Kevin Kelly Quotes
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In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.
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The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.
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But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths.
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The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient.
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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.
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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.
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An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.
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The organization and the environment are in concert.
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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.
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The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.
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We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.
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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.
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Managing bottom-up change is its own art.
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Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.
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Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.
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Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas.
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Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.
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We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks.