll give you money.

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today.

All guns are loaded.

People will give you permission to do all kinds of things if you wear a yellow safety vest.

The net shifts from mass media to mess media.

Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans.