Kevin Kelly

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

Fabrice Florin: Stewart Brand recognized very early on the importance of computers for information sharing, and so very early on he wanted to be able to serve his community with the right tools that would allow people to communicate and share ideas effectively. Kevin Kelly: Whether it was ever articulated or not, what Whole Earth was doing was trying to make it work in terms of governance, best practices, cultural nudges, pricing… Howard Rheingold: Part of it was not trying to shape it, enabling the shape to emerge. Letting the people there make whatever it was. Kevin Kelly: One of the design principles for The Well was to try to get as close to free as we could get. The idea was to see how cheap can we possibly make this, cheap for the user. Stewart Brand: I priced it to be very inviting. Kevin Kelly: We would bring the power to the people by having really cheap telecommunications.

…

We changed the name in the middle of its life. Jane Metcalfe: We sent a copy to Kevin Kelly. Louis Rossetto: We had a piece on Anthony Burgess about how word processing affects writing. And a piece on Nicholson Baker, who was a word worker, a novelist. This is like the seed for everything that came out ultimately in Wired. Kevin Kelly: And I thought, Wow, this is interesting! So I reviewed it for Whole Earth. I called it “the least boring computer magazine there was.” Louis Rossetto: He had written this gracious thing. And so we said, “We want to go meet Kevin Kelly.” And so we went to visit him in his chaotic office. He had billions of books all over the place.

…

But it turned out there was a ten-year hiatus between when I did that article and when Hackers came out, so the lifetimes that I experienced around computers made it seem always very slow and kind of boring and frustrating. Kevin Kelly: For me there was this new interest in this culture that was emerging around the programmers. I was talking to Stewart about the fact that there were three generations of hackers and they hadn’t met—they themselves didn’t know about each other. Stewart Brand: And Kevin said, “What if we can get those three generations together?” Kevin Kelly: And the one genius of Stewart’s is that he will often take an idea and, unlike me, he’ll actually try and do something about it.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Rather, a close look at Wired’s first and most influential five years suggests that the magazine’s vision of the digital horizon emerged in large part from its intellectual and interpersonal affiliations with Kevin Kelly and the Whole Wired [ 209 ] Earth network and, through them, from the New Communalist embrace of the politics of consciousness.4 Although Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe founded Wired, and although Rossetto’s libertarian politics exerted a substantial influence on the magazine, Rossetto and Metcalfe also drew heavily for funds and, later, for subjects and writers, on the Whole Earth world. In 1992, while Kevin Kelly was finishing up Out of Control, Rossetto hired him to serve as executive editor of the magazine.

…

In the 1990s both computer networks such as the Internet and the social networks of the Whole Earth community became emblems of what many claimed at the time was a new economic and political world. Thanks in large part to the example of the Global Business Network and to the writings of Kevin Kelly and Peter Schwartz, as well as to the work of Wired magazine as a whole, many began to imagine that the New Communalist dream of a nonhierarchical, interpersonally intimate society was on the threshold of coming true. Despite their libertarian orientation, the writings of Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and Kevin Kelly in this period fairly ache with a longing to return to an egalitarian world. For these writers and, due to their influence, for many others, the early public Internet seemed poised to model and help bring into being a world in which each individual could act in his or her own interest and at the same time produce a unified social sphere, a world in which we were “all one.”

…

As he coordinated those collaborations, Brand quickly learned to speak the contact languages developing around him. In this way, he and others like him, including most prominently Kevin Kelly and the writers of Wired, gave voice to an ongoing integration of ideas and practices that had first appeared in the New Communalist and hightechnology research worlds. Having helped that synthesis to emerge in interpersonal collaboration among multiple communities, and having helped link it to new computing technologies, Brand, and later Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, and others, found themselves in a unique position to “report” the synthesis as “news” to the rest of the world. 

Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand
Published 1 Jan 1999

Manifestations of the overall project could range from fortune cookies to theme parks. For now, we will build an astonishing Clock and a unique Library and see what develops from there. Who is “we”? The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to foster long-term responsibility. The founding board is Daniel Hillis (co-chair), Stewart Brand (co-chair), Kevin Kelly, Douglas Carlston, Peter Schwartz, Brian Eno, Paul Saffo, Mitchell Kapor, and Esther Dyson. Hillis created Thinking Machines Inc. and its supercomputer, the Connection Machine, and is now a Fellow at Disney. Brand began the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founded Global Business Network. Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control.

…

To caricature each of their stances: Judaism says, “The Messiah is going to come, and that’s the end of history”; Christianity says, “The Messiah is going to come back, and that’s the end of history”; Islam says, “The Messiah came; history is irrelevant.” One Sunday morning at a Long Now Foundation board retreat on Clock/Library design, Kevin Kelly, a devout Christian, spoke up: “I go to church, but why am I here and not in church? It’s because I feel that the Christian church denies the future. From year one, they have been waiting for the second coming. I think we need a story that includes the future.” CLOCK/LIBRARY “8. Provide a description of what a visitor to the clock, library, etc. would see and experience.”

…

It would show, in briskly intuitive fashion only: the year date (Gregorian calendar, easily convertible to anything else), the position of the Sun (hence the approximate time of day), the Moon’s position and phase, the local rising and setting times of the Sun and Moon, and the locally visible star field, which rotates daily, shifts with the yearly seasonal cycle, and adjusts very gradually to the 25,784-year cycle of the precession of the equinoxes. Kevin Kelly observed that such a display would be a return to origins: “From the very beginning clocks were simulacra. The first clocks were models of the heavens—Sun and Moon rotating overhead. Later clockmakers modeled a universe of seasons and time and birth and death, displayed as marching jacks and crowing cocks.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

Public domain. Jaron Lanier. Photo: Kevin Kelly. VPL suits and gloves. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Full-body VPL suit. Photo: Kevin Kelly. VPL diagram. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Photo of VR machine at Whole Earth Institute’s Cyberthon, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cyberspace illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Cybersex illustration, Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. R.U. a Cyberpunk? Mondo 2000, 1993, Nr 10, p. 30. Courtesy Ken Goffman. Photo of John Perry Barlow. Mondo 2000. Courtesy Ken Goffman. John Gilmore. Photo: Kevin Kelly. Timothy C. May. Photo: Kevin Kelly. May, Gilmore, and Hughes.

…

Entire communities functioned like whole systems, many in the countercultural avant-garde came to understand: there was a different way of seeing things, a circular way, where everything was connected, connected by feedback, kept in balance, in touch with the environment, even with animals and plants and rocks, in unity, as one single whole, one planet, shrunk into a village by communication technology. A veritable cult emerged. Seeing communities as self-regulating feedback systems was liberating, driven by a theory of machines that was quite literally “out of control,” in the memorable phrase of the founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly.1 The cybernetic myth had a major cultural impact. Wiener’s work, in its countercultural and highly symbolic reading, forms one of the oldest and deepest roots of that firm belief in technical solutions that would later come to characterize the culture of Silicon Valley. One of the earliest and most eminent writers roused by cybernetics was L.

…

On the one hand, cybernetic ideas and terms were spectacularly successful and shaped other fields: control engineering, artificial intelligence, even game theory. On the other hand, cybernetics as a science entered a creeping demise, with therapists and sociologists increasingly filling the rolls at the American Society for Cybernetics. Kevin Kelly, the Wired magazine editor, later observed that “by the late 1970s, cybernetics had died of dry rot.”25 Yet, to the surprise of the remaining founders, cybernetics lived on—not in Boston’s scientific research labs, but in California’s counterculture communes. The rising New Age movement found the new discipline’s mystic side appealing.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

Then he said he needed to speak to his financial adviser. At midnight he called Brockman back and said he hadn’t been able to find him, adding that he was going to think about it overnight and throw the I Ching. Brockman couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. In the morning Brand called back and said he would accept. * * * Kevin Kelly was a high schooler in a suburban town in New Jersey when his mother alerted him to the Whole Earth Catalog, having read a story about it in Time and figured it might be something he would be interested in. It would take Kelly another year to actually find a copy in a bookstore in Woodstock. Like many others of his generation who had found the Whole Earth Catalog, it changed his life.

…

(Sales of the UK edition were almost nonexistent.) It was left to Paul Hawken, the Point Foundation’s financial officer, to break the news to the Review editors that their publication would be folded into the CoEvolution Quarterly to create the newly combined publication that Art Kleiner had named the Whole Earth Review. Kevin Kelly, who was editing the Quarterly, was put in charge of editing the two publications together into a strange mixture that pleased neither audience. The coup de grâce, however, was delivered by Richard Dalton, who had served as editor of the first two issues of the Review and then handed the job off to Kleiner.

…

Although the first issue of the combined Whole Earth Review was titled “Computers as Poison,” Brand was outwardly sanguine: “Computers suppress our animal presence,” he told an SF Focus interviewer. “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.”[23] Just a few years later he would realize how naive he had been. * * * Shortly after he arrived in Sausalito, Kevin Kelly read Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that portrayed three generations of “white hat” computer hackers (the good guys) ranging from the young programmers at MIT’s AI Lab decades earlier, through the Homebrew Computer Club, to the then new world of video game design.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Martin’s Griffin, 2000), p. 34. 16 Ibid., p. 68. 17 Cassidy, Dot.Con, p. 63. 18 Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams, p. 243. 19 Clark, Netscape Time, p. 261. 20 Ibid., p. 251. 21 Ibid., p. 249. 22 Ibid., p. 119. 23 Ibid., p. 67. 24 Thomson Venture Economics, special tabulations, June 2003. 25 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Random House, 1996). 26 Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Penguin, 1997). 27 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 28 Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy, p. 156. 29 Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life (New York: Free Press, 1995). 30 Ibid., p. 47. 31 Ibid., p. 48. 32 “The Greatest Defunct Web Sites and Dotcom Disasters,” CNET, June 5, 2008. 33 Cassidy, Dot.con, pp. 242–45. 34 Stone, The Everything Store, p. 48. 35 Ibid. 36 Fred Wilson, “Platform Monopolities,” AVC.com, July 22, 2014. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Matthew Yglesias, “The Prophet of No Profit,” Slate, January 30, 2014. 40 Stone, The Everything Store, pp. 181–82. 41 Ibid., p. 173. 42 Jeff Bercovici, “Amazon Vs.

…

“It has four very powerful qualities that will guarantee its ultimate triumph,” Negroponte promised about this revolution. It would be “decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering.”25 One of the most frequently quoted books about the Internet economy published in the wake of the August 1995 IPO was Kevin Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy.26 Kelly’s economic manifesto, which came out as a series of articles he wrote as the founding executive editor for Wired magazine, became an appropriately magical handbook for startup entrepreneurs in the surreal dot-com era. The personally very gracious and well-meaning Kelly, one of the founders of the countercultural WELL BBS and a born-again Christian techno-mystic who would later write a book about how technology has a mind of its own,27 stoked the already irrational exuberance of the late nineties with a new economy manifesto that today reads like a parody of digital utopianism.

…

In 1995, two American economists published a less hyped but much more prescient book about the depressingly old rules of our new economy. In The Winner-Take-All Society,29 Robert Frank and Philip Cook argue that the defining feature of late-twentieth-century global capitalism was a growing financial chasm between a narrow elite and the rest of society. Rather than Kevin Kelly’s “thousand points of wealth,” Frank and Cook found that wealth in the winner-take-all society actually had very few points. They agreed with Tom Perkins about the enormous power and influence of this new elite. But in contrast with Perkins, Frank, and Cook—whose observations about this emerging plutocracy are supported by the later research of many distinguished economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Reich, and Thomas Piketty—didn’t celebrate this one percent, trickle-down economy.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

,” ScienceDaily, February 28, 2007, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218140157.htm. 265 “the more we look for patterns”: ibid. 265 “exhaustive data, the Google way of doing science”: quoted in Ethan Zuckmerman, “Kevin Kelly on Context for the Quantified Self,” My Heart’s in Accra, May 29, 2011, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2011/05/29/kevin-kelly-on-context-for-the-quantified-self. 266 “a serious shift in our image”: David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 35.

…

To assume that we can distill life-changing lessons from it and then apply them in completely different fields seems arrogant to say the least. Worst of all, Wikipedia is itself subject to many myths, which might result in Wikipedia-inspired solutions that misrepresent its spirit. “The bureaucracy of Wikipedia is relatively so small as to be invisible,” proclaims technology pundit Kevin Kelly, confessing that “much of what I believed about human nature, and the nature of knowledge, has been upended by the Wikipedia.” But what did Kelly believe before Wikipedia? Kelly writes that “everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it.”

…

This view of technology as an autonomous force has its own rather long intellectual pedigree; in 1978 Langdon Winner offered perhaps the best summary in his Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of- Control as a Theme in Political Thought. This view has been debunked hundreds of times as a lazy, unempirical approach to studying technological change, and yet it has never really left the popular discourse about technology. It has recently made a forceful appearance in Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, and Kelly’s thought is not a bad place to observe technological defeatism up close, if only because he is a Silicon Valley maven and the first executive editor of Wired. Besides, very diverse thinkers about “the Internet”—from Tim Wu to Steven Johnson—cite Kelly’s What Technology Wants as an influence.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

But maybe the media is going to be a part time job”: “Chris Anderson on the Economics of ‘Free,’” Der Spiegel, July 28, 2009. “Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), 237. “The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book”: Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006. “In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text”: Kelly, “Scan This Book!” “By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas”: Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (PublicAffairs, 2013), 292.

…

Before the arrival of the new technologies, information, like the isolated scholar, was atomized. But now, information can be sorted and processed by a much larger community—that could correct mistakes, add insights, and revise conclusions. Technology enabled what H. G. Wells once called the World Brain, or what Wired editor Kevin Kelly called the hive mind. The assumption that undergirds this strain of technological thinking is that humans aren’t simply self-interested economic creatures. Linus Torvalds, the engineer who created Linux, argued, “Money is not the greatest of motivators. It’s been well established that folks do their best work when they are driven by a passion.”

…

It was a superhighway to a world of readers that would never dump a quarter into a newspaper box, let alone pay the hefty charge for home delivery. No direct mail campaign, no television advertising, could equal the marketing potential of the Internet. “Value is derived from plentitude [sic],” Wired editor Kevin Kelly counseled, advice that was adopted on the widest scale. This was a conscious change, but newspapers hadn’t entirely understood how they were abandoning an old tenet of their business. Media had long followed a venerable strategy that suggested that profit could be found in the bundling of products—the way Microsoft Office jammed consumers into buying Excel with Word, though they may not have had any need for a spreadsheet.

Cool Tools in the Kitchen
by Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart
Published 1 Dec 2011

Cool Tools in the Kitchen Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart Editor Brian Jepson Copyright © 2011 Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart 2011-10-05 First release O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or corporate@oreilly.com. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

…

A correspondent at Wired Magazine, Steven has also written for the New York Times, Men’s Health, and Men’s Journal, among other publications. CAMILLE CLOUTIER, Managing Editor Camille runs the Cool Tools website, posting items daily, maintaining software, measuring analytics, managing ads, and in general keeping the site alive. As Kevin Kelly’s personal librarian, she also oversees research, web production and ebook conversions for many of his publishing projects. KEVIN KELLY, Publisher Kevin founded Cool Tools and edited all reviews through 2006. He writes the occasional review, oversees the design and editorial direction of the website, and is working on a print book version of Cool Tools. A Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine, Kevin co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999.

…

Not just kitchen stuff, but all kinds of useful things. One day you’ll hear about a solar-powered flashlight. The next, a book on how to build an igloo, or the best heart rate monitor. We pride ourselves on the mix. The Cool Tools website began in 2003. However Cool Tools started even earlier, in 2000, as an email list run by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired Magazine and, prior to that, publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and its quarterly journal. The Whole Earth Catalog was a reader-written publication, with no ads, long before the web. Much of Cool Tools’ DNA stems from the passionate amateur’s spirit of the Catalog.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

Some of the questions were silly, and others were prescient. How Politics Influences Information Technology I was part of a merry band of idealists back then. If you had dropped in on, say, me and John Perry Barlow, who would become a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or Kevin Kelly, who would become the founding editor of Wired magazine, for lunch in the 1980s, these are the sorts of ideas we were bouncing around and arguing about. Ideals are important in the world of technology, but the mechanism by which ideals influence events is different than in other spheres of life.

…

You Need Culture to Even Perceive Information Technology Ever more extreme claims are routinely promoted in the new digital climate. Bits are presented as if they were alive, while humans are transient fragments. Real people must have left all those anonymous comments on blogs and video clips, but who knows where they are now, or if they are dead? The digital hive is growing at the expense of individuality. Kevin Kelly says that we don’t need authors anymore, that all the ideas of the world, all the fragments that used to be assembled into coherent books by identifiable authors, can be combined into one single, global book. Wired editor Chris Anderson proposes that science should no longer seek theories that scientists can understand, because the digital cloud will understand them better anyway.* Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.

…

The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors. An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship. This was as clear as ever when John Updike and Kevin Kelly exchanged words on the question of authorship in 2006. Kevin suggested that it was not just a good thing, but a “moral imperative” that all the world’s books would soon become effectively “one book” once they were scanned, searchable, and remixable in the universal computational cloud. Updike used the metaphor of the edges of the physical paper in a physical book to communicate the importance of enshrining the edges between individual authors.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

[cccxlii] https://edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave [cccxliii] http://uk.pcmag.com/robotics-automation-products/34778/news/will-a-robot-revolution-lead-to-mass-unemployment [cccxliv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [cccxlv] http://www.prisonexp.org/ [cccxlvi] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/08/29/kevin-kelly/ [cccxlvii] https://www.edge.org/conversation/kevin_kelly-the-technium [cccxlviii] http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165acton.html [cccxlix] http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Brito_BitcoinPrimer.pdf [cccl] http://www.dugcampbell.com/byzantine-generals-problem/ [cccli] http://www.economistinsights.com/technology-innovation/analysis/money-no-middleman/tab/1 [ccclii] : The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Northern California, The Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) in England’s Oxford and Cambridge respectively, and the Future of Life Institute (FLI) in Massachussetts.

…

[xcv] These are games which previous AI systems found hard to play because they involve hand-to-eye co-ordination. The system was not given instructions for how to play the games well, or even told the rules and purpose of the games: it was simply rewarded when it played well and not rewarded when it played less well. As the writer Kevin Kelly noted, “they didn't teach it how to play video games, but how to learn to play the games. This is a profound difference.”[xcvi] The system's first attempt at each game was feeble, but by playing continuously for 24 hours or so it worked out – through trial and error – the subtleties in the gameplay and scoring system, and played the games better than the best human player.

…

Some people believe this phenomenon of humans teaming up with computers to form centaurs is a metaphor for how we can avoid most jobs being automated by machine intelligence. The computer will take care of those aspects of the job (or task) which are routine, logical and dull, and the human will be freed up to deploy her intuition and creativity. Engineers didn’t become redundant just because computers replaced slide rules. Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine, puts it more lyrically: machines are for answers; humans are for questions.[cclxvi] The trouble is that the intuition and creativity which we humans bring to tasks and jobs is largely a matter of pattern recognition, and machines are getting better at this at an exponential rate.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Kevin Kelly, 2010 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Kelly, Kevin, 1952- What technology wants / Kevin Kelly. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-101-44446-7 1. Technology’—Social aspects. 2. Technology and civilization. I. Title. T14.5.K45 2010 303.48’3—dc22 2010013915 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

…

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 12, 28. 14 one mega-scale computing platform: Kevin Kelly. (2008) “Infoporn: Tap into the 12-Million-Teraflop Handheld Megacomputer.” Wired, 16 (7). http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/st_infoporn_1607. 14 eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in: Ibid. 14 searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz: comScore. (2007) “61 Billion Searches Conducted Worldwide in August.” http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2007/10/Worldwide_Searches_Reach_61_Billion. Calculation based on comScore’s figure for the number of searches performed in a month. 14 5 percent of the world’s electricity: Kevin Kelly. (2007) “How Much Power Does the Internet Consume?”

…

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Chapter 1 - My Question PART ONE - ORIGINS Chapter 2 - Inventing Ourselves Chapter 3 - History of the Seventh Kingdom Chapter 4 - The Rise of Exotropy PART TWO - IMPERATIVES Chapter 5 - Deep Progress Chapter 6 - Ordained Becoming Chapter 7 - Convergence Chapter 8 - Listen to the Technology Chapter 9 - Choosing the Inevitable PART THREE - CHOICES Chapter 10 - The Unabomber Was Right Chapter 11 - Lessons of Amish Hackers Chapter 12 - Seeking Conviviality PART FOUR - DIRECTIONS Chapter 13 - Technology’s Trajectories Chapter 14 - Playing the Infinite Game Acknowledgements Annotated Reading List Source Notes Index ALSO BY KEVIN KELLY Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World Asia Grace VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

Carol Kaesuk Yoon, “Bacteria Seen to Evolve in Spurts,” New York Times (June 1996), www.nytimes.com/1996/06/25/science/bacteria-seen-to-evolve-in-spurts.html. 2. Arnold Toynbee, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England: Popular Addresses, Notes and Other Fragments (London, 1884). 3. Kevin Kelly, “Kevin Kelly on the Next 5,000 Days of the Web,” video on Ted.com (July 2008), www.ted.com/index.php/talks/kevin_kelly_on_the_next_5_000_days_of_the_web.html. 4. Clifford Stroll, “Why the Web Won’t be Nirvana,” Newsweek (February 1995), www.newsweek.com/id/106554/page/1. 5. Tim Cooper and Sian Evans, “Products to Services,” a report for Friends of the Earth, Centre for Sustainable Consumption, Sheffield Hallam University, www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/products_services.pdf. 6.

…

In other words, we want not the stuff but the needs or experiences it fulfills. As our possessions “dematerialize” into the intangible, our preconceptions of ownership are changing, creating a dotted line between “what’s mine,” “what’s yours,” and “what’s ours.” This shift is fueling a world where usage trumps possessions, and as Kevin Kelly, a passionate conservationist and founder of Wired magazine, puts it, where “access is better than ownership.”1 We have constructed a large part of our freedom around our “right to own” and our self-identity around what we do. But for the Millennials, the first generation that writer John Palfrey describes as “born digital,” this powerful relationship with ownership is fracturing.

…

From Rachel Botsman For me, this is a book about the possibilities and powerful reconnections that can help reshape our future for the better. I am indebted to the brilliant thought leaders whose ideas have inspired me to think in this way. These include Yochai Benkler, Robin Chase, Jeff Howe, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Bill McKibben, Elinor Ostrom, Robert Putnam, Jeremy Rifkin, Clay Shirky, and James Surowiecki. Personal thanks to Gillian Blake for transforming the way I write, and to Ben Loehnen for masterfully shepherding this project. This book would not have been remotely possible without my fantastic coauthor and wonderful friend, Roo Rogers.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

© REX / Shutterstock. Drawings by Ann Lasko Harvill, photographed by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © George MacKerron, used with permission. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1984 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. © MixPix / Alamy Stock Photo. Photograph by Ann Lasko Harvill, used with permission. Photograph by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © NASA. Photograph by Young Harvill, used with permission. © AP Photo / Eric Risberg. © AP Photo / Oinuma. Photograph by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. Top photographs: © Rick English Pictures.

…

Poïesis Fascination Versus Suicide Rue Goo Appendix Two: PHENOTROPIC FEVERS (ABOUT VR SOFTWARE) Mandatory Metamorphosis Grace Picture This Sleight Editor and Mapping Variation Phenotropic Trial Run Scale Motivation Role Reversal Expression The Wisdom of Imperfection Resilience Adapt Swing Rubble Fills Plato’s Cave Many Caves, Many Shadows, but Only Your Eyes Appendix Three: DUELING DEMIGODS Not Artificial, but Imaginary The Banality of Weightlessness The Invisible Hand on a Multitouch Screen The Absurdity of Demanding That AI Fix Itself The Humane Use of Human Systems NOTES INDEX ALSO BY JARON LANIER ABOUT THE AUTHOR ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COPYRIGHT Illustration Acknowledgments All images in this book are courtesy of the author with the exception of the following: Photographs by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © AP Photo / Jeff Reinking. Top: © Mark Richards. Courtesy of the Computer History Museum. Bottom: Courtesy of the Inamori Foundation. Courtesy of Steve Bryson. Photographs by Ann Lasko Harvill, used with permission. Left: Photograph by Ann Lasko Harvill, used with permission. Right: Photograph by Kevin Kelly, used with permission. © Linda Jacobson. Photograph by Walter Greenleaf, used with permission. TK Reproduced with permission.

…

A tech company based on consensus decision making? Would that be a crazy idea? (2017 Jaron intervenes to scream, Yes, that would have been crazy!) But at the time everything seemed possible and everyone was idealistic and young enough to go for nights without sleep to get the latest demo running. Kevin Kelly visited VPL in the late 1980s and took these pictures of Ann’s early concept drawings that were still pinned on the wall. Upper left: Very early concept drawing for the VPL EyePhone. Like every other team making VR headsets since, we underestimated the ultimate thickness that would be needed. Upper right: An EyePhone in use.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

The evolved circuit had taken advantage of weird physical and electromagnetic phenomena, which no engineer would ever have thought of using, to make the circuit complete its task. In another instance, an equation was evolved to solve another problem, and the result was also recognized as impenetrable. Kevin Kelly, in Out of Control, describes it thus: “Not only is it ugly, it’s incomprehensible. Even for a mathematician or computer programmer, this evolved formula is a tar baby in the briar patch.” The evolved code was eventually understood, but its way of solving the problem appeared to be “decidedly inhuman.”

…

These include such things as technological change and how that affects education, more on Big Data, our increasing partnership with our machines, automation and the future of jobs, and the many, many different types of systems that we see around us, including those in manufacturing, food, government, energy, and so much more. Some of the works below address these topics. • • • The Systems Bible by John Gall is a bizarre romp into how to think about large systems and how they work, or don’t. It is fascinating and much of my thinking parallels Gall’s. Out of Control by Kevin Kelly includes some of the same points about biological thinking and how technology is becoming increasingly biological and unable to be understood, though from the perspective of emergence and biological complexity and the use of biological principles to build technologies. I also recommend What Technology Wants by the same author.

…

Quoted in Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), 13. “complicated” and “complex” systems: This is but one of likely very many distinctions between these two terms. Imagine water buoys: Thanks to Aaron Clauset for providing the example of tied-together buoys during a discussion. the infrastructure of our cities: In Kevin Kelly’s view, “Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make.” What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 81. could fill encyclopedias: David McCandless, “Codebases: Millions of Lines of Code,” infographic, v. 0.9, Information Is Beautiful, September 24, 2015, http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

—Jon Turney, The Guardian (London) “This is a short course on how to change your mind intelligently. Stewart Brand is the master guru of following the early warning signals of first adopters and the rough edges of science wherever it might lead. In this book he reveals how this discipline has landed him at the very front of cultural change once again.” —Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants “In the face of climate change, a founding father of the greens argues the movement must embrace whatever works—even if that happens to be nuclear power, mass urbanization, or genetic modification. . . . The environmental left needs to view the world afresh.

…

This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history. . . . Cellphones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in the developing world than in the West.” American travelers are often shocked to find that cellphone connectivity is better in developing countries than in the United States. Technology historian Kevin Kelly draws an interesting conclusion from this:A decade ago many folks who like to worry about the advance of technology were worried about the “digital divide.” This phrase signified the unfair gap between those who had computers and the internet and those who did not. The question was usually framed in these words: “What are you going to do about the digital divide?”

…

A lot of different organisms use similar or nearly identical genes to do the same job.” Where a gene comes from is irrelevant; the point is what it does. Genetic engineering is so much more precise, transparent, and accountable than breeding, it invites the thought experiment proposed by technology historian Kevin Kelly: “Suppose the sequence was reversed. Suppose genetic engineering is what we had been doing all along. Then some group says, ‘No, we’re going to use this new process called breeding . We’ll create all kinds of interesting recombinations, we’ll blast seeds with radiation and chemicals to get lots of mutations, and we’ll grow whatever comes up, pick the ones we like, and hope for the best.’

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

Measure the cost of inaction, realize the unlikelihood and repairability of most missteps, and develop the most important habit of those who excel and enjoy doing so: action. “Productivity is for robots. What humans are going to be really good at is asking questions, being creative, and experiences.” * * * Kevin Kelly Kevin Kelly (TW: @kevin2kelly, kk.org) is “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on earth. In his spare time, he writes best-selling books, co-founded the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and serves on the board of the Long Now Foundation.

…

Dubner (p. 574) Dan Engle (p. 109) James Fadiman (p. 100) Jon Favreau (p. 592) Jamie Foxx (p. 604) Chris Fussell (p. 435) Cal Fussman (p. 495) Adam Gazzaley (p. 135) Malcolm Gladwell (p. 572) Seth Godin (p. 237) Evan Goldberg (p. 531) Marc Goodman (p. 424) Laird Hamilton (p. 92) Sam Harris (p. 454) Wim Hof (p. 41) Reid Hoffman (p. 228) Ryan Holiday (p. 334) Chase Jarvis (p. 280) Daymond John (p. 323) Bryan Johnson (p. 609) Sebastian Junger (p. 420) Noah Kagan (p. 325) Samy Kamkar (p. 427) Kaskade (p. 329) Sam Kass (p. 558) Kevin Kelly (p. 470) Brian Koppelman (p. 613) Tim Kreider (p. 489) Paul Levesque (p. 128) Phil Libin (p. 315) Will MacAskill (p. 446) Brian MacKenzie (p. 92) Justin Mager (p. 72) Nicholas McCarthy (p. 208) Gen. Stan McChrystal (p. 435) Jane McGonigal (p. 132) BJ Miller (p. 400) Matt Mullenweg (p. 202) Casey Neistat (p. 217) Jason Nemer (p. 46) Edward Norton (p. 561) B.J.

…

Novak How to Say “No” When It Matters Most * * * Part 3: Wise BJ Miller Maria Popova Jocko Willink Sebastian Junger Marc Goodman Samy Kamkar Tools of a Hacker General Stanley McChrystal & Chris Fussell Shay Carl Will MacAskill The Dickens Process—What Are Your Beliefs Costing You? Kevin Costner Sam Harris Caroline Paul My Favorite Thought Exercise: Fear-Setting Kevin Kelly Is This What I So Feared? Whitney Cummings Bryan Callen Alain de Botton Lazy: A Manifesto Cal Fussman Joshua Skenes Rick Rubin The Soundtrack of Excellence Jack Dorsey Paulo Coelho Writing Prompts from Cheryl Strayed Ed Cooke Amanda Palmer Eric Weinstein Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg 8 Tactics for Dealing with Haters Margaret Cho Andrew Zimmern Rainn Wilson Naval Ravikant Glenn Beck Tara Brach Sam Kass Edward Norton Richard Betts Mike Birbiglia The Jar of Awesome Malcolm Gladwell Stephen J.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

If it’s not the death of yourself or those you are responsible for, there’s probably some reasonable set of options you should consider calmly and thoughtfully. “I started my first business with $200. . . . I learned far more about business from that $200 than from a debt-inducing MBA.” Kevin Kelly TW: @kevin2kelly kk.org KEVIN KELLY is “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, which he co-founded in 1993. He also co-founded the All Species Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at cataloging and identifying every living species on Earth, and the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages.

…

Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Nov. 6–Dec. 4, 2015) Soman Chainani Dita Von Teese Jesse Williams Dustin Moskovitz Richa Chadha Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Dec. 11, 2015–Jan. 1, 2016) Max Levchin Neil Strauss Veronica Belmont Patton Oswalt Lewis Cantley Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Jan. 8–Jan. 29, 2016) Jerzy Gregorek Aniela Gregorek Amelia Boone Sir Joel Edward McHale, Lord of Winterfell Ben Stiller Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: March 11–March 25, 2016) Anna Holmes Andrew Ross Sorkin Joseph Gordon-Levitt How to Say No: Wendy MacNaughton Vitalik Buterin Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Feb. 12–March 4, 2016) Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks Julia Galef Turia Pitt Annie Duke Jimmy Fallon Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 1–April 15, 2016) Esther Perel Maria Sharapova Adam Robinson Josh Waitzkin Ann Miura-Ko Jason Fried Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: April 22–May 13, 2016) Arianna Huffington Gary Vaynerchuk Tim O’Reilly Tom Peters Bear Grylls Brené Brown Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: May 27–June 16, 2016) Leo Babauta Mike D Esther Dyson Kevin Kelly Ashton Kutcher Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: June 24–July 15, 2016) Brandon Stanton Jérôme Jarre Fedor Holz Eric Ripert Sharon Salzberg Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: July 22–Aug. 12, 2016) Franklin Leonard Peter Guber Greg Norman Daniel Ek Strauss Zelnick Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Aug. 12–Sept. 9, 2016) Steve Jurvetson Tony Hawk Liv Boeree Anníe Mist þórisdóttir Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Sept. 16–Oct. 14, 2016) Mark Bell Ed Coan Ray Dalio Jacqueline Novogratz Brian Koppelman Stewart Brand Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Oct. 21–Nov. 18, 2016) Sarah Elizabeth Lewis Gabor Maté Steve Case Linda Rottenberg Tommy Vietor Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Nov. 25–Dec. 30, 2016) Larry King Muna AbuSulayman Sam Harris Maurice Ashley How to Say No: Danny Meyer John Arnold Quotes I’m Pondering (Tim Ferriss: Jan. 6–Jan. 27, 2017) Mr.

…

A gift to all of my Apple ][ programming buddies from high school and Dungeons & Dragons comrades. So many of the geek references from the early days of personal computing brought back a Rush 2112 of Proustian 16K memories, from the Trash-80 to cassette-loading games. Most influential books on me: Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. Introduction to the power of evolutionary algorithms and information networks inspired by biology. Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. What Moore observed in the belly of the early integrated-circuit (IC) industry was a derivative metric, a refracted signal, from a longer-term trend, a trend that begs various philosophical questions and predicts mind-bending futures.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

. ** A study of the Mozilla Firefox web browser project found that among the 150,000 issue reporters over eleven years, there was “a comparably small group of about 8,000 experienced, frequent reporters” (roughly 5% of reporters) who had higher-quality insights and contributions.175 CODE AS ARTIFACT, CODE AS ORGANISM “One of my hypothesis [sic] is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, do not go extinct. When I really look at supposed extinct species of technology, I find they still survive in some fashion. A close examination of by-gone technologies shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it.” —KEVIN KELLY, “Immortal Technologies”183 To the untrained eye, writing software appears to be all about the new and shiny, free from the earthly troubles of working with atoms rather than imaginary bits. In practice, software ages quietly, in the shadows, and stubbornly refuses to die. There are two observations to make about software here, which will help illuminate the problem.

…

This is especially true in today’s world, where creators can attract millions of fans without being nationally or internationally famous. Whereas everyone once congregated around the same set of memes, now countless online celebrities are knighted every day. In “1,000 True Fans,” a blog post first published back in 2008 and now part of internet canon, the writer Kevin Kelly points to the value of a small, avid audience. In an updated version of this post, he writes, To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.

…

Pricing is typically based on CPM, or cost per thousand impressions, and CPC, or cost per click, both of which require a lot of views to make these numbers meaningful. These days, as consumers are faced with near-infinite options, making money as a creator is about making meaning of the small again: Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans,” finally come to pass. We’re seeing renewed interest in subscription models, sponsorships, and merchandise, all of which operate as a function of parasocial, or one-sided, intimacy. It’s hard to write about the economics of content without discussing advertising further, but because it’s such a big topic on its own, I’m not explicitly covering it in this book.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

The return on the Kickstarter investment can’t be measured by the conventional yardstick of utilitarian economic theory. People contribute for more subtle, but just as powerful, reasons: the psychological reward of knowing that their money is helping cultivate another human’s talents; the social reward of being seen in public doing just that. Drawing on the work of Lewis Hyde, the writer Kevin Kelly calls this kind of activity the Web’s “gift economy.” Kelly described this phenomenon in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published shortly after the dot-com bubble burst in 2000: As the Internet continues to expand in volume and diversity without interruption, only a relatively small percent of its total mass will be money-making.

…

My thinking on these issues has been greatly expanded—if not downright borrowed—from conversations with Beth Noveck, Yochai Benkler, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Larry Lessig, Denise Caruso, John Mackey, John Geraci, Paul Miller, Roo Rogers, Rachel Botsman, Reid Hoffman, Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Jon Schnur, Raj Sisodia, Gordon Wheeler, Nick Grossman, Jay Haynes, Eric Liftin, John Battelle, and my mother, Bev Johnson. Special thanks to the group who were generous enough to comment on the manuscript in draft: Bill Wasik, David Sloan Wilson, Dan Hill, Henry Farrell, and my father and longtime political sparring partner, Stan Johnson.

…

The key books and essays that have shaped my thinking on the power of peer networks and the framework of peer-progressive values include Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks; Beth Noveck’s WikiGovernment; Carne Ross’s The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century; Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs; Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations; Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations; Tim O’Reilly’s “The Architecture of Participation”; Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s “Cognitive Democracy”; and just about everything written by Manuel Castells, starting with The Rise of the Network Society. Many of these themes are explored in my books Emergence and Where Good Ideas Come From. For more on the gift economy, see Kevin Kelly’s essay “The Web Runs on Love, Not Greed,” in the January 4, 2002, edition of The Wall Street Journal. The figure of some $1.5 billion passing through crowdfunding sites in 2011 is from Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/suwcharmananderson/2012/05/11/crowdfunding-raised-1-5bn-in-2011-set-to-double-in-2012/.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

.: MIT Press, 1977), 20–21. 27.Aristotle, The Politics, in Mitchell Cohen and Nicole Fermon, eds., Princeton Readings in Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 110–111. 28.Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013), 323. 29.Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, January 2013. 30.Kevin Drum, “Welcome, Robot Overloads. Please Don’t Fire Us?,” Mother Jones, May/June 2013. 31.Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Verso, 1998), 43. 32.Anonymous, “Slaves to the Smartphone,” Economist, March 10, 2012. 33.Kevin Kelly, “What Technology Wants,” Cool Tools, October 18, 2010, kk.org/cooltools/archives/4749. 34.George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” New Yorker, November 28, 2011. 35.Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4–5. 36.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper, 1991), 80. 37.Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 57.

…

If computers are advancing so rapidly, and if people by comparison seem slow, clumsy, and error prone, why not build immaculately self-contained systems that perform flawlessly without any human oversight or intervention? Why not take the human factor out of the equation altogether? “We need to let robots take over,” declared the technology theorist Kevin Kelly in a 2013 Wired cover story. He pointed to aviation as an example: “A computerized brain known as the autopilot can fly a 787 jet unaided, but irrationally we place human pilots in the cockpit to babysit the autopilot ‘just in case.’ ”1 The news that a person was driving the Google car that crashed in 2011 prompted a writer at a prominent technology blog to exclaim, “More robo-drivers!”

…

It informs society’s recurring dream of emancipation from toil, the one that was voiced by Marx and Wilde and Keynes and that continues to find expression in the works of technophiles and technophobes alike. “Wilde was right,” Evgeny Morozov, the technology critic, wrote in his 2013 book To Save Everything, Click Here: “mechanical slavery is the enabler of human liberation.”28 We’ll all soon have “personal workbots” at our “beck and call,” Kevin Kelly, the technology enthusiast, proclaimed in a Wired essay that same year. “They will do jobs we have been doing, and do them much better than we can.” More than that, they will free us to discover “new tasks that expand who we are. They will let us focus on becoming more human than we were.”29 Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum, also writing in 2013, declared that “a robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us.”

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

In 2001 an IBM machine called Watson beat the best human players at the TV quiz game Jeopardy! In 2013 a DeepMind AI system taught itself to play Atari video games like Breakout and Pong, which involve hand–eye coordination. This was much more significant that it might have seemed. The AI system wasn’t taught how to play video games, but rather how to learn to play the games. Kevin Kelly thinks that AI has now made a decided leap forward, but its significance is still not fully appreciated. He writes: Once a computer manages to perform a task better than humans, the task is widely dismissed as simple. People then say that the next task is really hard – until that task is accomplished by the computer and so on.

…

Admittedly, the Baxter robot works for about $4 an hour. But Baxters are, in fact, not very capable and are not in much demand. They may be cheap to run but they cost $22,000 and upward to buy. Sales of Baxters have not picked up, and in December 2013 Baxter’s manufacturer, a firm called Rethink, laid off a quarter of its staff.39 According to Kevin Kelly, it costs $100,000 or more to buy an industrial robot but you may need to spend four times that amount over a lifespan to program, train, and maintain it, making a total bill over the robot’s “lifetime” of half a million dollars or more.40 So, employing a robot will involve a fixed investment.

…

Accordingly, it is better for us to think about the labor market in an AI- and robot-dominated world in relation to supply and demand and to see changes in these two fundamentals as being expressed in changes in both quantities and prices. In the case of employment, the price in question is wages and salaries. And, of course, what happens here feeds into the income distribution. So who will the winners and losers be? Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, has made a key contribution to discussion of this issue. He has said: “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”18 Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently says that people should seek to be an “indispensable complement” to something that’s getting plentiful and cheap.

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

This leap in computation has allowed us for the first time to fathom some of the universal characteristics of complexity. What the computers show is that complex systems can be built and understood only from the bottom up. Multiplying prime numbers is simple. But disaggregating complexity by trying to decompose the product of large prime numbers is all but impossible. Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, puts it this way: "To multiply several prime numbers into a larger product is easy; any elementary school kid can do it. But the world's supercomputers choke while trying to unravel a product into its simple primes." The Logic of Complex Systems The cybereconomy will inevitably be shaped by this profound mathematical truth.

…

The closer computers bring us to understanding the mathematics of artificial life, the better we understand the mathematics of real life, which are those of biological complexity. These secrets of complexity, harnessed through information technology, are allowing economies to be reconfigured into more complex forms. The Internet and the World Wide Web have already taken on characteristics of an organic system, as Kevin Kelly suggests in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems. and the Economic World.' In his words, nature is "an idea factory. Vital, postindustrial paradigms are hidden in every jungle ant hill. . . . The wholesale transfer of biologic into machines should fill us with awe. When the union of the born and the made is complete, our fabrications will learn, adapt, heal themselves, and evolve.

…

This is why cries of "exploitation" by workers are now heard mainly among janitors. Information technology is making it plain that the problem faced by persons of low skill is not that their productive capacities are being unfairly taken advantage of; but rather the fear that they may lack the ability to make a real economic contribution. As Kevin Kelly suggests in Out Of Control, the "Upstart" car company of the Information Age may be the brainchild of "a dozen people," who will outsource most of their parts, and still produce cars more carefully customized and tailored to their buyer's wishes than 126 anything yet seen from Detroit or Tokyo: "Cars, each one customer-tailored, are ordered by a network of customers and shipped the minute they are done.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

Sufficiently complex systems can't be controlled. We have reached that level of complexity, and we are going to far surpass it in the coming years. Once again, we can turn to our wise old teacher, nature. Nature has perfected out of control systems. Biological systems are great models for what human-designed systems could come to be. Kevin Kelly, the former executive editor of Wired, laid this out beautifully in Ms groundbreaking book Out of Control: How Human Systems Are Emulating the Biological. At the microlevel, individual organisms are extremely complex but not strictly controlled by their brains. For example, many organs of the body do not need the brain to function.

…

Against that gloomy backdrop, a project began at Wired magazine in San Francisco to create a positive scenario of the future. It would need to be able to convince a tough-minded audience that this vision of the world could be realized in the near future. Peter Schwartz, a contributing writer for the magazine, and Peter Leyden, a senior editor, teamed up to work through the ideas and write the story. Kevin Kelly, Wired's executive editor, Louis Rossetto, Wired's founder and publisher, and John Battelle, the executive managing editor, challenged our thinking and contributed their ideas throughout the yearlong gestation of the article, which was published in July 1997. By the winter of 1998, we had started realizing that politics would be increasingly important in sustaining and extending this Long Boom.

…

Richard L Berke, "Voters All Over Take the Wheel from Conservatives," New York Times (January 31, 1999), WK1. DeAnne Julius, "21st Century Economic Dynamics: Anatomy of a Long Boom," OECD Forum for the future, Expo 2000 conference on the policy drivers for the Long Boom. (OECD; Frankfurt, 1998) Kevin Kelly, the executive editor of Wired, expands at length on the networking metaphor in his book The New Rules of the New Economy (New York: Viking, 1998). "Education and the Wealth of Nations," The Economist (March 29, 1997), 15, 21-23. The Third Wave; AMn Toffler, The Third Wave, The Classic Study of Tomorrow (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 306 83 83 84 87 NOTES . like the best schools: This concept is based on a conversation Leyden had with Roberto Unger, a Harvard professor, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in the summer of 1998.

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence
by Richard Yonck
Published 7 Mar 2017

In addition to immediate survival, mirroring and mimicry could have promoted learning, language development, and empathy that improved bonding among families and clan members.30 Again, such behavior would have likely enhanced survivability for both the individual and the clan and thus could have been selected for. Much later, such mirroring might have come to serve yet another purpose: the transmission of culture and technology. (What author, editor, and technologist Kevin Kelly refers to as the technium.)31 In which case, the transmission of the first true technology carried over to the transmission and continuation of subsequent technologies. Most notable of these, in light of its obvious long-term success, was knapping. Much later, over the course of thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of generations, would come other technologies, such as fire and the first proto-languages.

…

This in spite of many people’s newscast-instilled perceptions that death and destruction lurk around every corner. Pinker argues that this improvement has not been due to a change in our biology or cognition, but rather because of “the changes in our cultural and material milieu that have given our peaceable motives the upper hand.” I concur with Pinker on this, with one exception: our culture, as Kevin Kelly has pointed out, is a part of the vast technological web we have woven up to this time, the same technological web we have coevolved with and are currently merging with. Our memetic and cultural legacy has evolved, as we have along with it.6 Our fates are interwoven and can no longer be separated from each other.

…

Whether that is irony, karma, or some great cosmic punchline, I’m not really certain, but in light of all that technology has done for us throughout these many hundreds of millennia, our being able to give it something so special—so human—as emotion and consciousness feels somehow poetic. There will be those who say we shouldn’t pursue this because it’s too dangerous, that the risks are too great, the threats to who we are and what we’ve built up to are now too overwhelming. But really, we probably don’t have a say in the matter. As Kevin Kelly has explained, technology has its own trajectory; it will happen when it is ready to happen. Our choices will be in helping to define the course these new developments will take. Then there are those AI scientists, engineers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and theorists who will say this can’t be done.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

Says David Shaum, the inventor of digital cash and privacy technologies: “Untraceable communication is fundamental to freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and increasingly to online privacy generally, including person-to-person communication. To address these needs a system should support, ideally within a combined anonymity set, the most common use cases: chat, photo/video sharing, feed following, searching, posting, payments, all with various types of potentially pseudonymous authentication.” In 1994, Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control, wrote this: A pretty good society needs more than just anonymity. An online civilization requires online anonymity, online identification, online authentication, online reputations, online trust holders, online signatures, online privacy, and online access. All are essential ingredients of any open society.

…

He believed that the path to a functioning economy—or society—was decentralization, and asserted that a decentralized economy complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society.1 WHAT HAPPENED TO THE DECENTRALIZED INTERNET? Let us remember the intended vision of the Internet. It was very much about openness in decentralization and distribution of services, with minute controls at the centers. At the dawn of the Internet life in 1994, Kevin Kelly wrote in his book, Out of Control, three important comments to remember: The network is the icon of the 21st century. The net icon has no center—it is a bunch of dots connected to other dots. A decentralized, redundant organization can flex without distorting its function, and thus it can adapt.

…

Notes Berners-Lee and the website’s community: We are concerned about the growing number of threats to the very existence of the open Web, such as censorship, surveillance, and concentrations of power. The Web that drives economic progress and knowledge, is the one where anyone can create websites to share culture and information. It’s the Web where new businesses bloom, where government transparency is a reality, and where citizens document injustice. Wow. What Kevin Kelly and Web We Want are saying is pure music to the ears of today’s believers that a more decentralized Internet can shepherd us into a better future. If you are content with the Web today, stop and think for a minute whether you are happy with this situation. Web We Want observes: Millions of spam blogs and websites are visited by bots to cash in on ads.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

A quote from Science Daily gives a sense of how unbelievable this is: On just two stops in the southeast Atlantic Angola Basin, they found almost 700 different copepod species (99 percent of them unfamiliar) in just 5.4 square meters (6.5 square yards), nearly twice the number of species described to date in the entire southern hemisphere. Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution as the “long tail of life.” In the media world, a small fraction of movies accounts for the vast amount of success and box office take—these are the blockbusters. The same thing happens on the Internet: a tiny group of Web sites commands most of the world’s attention.

…

Brooks looked at how robots have improved over the years and found that their movement abilities—how far and how fast a robot can move—have gone through about thirteen doublings in twenty-six years. That means that we have had a doubling about every two years: right on schedule and similar to Moore’s Law. Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, has cataloged a wide collection of technological growth rates that fit an exponential curve. The doubling time of each kind of technology, as shown in the following table, acts as a sort of half-life for it and is indicative of exponential growth: It’s the amount of time before what you have is out-of-date and you’re itching to upgrade.

…

Cosmic Variance, 2010; http://blogs.discover magazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/05/23/physics-and-the-immortality-of-the-soul/. 37 A quote from Science Daily: Census of Marine Life. “Giant Undersea Microbial Mat Among Discoveries Revealed by Marine Life Census.” Science Daily, April 18, 2010. 38 Kevin Kelly refers to this sort of distribution: Kelly, Kevin. “The Long Tail of Life.” The Technium, 2010; http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_long_tail_o.php. CHAPTER 4: MOORE’S LAW OF EVERYTHING 41 The @ symbol has been on keyboards: Rawsthorn, Alice. “Why @ Is Held in Such High Design Esteem.”

