Kevin Kelly Quotes

Man must be at once more humble and more confident; more humble in the face of destructive potentials of what he can achieve, more confident of his own humanity as against computers and robots which are only engines to simulate him.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

You can't gaze in the crystal ball and see the future. What the Internet is going to be in the future is what society makes it.

So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.

It's not just the effect of technology on the environment, on religion, on the economic structure, on society, on politics, etc. It's that everything now exists in technology to the point where technology is the new and comprehensive host of nature of life.

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

All these remarkable new technologies are starting to make people very uncomfortable with the whole process of science.

We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

Scientific men can hardly escape the charge of ignorance with regard to the precise effect of the impact of modern science upon the mode of living of the people and upon their civilization. For them, such a charge is worse than that of crime.

I truly hope that we can evolve with technology, and use it for the benefit of all mankind, but history might suggest otherwise.

What I worry about ultimately is that when we're stripped of our privacy, when we're stripped of free will, when we start to merge with machines in a more robust way, at some point, we'll cease to be identifiably human. And therefore, I think our humanity is, in some ways, the thing that's under existential threat.

Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.

There's an idea that, 'Oh, the more technology you have, or the more you modify your body, the less human you are.' I think that's super gross, and inaccurate, and also offensive to anybody who relies on technology to live.

We must face the fact that we are on the brink of times when man may be able to magnify his intellectual and inventive capability, just as in the nineteenth century he used machines to magnify his physical capacity. Again, as then, our innocence is lost. And again, of course, the innocence, once lost, cannot be regained. The loss demands attention, not denial.

Technological civilization has now dominated the earth to the point where there is a big question what is going to happen next.

The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no.

Ideas and philosophies change just as machines do. Religions changed because of the birth control pill. Politics changes because of the hydrogen bomb. All because of science fictional inventions.

Where the world is going and what technology is leading us to in terms of the evolution of humanity is an incredibly valuable thing to understand.

There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.

We are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire.

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics.

The mediated world has approached us from a lot of different directions and we have freely chosen our automobiles and our skyscrapers and our televisions and our telephones and our computers because they have given us power and freedom. Now we are beginning to notice there's a price to pay for them. It's all interconnected, the good stuff and the bad stuff comes together.

God love the car. It has shown the naked heart that lives in all of us. Man invented the car but the car -- out of pure malevolence no doubt -- changed the history of the world by reinventing man.

These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.