Thoughts from Kevin Kelly circa 1995

Quotes from Out of Control by Kevin Kelly (1995)
This was an important read for me back then. Still has value.

• The marriage of the born and the made.
• Our technological furture is headed toward a neo-biological civilization.
• Nature has all along yielded her flesh to humans. First we took nature's materials as food, fibers, and shelter. Then we learned to extract raw materials from her biosphere to create our own new synthetic materials. Now Bios is yielding us her mind - we are taking here logic.
• 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.
• Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.
• To err is human; to manage error is system.
• A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often.
• The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network.
• A system is anything that talks to itself.
• The future of machines is biology.
• An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally.
• Life never falls, but never gets out of falling. It is poised in a persistent state of almost-fell.
• We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.
• Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going.
• One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.
• A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company.
• Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge.
• There's nothing more addictive than being a god.
• The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.
• What humans can't engineer, evolution can.
• The nature of life is to delight in all possible loopholes. Every creature is in some way hacking a living by reinterpreting the rules.
• We want a machine that is constantly remaking itself.
• In turbulence is the preservation of the world.
• The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.
• Hereditary information does not exist independently of its embodiment.
• Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not.
• The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it.
• Telling the future is what organisms are for.
• When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.
• The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.
• The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.

Full text of book is online:http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/contents.php


Also, from the same book:
The Nine Laws of God

1. Distribute being
2. Control from the bottom up
3. Cultivate increasing returns
4. Grow by chunking
5. Maximize the fringes
6. Honor your errors
7. Pursue no optima; have multiple goals
8. Seek persistent disequilibrium
9. Change changes itself.