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

Eagleman later published a version of the story in his speculative fiction collection, Sum: Tales from the Afterlives. Sum was generally well received, becoming a New York Times bestseller. It also attracted the attention of both Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly. According to Eagleman (whom I interviewed over the phone as part of my dissertation research), Kevin Kelly and his wife used Sum as “dream stokers.” They would read one of the stories before bed and try to dream about the possible afterlife attached to the tale. As a result of his appreciation of Sum, Brand personally invited Eagleman to join the Long Now Foundation in 2011. 5.

…

Similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, the Long Now unites back-to-the-land communalism and libertarian-tinged techno-utopianism. Members intend to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, providing an alternative to the short attention spans of social media feeds. The organization is also composed of elite techies, such as Kevin Kelly, the former editor of Wired, and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder. The Long Now is a unique example of what happens when technologists attempt to build with posterity in mind, as opposed to their more common focus on short-term investments and rapid prototyping. Brand has explicitly stated that the Long Now fosters sustainability but not immortality.45 Its more ambitious projects, however, are about extending smart objects beyond the limited human lifespan.

…

Rose blogged about the pilgrimage he and Brand took to Sandy, stating that the Mormon archives and the Long Now are, “at the very least, new allies in the long term.”80 The Long Now likewise emphasizes ritualized duties toward both ancestors and descendants, combining material and digital aspects of legacy. The imagined long-term future is based on a meditative appreciation of the deep past. To such futurists, imagining the long-term future through smart technologies is a service to future generations. As journalist Kevin Kelly writes on the Long Now’s website for the project: “If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish?”81 In this presentation of transgenerational relations, the Long Now extends the individual technologist’s life span, allowing him to live on in perpetuity through monumental technology that combines the digital with the elemental or monumental.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Paul Saffo, Director, Institute for the Future “To track where technology bends society, I’ve learned to follow Howard Rheingold. He always leads a grand tour, and this time is no different. In this book, he takes you to the edge of the global brain as made real by thumb tribes and mobile networks. You don’t want to leave.” Kevin Kelly, Editor-at-Large, Wired “From techno-animism and hyper-coordination, to smartifacts and social networks, this insightful and engaging guided tour through the next communications renaissance is at turns inspiring, frightening, but always fascinating. Smart Mobs is Rheingold’s greatest achievement.”

…

Text design by Brent Wilcox Set in 10.5-point New Caledonia by the Perseus Books Group EBA 06 07 08 09 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 ALSO BY HOWARD RHEINGOLD The Virtual Community Tools for Thought They Have a Word for It Virtual Reality Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (coauthor) Higher Creativity (coauthor) Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind The Cognitive Connection (coauthor) ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TO THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE: THANK YOU! I COULD NEVER HAVE DONE this without you. Marc A. Smith convinced me that I could weave a book from our many-stranded conversations about cooperation, communication, and computation and then stuck with me to inspire, provoke, support, and educate over the two years it took to do it. Kevin Kelly, who has patiently pushed, persuaded, edited, and criticized my work for more than a decade, suggested that I turn one of the chapter titles into the name of this book. My agents, John Brockman and Katinka Matson, who never settle for less, rejected my first two attempts at a book proposal and then found me an editor who understood what I was trying to do.

…

When it comes to hives and swarms, the emergent capabilities of decentralized self-organization can be surprisingly intelligent. What happens when the individuals in a tightly coordinated group are more highly intelligent creatures rather than simpler organisms like insects or birds? How do humans exhibit emergent behavior? As soon as this question occurred to me, I immediately recalled the story Kevin Kelly told at the beginning of Out of Control, his 1994 book about the emergent behaviors in biology, machinery, and human affairs.58 He described an event at an annual film show for computer graphics professionals. A small paddle was attached to each seat in the auditorium, with reflective material of contrasting colors on each side of the paddle.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

Prediction depends on having the right abstractions—for example, I can predict that “I” will be “on stage in Wheeler Auditorium” on the Berkeley campus on the last Tuesday in April, but I cannot predict my exact location down to the millimeter or which atoms of carbon will have been incorporated into my body by then. Machines are also subject to certain speed limits imposed by the real world on the rate at which new knowledge of the world can be acquired—one of the valid points made by Kevin Kelly in his article on oversimplified predictions about superhuman AI.53 For example, to determine whether a specific drug cures a certain kind of cancer in an experimental animal, a scientist—human or machine—has two choices: inject the animal with the drug and wait several weeks or run a sufficiently accurate simulation.

…

The Google search engine and AlphaGo have almost nothing in common, besides being products of two subsidiaries of the same parent corporation, and so it makes no sense to say that one is more intelligent than the other. This makes notions of “machine IQ” problematic and suggests that it’s misleading to describe the future as a one-dimensional IQ race between humans and machines. Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine and a remarkably perceptive technology commentator, takes this argument one step further. In “The Myth of a Superhuman AI,”4 he writes, “Intelligence is not a single dimension, so ‘smarter than humans’ is a meaningless concept.” In a single stroke, all concerns about superintelligence are wiped away.

…

The following article by a renowned physicist provides a good introduction to the current state of understanding and technology: John Preskill, “Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond,” arXiv:1801.00862 (2018). 36. On the maximum computational ability of a one-kilogram object: Seth Lloyd, “Ultimate physical limits to computation,” Nature 406 (2000): 1047–54. 37. For an example of the suggestion that humans may be the pinnacle of physically achievable intelligence, see Kevin Kelly, “The myth of a superhuman AI,” Wired, April 25, 2017: “We tend to believe that the limit is way beyond us, way ‘above’ us, as we are ‘above’ an ant. . . . What evidence do we have that the limit is not us?” 38. In case you are wondering about a simple trick to solve the halting problem: the obvious method of just running the program to see if it finishes doesn’t work, because that method doesn’t necessarily finish.

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency
by Ian Demartino
Published 2 Feb 2016

Although remittance, distributed funding, micropayments, and accessible investing are often pointed to as the areas where Bitcoin can make the most headway today, the original motivation behind the early iterations of electronic cash was primarily to address these security concerns. In his 1994 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly outlined what he thought was needed for an Internet economy to fully take off. Kelly argued, “A pretty good society needs more than just anonymity. An online civilization requires online anonymity, online identification, online authentication, online reputations, online trust holders, online signatures, online privacy and online access.

…

What the Internet needs, according to Kelly, is both anonymity to provide privacy and identification, verification, reputation, and signatures to provide security. The two desires seem to be fundamentally at odds. How can you have both privacy and identification? The answer lies in cryptography and encryption, as Kevin Kelly and the “cypherpunks” of the time had correctly predicted: [I]t seems to me that encryption technology civilizes the grid-locking avalanche of knowledge and data that networked systems generate. Without this taming spirit, the Net becomes a web that snares its own life. It strangles itself by its own prolific connections.

…

It already is a global currency that is instant and, like the Internet, open for use by nearly everyone. Early Internet pioneers did not talk about the speculative possibilities that the Bitcoin ecosystem is so obsessed with today. That unfortunate aspect of the Bitcoin culture only arose after the wild price swings. Kevin Kelly, the first executive editor of Wired magazine, predicted the development of an electronic money system and the effect it would have on our world in his 1994 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World. Kelly wrote: By its decentralized, distributed nature, encrypted emoney has the same potential for transforming economic structure as personal computers did for overhauling management and communication structure.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

,” NYTimes.com, November 30, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/ll/30/opinion/global/maria-popova-evgeny-morozov-susan-greenfield-are-we-becoming-cyborgs.html?pagewanted=all. 43. Joe Coscarelli, “Gabriel Snyder to The Atlantic Wire: On Growing Up an Aggregator,” VillageVoice.com, January 31, 2011, http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2011/01/gabriel_snyder.php. 4: UNEQUAL UPTAKE 1. Kevin Kelly says the “atom is the past” and George Gilder talks of overthrowing material tyranny. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 25. George Gilder, “Happy Birthday Wired,” Wired, June 2001. 2. Susan P. Crawford, “The New Digital Divide,” New York Times, December 4, 2011, SR1. 3.

…

But when the commons are sold or traded on Wall Street, the vast disparities between us, the peasants, and them, the lords, become more obvious and more objectionable.”13 Computer scientist turned techno-skeptic Jaron Lanier has staked out the most extreme position in relation to those he calls the “lords of the computing clouds,” arguing that the only way to counteract this feudal structure is to institute a system of nanopayments, a market mechanism by which individuals are rewarded for every bit of private information gleaned by the network (an interesting thought experiment, Lanier’s proposed solution may well lead to worse outcomes than the situation we have now, due to the twisted incentives it entails). New-media cheerleaders take a different view.14 Consider the poet laureate of digital capitalism, Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine and longtime technology commentator. It is not feudalism and exploitation that critics see, he argued in a widely circulated essay, but the emergence of a new cooperative ethos, a resurgence of collectivism—though not the kind your grandfather worried about. “The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism,” Kelly raves, pointing to sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Yelp.

…

Dan Hunter and John Quiggin, “Money Ruins Everything,” Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 30 (2008). 15. Clay Shirky says it is not labor if people enjoy it. Jeffrey R. Young, “The Souls of the Machine,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 13, 2010. 16. C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 224. 17. Ibid., 237. 18. Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, December 24, 2012. 19. Shirky fails to mention that many of these hours are inevitably spent filling out forms, looking at porn, watching TV online, etc. 20. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 209.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever
Published 2 Apr 2017

Chemically and logically, they are the same substance. Whereas human legislators can succumb to bias, an A.I. might be far more even-handed in applying the law. A.I. will provide similar benefits—and take over human jobs—in most areas in which data are processed and decisions required. WIRED magazine’s founding editor, Kevin Kelly, likened A.I. to electricity: a cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything. He said that it “will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now ‘cognitize.’ This new utilitarian A.I. will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species.

