KEVIN KELLY

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.

It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.

Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.

This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

The organization and the environment are in concert.

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.

Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb.

And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.

A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.