"A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally, like creeping tide." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"And in computer life, where the term 'species' does not yet have meaning, we see no cascading emergence of entirely new kinds of variety beyond an initial burst. In the wild, in breeding, and in artificial life, we see the emergence of variation. But by the absence of greater change, we also clearly see that the limits of variation appear to be narrowly bounded, and often bounded within species." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"At the other far extreme, we find many systems ordered as a patchwork of parallel operations, very much as in the neural network of a brain or in a colony of ants. Action in these systems proceeds in a messy cascade of interdependent events. Instead of the discrete ticks of cause and effect that run a clock, a thousand clock springs try to simultaneously run a parallel system. Since there is no chain of command, the particular action of any single spring diffuses into the whole, making it easier for the sum of the whole to overwhelm the parts of the whole. What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Dumb parts, properly constituted into a swarm, yield smart results." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"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." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"I take the view that life is a nonspiritual, almost mathematical property that can emerge from networklike arrangements of matter. It is sort of like the laws of probability; if you get enough components together, the system will behave like this, because the law of averages dictates so. Life results when anything is organized according to laws only now being uncovered; it follows rules as strict as those that light obeys." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"If the system settles into harmony and equilibrium it will eventually stagnate and die."(Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Inconsistency is an inevitable trait of any self-sustaining system built up out of consistent parts." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"It has long been appreciated by science that large numbers behave differently than small numbers. Mobs breed a requisite measure of complexity for emergent entities. The total number of possible interactions between two or more members accumulates exponentially as the number of members increases. At a high level of connectivity, and a high number of members, the dynamics of mobs takes hold. " (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Knowledge, truth, and information flow in networks and swarm systems. I have always been interested in the texture of scientific knowledge because it appears to be lumpy and uneven. Much of what we collectively know derives from a few small areas, yet between them lie vast deserts of ignorance. I can interpret that observation now as the effect of positive feedback and attractors. A little bit of knowledge illuminates much around it, and that new illumination feeds on itself, so one corner explodes. The reverse also holds true: ignorance breeds ignorance. Areas where nothing is known, everyone avoids, so nothing is discovered. The result is an uneven landscape of empty know-nothing interrupted by hills of self-organized knowledge." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network. All other topologies limit what can happen." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"The slightly chaotic character of mind goes even deeper, to a degree our egos may find uncomfortable. It is very likely that intelligence, at bottom, is a probabilistic or statistical phenomenon - on par with the law of averages. The distributed mass of ricocheting impulses which form the foundation of intelligence forbid deterministic results for a given starting point. Instead of repeatable results, outcomes are merely probabilistic. Arriving at a particular thought, then, entails a bit of luck." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"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)
"There are a variety of swarm topologies, but the only organization that holds a genuine plurality of shapes is the grand mesh. In fact, a plurality of truly divergent components can only remain coherent in a network. No other arrangement-chain, pyramid, tree, circle, hub-can contain true diversity working as a whole. This is why the network is nearly synonymous with democracy or the market." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"To err is human; to manage error is system." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"When everything is connected to everything in a distributed network, everything happens at once. 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.A mob can steer itself, and in the territory of rapid, massive, and heterogeneous change, only a mob can steer. To get something from nothing, control must rest at the bottom within simplicity. " (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralysed with choices." (Kevin Kelly, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World", 1995)
"A standalone object, no matter how well designed, has limited potential for new weirdness. A connected object, one that is a node in a network that interacts in some way with other nodes, can give birth to a hundred unique relationships that it never could do while unconnected. Out of this tangle of possible links come myriad new niches for innovations and interactions."
"Any network has two ingredients: nodes and connections. In the grand network we are now assembling, the size of the nodes is collapsing while the quantity and quality of the connections are exploding." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"At present, there is far more to be gained by pushing the boundaries of what can be done by the bottom than by focusing on what can be done at the top. When it comes to control, there is plenty of room at the bottom. What we are discovering is that peer-based networks with millions of parts, minimal oversight, and maximum connection among them can do far more than anyone ever expected. We don’t yet know what the limits of decentralization are." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"Arriving at standards is often easier said than done.
Standard-making is a torturous, bickering process every time. And the end
result is universally condemned - since it is the child of compromise. But for a
standard to be effective, its adoption must be voluntary. There must be room to
dissent by pursuing alternative standards at any time."
"Mathematics says the sum value of a network increases as the
square of the number of members. In other words, as the number of nodes in a
network increases arithmetically, the value of the network increases
exponentially. Adding a few more members can dramatically increase the value
for all members." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical
strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"Networks have existed in every economy. What’s different now is that networks, enhanced and multiplied by technology, penetrate our lives so deeply that 'network' has become the central metaphor around which our thinking and our economy are organized. Unless we can understand the distinctive logic of networks, we can’t profit from the economic transformation now under way." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"The combinatorial mathematics of networks also boost the opportunities for intermediaries. By definition, every node on a network is a node between other nodes. The more connections there are between members in a net, the more intermediary nodes there can be. Everything in a network is intermediating something else." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"The distinguishing characteristic of networks is that they contain no clear center and no clear outside boundaries. Within a network everything is potentially equidistant from everything else." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, will increasingly obey the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"The internet model has many lessons for the new economy but
perhaps the most important is its embrace of dumb swarm power. The aim of swarm
power is superior performance in a turbulent environment. When things happen
fast and furious, they tend to route around central control. By interlinking
many simple parts into a loose confederation, control devolves from the center
to the lowest or outermost points, which collectively keep things on course. A
successful system, though, requires more than simply relinquishing control
completely to the networked mob."
"The more interconnected a technology is, the more opportunities it spawns for both use and misuse. [… The law of plentitude is most accurately rendered thus: In a network, the more opportunities that are taken, the faster new opportunities arise." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"We are connecting everything to everything. […] 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." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"Without some element of governance from the top, bottom-up control will freeze when options are many. Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralyzed with choices." (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy: 10 radical strategies for a connected world", 1998)
"But nature can’t plan ahead. It does not hoard innovations for later use. If a variation in nature does not provide an immediate survival advantage, it is too costly to maintain and so over time it disappears." (Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants", 2010)
"Entropy is the crisp scientific name for waste, chaos, and disorder. As far as we know, the sole law of physics with no known exceptions anywhere in the universe is this: All creation is headed to the basement. Everything in the universe is steadily sliding down the slope toward the supreme equality of wasted heat and maximum entropy." (Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants", 2010)
"In the telephone system a century ago, messages dispersed
across the network in a pattern that mathematicians associate with randomness.
But in the last decade, the flow of bits has become statistically more similar
to the patterns found in self-organized systems. For one thing, the global
network exhibits self-similarity, also known as a fractal pattern. We see this
kind of fractal pattern in the way the jagged outline of tree branches look
similar no matter whether we look at them up close or far away. Today messages
disperse through the global telecommunications system in the fractal pattern of
self-organization." (Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants", 2010)
"Language accelerates learning and creation by permitting
communication and coordination. A new idea can be spread quickly if someone can
explain it and communicate it to others before they have to discover it
themselves. But the chief advantage of language is not communication but
autogeneration. Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself; a
magic mirror that reveals to the mind what the mind thinks; a handle that turns
a mind into a tool."
"The evolution of science and technology parallels the evolution of nature. The major technological transitions are also passages from one level of organization to another."(Kevin Kelly, "What Technology Wants", 2010)
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