…

Newer practices of managing sensitive data can put users in charge or, alternatively, collect only the data necessary to perform the task at hand. We need a radical shift in how we think about data collection, centering system design on users’ data management and their privacy rights rather than layering them on as an afterthought. Users will vote with their online presence. Noted futurist and author Kevin Kelly observes in his book The Inevitable that “vanity trumps privacy”—that we are willing to give incredibly revealing details about ourselves in exchange for social validation: “They’ll take transparent personalized sharing. . . . If today’s social media has taught us anything about ourselves as a species, it is that the human impulse to share overwhelms the human impulse for privacy.”6 This has been true, in part, because the costs of losing control of our data are hidden and hard to understand.

…

Daniela Hernandez, “Artificial intelligence is now telling doctors how to treat you,” WIRED 6 February 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/06/ai-healthcare (accessed 21 October 2016). 5. Thomas H. Davenport, “Let’s automate all the lawyers,” Wall Street Journal 25 March 2015, http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/03/25/lets-automate-all-the-lawyers (accessed 21 October 2016). 6. Kevin Kelly, “The three breakthroughs that have finally unleashed AI on the world,” WIRED 27 October 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence (accessed 21 October 2016). 7. Matt McFarland, “Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon,’ ” Washington Post 24 October 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/10/24/elon-musk-with-artificial-intelligence-we-are-summoning-the-demon (accessed 21 October 2016). 8.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

Just as it is much harder to create a 100-percent self-driving car than one that merely drives in normal conditions on a highway, creating a machine-based system for covering all possible medical cases is radically more difficult than building one for the most common situations. As with chess, a partnership between Dr. Watson and a human doctor will be far more creative and robust than either of them working alone. As futurist Kevin Kelly put it “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”7 Sensing Our Advantage So computers are extraordinarily good at pattern recognition within their frames, and terrible outside them. This is good news for human workers because thanks to our multiple senses, our frames are inherently broader than those of digital technologies.

…

In the former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod Brooks, Peter Diamandis, Ephraim Heller, Reid Hoffman, Jeremy Howard, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, John Leonard, Tod Loofbourrow, Hilary Mason, Tim O’Reilly, Sandy Pentland, Brad Templeton, and Vivek Wadhwa. All of them were incredibly generous with their time and tolerant of our questions. We did our best to understand the insights they shared with us, and apologize for whatever mistakes we made in trying to convey them in this book.

…

Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer,” New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/. 4. “Chess Quotes,” http://www.chessquotes.com/player-karpov (accessed September 12, 2013). 5. Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer.” 6. Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes (Barnes and Noble, 1995), p. 654. 7. Kevin Kelly, “Better than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, December 24, 2012. 8. Zara’s approach is described in more detail in a Harvard Business Case Study by Andy and two colleagues: Andrew McAfee, Vincent Dessain, and Anders Sjöman, “Zara: IT for Fast Fashion,” Harvard Business School, 2007 (Case number 604081-PDF-ENG). 9.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

As Eich told a TEDx audience in Vienna in October 2016, “Try to imagine a world in which you own your own dossier; it’s your own online life—you should own your own data. If you own it, then you can give terms of service [to the giant walled gardens on the Web], as well as them giving you their ‘terms of service’ that no one ever reads. . . . This would create a new web.” In a world of abundant information but scarce time, what do people value most? As Kevin Kelly declares, “The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences. . . . Cheap abundant [virtual reality] will be an experience factory.”1 I first met Brendan Eich when he joined me on the advisory board of the Los Angeles-based startup OTOY. My entrance into what Kelly describes as the experience factory also came courtesy of OTOY.

…

Its inventor-founder, Jules Urbach, has been turning computer models for 3D scenes into digital images that can be sent across the Net, shown on any screen, and experienced as real. OTOY’s metaverse is something entirely new. Its virtual worlds will be almost indistinguishable for many purposes from the topology of the real world. As Kevin Kelly breathlessly describes it, “We’ll use it to visit environments too dangerous to risk in the flesh, such as war zones, deep seas, or volcanoes. Or we’ll use it for experiences we can’t easily get to as humans—to visit the inside of a stomach, the surface of a comet. Or to swap genders, or [as Jaron Lanier wants] become a lobster.

…

“The technology was not mature,” Stephen decided. Despite the disappointment, he still did not want to work on “something that wasn’t mine.” In early 2015, Gary Bradski—the robotics pioneer who developed computer vision at Intel, founded the Willow Garage robotics incubator, which convinced Wired’s Kevin Kelly that “robots have wants,” and started Industrial Perception, which made “stevedore robots” that could, as Stephen Balaban described it, “pick up and chuck a box so elegantly” that Google bought them—that Gary Bradski—invited Balaban to join his deep-learning team at Magic Leap. Launched in 2010, the Google-funded virtual reality venture in Florida had heretofore raised half a billion dollars while generating more national magazine covers than virtual reality advances.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.”7 Thoreau’s quest inspires us to ask of our life with technology: Do we live deliberately? Do we turn away from life that is not life? Do we refuse resignation? Some believe that the new connectivity culture provides a digital Walden. A fifteen-year-old girl describes her phone as her refuge. “My cell phone,” she says, “is my only individual zone, just for me.” Technology writer Kevin Kelly, the first editor of Wired, says that he finds refreshment on the Web. He is replenished in its cool shade: “At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of its human creators, the web is a wilderness.

…

We are willing to put aside a program’s lack of understanding and, indeed, to work to make it seem to understand more than it does—all to create the fantasy that there is an alternative to people. This is the deeper “ELIZA effect.” Trust in ELIZA does not speak to what we think ELIZA will understand but to our lack of trust in the people who might understand. Kevin Kelly asks, “What does technology want?” and insists that, whatever it is, technology is going to get it. Accepting his premise, what if one of the things technology wants is to exploit our disappointments and emotional vulnerabilities? When this is what technology wants, it wants to be a symptom. SYMPTOMS AND DREAMS Wary of each other, the idea of a robot companion brings a sense of control, of welcome substitution.

…

And, of course, no matter how much “wilderness” Kelly finds on the Web, we are not in a position to let the virtual take us away from our stewardship of nature, the nature that doesn’t go away with a power outage. We let things get away from us. Even now, we are emotionally dependent on online friends and intrigued by robots that, their designers claim, are almost ready to love us.15 And brave Kevin Kelly says what others are too timid to admit: he is in love with the Web itself. It has become something both erotic and idealized. What are we missing in our lives together that leads us to prefer lives alone together? As I have said, every new technology challenges us, generation after generation, to ask whether it serves our human purposes, something that causes us to reconsider what they are.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

For a brief description of the costly dynamic tension between anarchy and oligarchy in the digital world, see Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Anarchist in the 219 220 NOTES TO PAGES xiii–3 Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 5. For examples of simplistic, naive visions of how technology works in the world, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise Of Neo-biological Civilization (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994); Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking, 1998); Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995); Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (New York: Viking, 1999). 6.

…

How can we vet and judge its utility and truth? How can we connect the most people with the best knowledge? Google, of course, offers answers to those questions. It’s up to us to decide whether Google’s answers are good enough. SH UFFL IN G TH E PAGES In May 2006, the Wired magazine contributor Kevin Kelly published in the New York Times Magazine his predictive account of flux and change in the book-publishing world. That article outlined what he claimed “will” (not “might” or “could”) happen to the book business and the practices of writing and reading under a new regime fostered by Google’s plan to scan millions of books from university and public libraries and offer searchable texts to Internet users.

…

Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001). CH APTER 5. TH E GO O GLI ZAT I O N O F KNOWL E D G E 1. Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006, 42. 3. Ibid. 4. See John Updike, “The End of Authorship,” New York Times Book Review, June 25, 2006. 5. See Neil Netanel, “Google Book Search Settlement,” Balkinization, blog, October 28, 2008, http://balkin.blogspot.com. Also see James Grimmelmann, “Author’s Guild Settlement Insta-Blogging,” The Laboratorium, blog, October 28, 2008, http://laboratorium.net; Lawrence Lessig, “On the Google Book Search agreement,” Lessig Blog, October 29, 2008, http://lessig.org/blog; Paul Courant, “The Google Settlement: From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore,” Au Courant, blog, October 28, 2008, http://paulcourant.net; Open Content Alliance, “Let’s Not Settle for this Settlement,” Open Content Alliance (OCA), blog, November 5, 2008, www.opencontentalliance.org. 248 NOTES TO PAGES 153–58 6.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics, 500(2):L33–L36, 2009. eprint arXiv:0905.1851. [106] Garry Kasparov. The chess master and the computer. New York Review of Books, 57(2), February 11, 2010. [107] Garry Kasparov with Daniel King. Kasparov Against the World. KasparovChess Online, 2000. [108] Kevin Kelly. Speculations on the future of science. Edge: The Third Culture, 2006. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly06/kelly06_index.html. [109] Kevin Kelly. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010. [110] Richard A. Kerr. Recently discovered habitable world may not exist. Science Now, October 12, 2010. http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/recently-discovered-habitable-world.html

…

p 3: The term collective intelligence was introduced by the philosopher Pierre Lévy [124]. A stimulating recent attempt to measure collective intelligence and to relate it to qualities of participants in the group is [243]. p 3 the process of science will . . . change more in the next twenty years than it has in the past 300 years: the author Kevin Kelly has made a similar claim in [108] (see also [109]): “There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years.” There is some broad overlap in my reasoning and Kelly’s, e.g., we both emphasize the importance of collaboration and large-scale data collection. There are also some considerable differences in our reasoning, e.g., Kelly emphasizes changes such as triple-blind experiments, and more prizes in science, while I believe these will play a comparatively minor role in change, and that the following three areas are the most critical: (1) collective intelligence and data-driven science, and the way they change how science is done; (2) the changing relationship between science and society; and (3) the challenge of achieving a much more open scientific culture.

