Kevin Kelly Quotes

Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue. Anthropological Commentary The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true.

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

Systems are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

It’s important to embrace new technologies instead of fight them.

Call me an optimist, but in the past 300 years we have built amazing technologies which - by and large - have advanced humanity.

There's just always going to be both positives and negatives to any evolution that we're a part of. And there's really no stopping the evolution of technology. There has been more and more integration in our daily lives, so we become more and more dependent on it.

Life gets boring, someone invents another necessity, and once again we turn the crank on the screwjack of progress hoping that nobody gets screwed.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.

Any technology that does not appear magical is insufficiently advanced.

Now, with the Internet, you're either five years ahead or you're five years behind, and the music game is catchin' up right now.

Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is. Electricity is going to change everything. Everything!

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

Any technology that is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.

The world may not be getting better and better, but our devices are getting newer and newer.

For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.

Technology is central to Development. It touches one and all, and is an important instrument of our national progress.

It's not the genius who is 100 years ahead of his time but average man who is 100 years behind it.

The world is littered with corpses that predicted technology in a particular arena was done. If there's another gigantic step change out there, we don't yet know what it is.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.

All the modern devices we have enable us to investigate things and have enabled us to do better.

Everything that you are taking advantage of, inventing and using, is still a generation or two behind when it comes to the U.S. government.

Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.

The progressive development of man is vitally dependent on invention.

If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don't, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there's no progress and basically everybody's gain is somebody else's loss.