Kevin Kelly Quotes

a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.

Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die;
it’s more fun and useful to them. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral
home and it should bounce.

What is clearly happening inside this glass capsule is happening less clearly at a great scale on Earth in the closing years of this millennium. The realm of the born — all that is nature — and the realm of the made — all that is humanly constructed — are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered. That’s banking on some ancient

the journey of going from ‘I’ to ‘We’. “When two indigenous Quechuans meet sixteen thousand feet atop a mountain in Peru for the first time, often they set a challenge. Let’s say the challenge is a race. In their society, whoever wins the race is duty bound to coach the loser until he has attained a similar competency. In return, the loser teaches the victor a new skill. This interdependence helps both people. Both win, as does society. Ayni, the art of reciprocation, ensures that their society as a whole grows together.

Life is less a miracle than a necessity for matter and energy

For the most part our legal system still runs on agrarian principles, where property is real. It has not caught up to the digital era. Not for lack of trying, but because it is difficult to sort out how ownership works in a realm where ownership is less important.

More important, with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic.

We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present.

We keep inventing new things that make new longings, new holes that must be filled.

When you forgive others
they may not notice
but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something
we do for others;
it is a gift to ourselves.

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

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. Ninety percent of your coworkers will be unseen machines. Most of what you do will not be possible without them. And there will be a blurry line between what you do and what they do. You might no longer think of it as a job, at least at first, because anything that resembles drudgery will be handed over to robots by the accountants. We need to let robots take over. Many of the jobs that politicians are fighting to keep away from robots are jobs that no one wakes up in the morning really wanting to do. Robots will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can. They will do jobs we can’t do at all. They will do jobs we never imagined even needed to be done. And they will help us discover new jobs for ourselves, new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters.

Your passions should fit you exactly
but your purpose in life should exceed you. Work for something
much larger than yourself.

Before the internet there was simply no way to coordinate a million people in real time or to get a hundred thousand workers collaborating on one project for a week. Now we can, so we are quickly exploring all the ways in which we can combine control and the crowd in innumerable permutations.

The real test of your character
is not how you deal with adversity — although that will teach you much. The real test is how you deal with power. The only cure for power is humility
and the admission that
your power comes from luck. The small person believes they are superior;
the superior person knows they are lucky.