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Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World QUOTES

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World QUOTES

1 " ‎What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?
...
The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?
In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

2 " What is clearly happening inside this glass capsule is happening less clearly at a great scale on Earth in the closing years of this millennium. The realm of the born—all that is nature—and the realm of the made—all that is humanly constructed—are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological and the biological is becoming engineered. That’s banking on some ancient "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

3 " if Earth is reduced to the size of a bacteria, and inspected under high-powered optics, would it seem stranger than a virus? "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

4 " Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority? "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

5 " Perhaps the most useful lesson of coevolution for “wannabe” gods is that in coevolutionary worlds control and secrecy are counterproductive. "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

6 " In the Network Era—that age we have just entered—dense communication is creating artificial worlds ripe for emergent coevolution, spontaneous self-organization, and win-win cooperation. In this Era, openness wins, central control is lost, and stability is a state of perpetual almost-falling ensured by constant error. "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

7 " The greatest social consequence of the Darwinian revolution was the grudging acceptance by humans that humans were random descendants of monkeys, neither perfect nor engineered. The greatest social consequence of neo-biological civilization will be the grudging acceptance by humans that humans are the random ancestors of machines, and that as machines we can be engineered ourselves. "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World

8 " Nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future diseases—although "

― Kevin Kelly , Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World