…

A full answer to this question is complex, but in brief, the Complexity Zoo has a much narrower scope than the qwiki, and because of this narrower scope a single dedicated person (Scott Aaronson, now of MIT) was able to build it out to the point where it became an extremely useful and well-known resource in the computer science community. The combination of its already high profile and its narrow scope has helped attract a few people to make occasional contributions to its upkeep. p 176: The term “wiki-science” seems to have been introduced in an essay by Kevin Kelly [108]. Similar ideas were proposed independently (and, in some cases, earlier) by many people. An intntere discussion involving some early contributors to wikis may be found at the Meatball wiki: [137] and [138]. p 178: The job and graduation data for physics are based on the American Institute of Physics’ “Latest Employment Data for Physicists and Related Scientists,” available at http://www.aip.org/statistics/.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
Published 9 Jun 2010

Fanning designed a system that shaped the users’ cumulative behavior away from spitefulness and toward sharing; and like all applications that rely on the cumulative participation of the users, Napster provided the means to share, but only the users could create the actual value for one another. As the visionary Kevin Kelly wrote in an essay called “Triumph of the Default,” engineers can influence the behavior of their users: Therefore the privilege of establishing what value the default is set at is an act of power and influence. Defaults are a tool not only for individuals to tame choices, but for systems designers—those who set the presets—to steer the system.

…

Backflip.com assumed that the personal utility was paramount; it provided an option for users to share their bookmarks, but users had to opt into it, which few did. Delicious, by contrast, didn’t provide this option; it always shared all your bookmarks. (It later added private bookmarks, but only after it achieved success as a “public-only” service.) As Kevin Kelly noted in his piece “Triumph of the Default” (see Chapter 4), the careful use of defaults can shape how users behave, because they communicate some expectation (the expectation has to be one the users are happy to follow). Backflip concentrated on personal value and assumed social value was optional.

…

Ante, “Napster’s Shawn Fanning: The Teen Who Woke Up Web Music,” BusinessWeek, April 12, 2000, Bloomberg, http://www.businessweek.com/ebiz/0004/em0412.htm (accessed January 9, 2010). 120 Napster acquired tens of millions of users in less than two years : Benny Evangelista, “News Analysis: Internet Music Will Still Play on Despite Napster’s Uncertain Future,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 2001, Hearst Communications, http://www.sfgate.com/c/a/2001/02/18/BU39387.DTL (accessed January 9, 2010). 124 “He who receives ideas from me”: Quoted in John Pitman, “Open Access to Professional Information,” IMS Bulletin 36.8 (2007): 13. 125 “Triumph of the Default”: Kevin Kelly, “Triumph of the Default,” The Technium, June 22, 2009, Creative Commons, http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/06/triumph_of_the.php (accessed January 9, 2010). 126 tired of their country’s divisive politics: Sabrina Tavernise, “Young Pakistanis Take One Problem into Their Own Hands,” The New York Times, May 18, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/world/asia/19trash.html (accessed January 9, 2010).

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
by Cal Newport
Published 5 Feb 2019

But then you start talking to scholars and writers who study the Amish seriously, and you begin to hear confusing statements that muddy these waters. John Hostetler, for example, who literally wrote the book on their society, claims the following: “Amish communities are not relics of a bygone era. Rather, they are demonstrations of a different form of modernity.” The technologist Kevin Kelly, who spent a significant amount of time among the Lancaster County Amish, goes even further, writing: “Amish lives are anything but antitechnological. In fact, on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselvers. They are often, surprisingly, pro-technology.”

…

The problem is not electricity; it’s the fact that the grid connects them too strongly to the world outside of their local community, violating the Amish commitment to the biblical tenet to “be in the world, but not of it.” Once you encounter this more nuanced approach to technology, you can no longer dismiss the Amish lifestyle as a quaint curiosity. As John Hostetler explained, their philosophy is not a rejection of modernity, but a “different form” of it. Kevin Kelly goes a step further and claims that it’s a form of modernity that we cannot ignore given our current struggles. “In any discussion about the merits of avoiding the addictive grasp of technology,” he writes, “the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative.” It’s important to understand what exactly makes this alternative honorable, as it’s in these advantages that we’ll uncover a strong argument for the third principle of minimalism, which claims that approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves

…

,” FAQs, Facebook Investor Relations, https://investor.fb.com/resources/default.aspx, accessed July 11, 2018. “Amish communities are not relics”: John A. Hostetler, Amish Society, 4th ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), ix. “Amish lives are anything but antitechnological”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 217. “cruising down the road”: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 219. “smoking, noisy contraption”: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 218. In one memorable passage: Kelly, What Technology Wants, 221. Kelly is actually talking about a strict Mennonite family instead of an Amish family, but the border between strict Mennonites and normal Amish is blurred, so the example is relevant for our purposes.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

ALSO BY KEVIN KELLY Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World Asia Grace What Technology Wants Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities VIKING An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Kevin Kelly Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission.

…

Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. ISBN 9780525428084 (hardcover) ISBN 9780698183650 (ebook) Version_1 CONTENTS Also by Kevin Kelly Title Page Copyright INTRODUCTION 1. BECOMING 2. COGNIFYING 3. FLOWING 4. SCREENING 5. ACCESSING 6. SHARING 7. FILTERING 8. REMIXING 9. INTERACTING 10. TRACKING 11. QUESTIONING 12. BEGINNING ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX INTRODUCTION When I was 13, my father took me to visit a computer trade show in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

…

(Mei’s Answer),” Quora, March 18, 2015. Half of them are there for virtual sex: Frank Rose, “How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life,” Wired, July 24, 2007. urinal in the men’s restroom: Nicholas Negroponte, “Sensor Deprived,” Wired 2(10), October 1, 1994. “not enough Africa in them”: Kevin Kelly, “Gossip Is Philosophy,” Wired 3(5), May 1995. Project Jacquard: Virginial Postre, “Google’s Project Jacquard Gets It Right,” BloombergView, May 31, 2015. prototype from Northeastern University: Brian Heater, “Northeastern University Squid Shirt Torso-On,” Engadget, June 12, 2012. Sensory Substitution Vest: Shirley Li, “The Wearable Device That Could Unlock a New Human Sense,” Atlantic, April 14, 2015.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

At the opposite end of the “seriousness” spectrum from Adams, we find Dartmouth physicist Arthur Kantrowitz and philanthropist-investor George Soros, who have taken up the cause Karl Popper championed a generation ago and are campaigning that an “open society” is healthiest when it lives up to its name. Both men have been vigorous in promoting the notion that free speech and transparency are not only good but absolutely essential for maintaining a free, creative, and vigorous civilization. Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, expressed the same idea with the gritty clarity of informationage journalism: “The answer to the whole privacy question is more knowledge. More knowledge about whoʼs watching you. More knowledge about the information that flows between us—particularly the meta-information about who knows what and where itʼs going.”

…

Would another culture put up with the likes of Stewart Brand, always poking at stagnant structures, from state government to the stuffy profession of architecture? Would Steve Jobs or Andrew Grove be billionaires in an economy based on inherited advantage? Where else might happy magicians like Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly be more influential than establishment priests or scientists? Would important power brokers hang on the words of Esther Dyson, Sherry Turkle, and Dorothy Denning if this culture did not value original minds? Listening to such remarkable individuals, one can tell they know how lucky they are. Few other cultures would reward oddball iconoclasts whose sole common attribute is a hatred of clichés.

…

Yet the management of great enterprises ultimately comes down to the judgment (and guesswork) of directors, generals, and public officials. Things may be worse than most leaders believe. Earlier in this book we referred to modern observers who think we have entered an era of unpredictability. In Out of Control, Kevin Kelly described how chaos theory and new notions of emergent properties mean that complex systems will tend to behave in unpredictable ways as tiny perturbations propagate through time, almost as if they are taking on a life of their own. Elsewhere we discuss how open criticism can ameliorate such problems.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

Just as some Marxists believed that the economic conditions of a society would inevitably propel it through capitalism and toward a world socialist regime, it’s easy to find engineers and technodeterminist pundits who believe that technology is on a set course. Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and rogue early president of Facebook, tells Vanity Fair that he’s drawn to hacking because it’s about “re-architecting society. It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.” Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, wrote perhaps the boldest book articulating the technodeterminist view, What Technology Wants, in which he posits that technology is a “seventh kingdom of life,” a kind of meta-organism with desires and tendencies of its own. Kelly believes that the technium, as he calls it, is more powerful than any of us mere humans.

…

It didn’t get a very good reception—in fact, he was just about booed off the stage. “‘We just want to do cool stuff,’ was the attitude,” Scott told me later. “ ‘Don’t bother me with this politics stuff.’ ” Technodeterminists like to suggest that technology is inherently good. But despite what Kevin Kelly says, technology is no more benevolent than a wrench or a screwdriver. It’s only good when people make it do good things and use it in good ways. Melvin Kranzberg, a professor who studies the history of technology, put it best nearly thirty years ago, and his statement is now known as Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral.”

…

execbios. 178 “come to Google because they choose to”: Greg Jarboe, “A ‘Fireside Chat’ with Google’s Sergey Brin,” Search Engine Watch, Oct. 16, 2003, accessed Dec. 16,2010, http://searchenginewatch.com/3081081. 178 “the future will be personalized”: Gord Hotckiss, “Just Behave: Google’s Marissa Mayer on Personalized Search,” Searchengineland, Feb. 23, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://searchengineland.com/just-behave-googles-marissa-mayer-on-personalized-search-10592. 179 “It’s technology, not business or government”: David Kirpatrick, “With a Little Help from his Friends,” Vanity Fair (Oct. 2010), accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/10/sean-parker-201010. 179 “seventh kingdom of life”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010). 180 “shirt or fleece that I own”: Mark Zuckerberg, remarks to Startup School Conference, XConomy, Oct. 18, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2010, www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/10/18/mark-zuckerberg-goes-to-startup-school-video//. 181 “ ‘the rest of the world is wrong’ ”: David A.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

Back to the present. Modern mythmaking held that new technologies overturn old hierarchies, leading to a virtual social revolution—not in the very old-fashioned world of organized politics, of course, but in 24 After the New Economy the new one of wireless web connections.^^ When I interviewed Wired's Kevin Kelly, I interrupted his effusions to ask him what relevance they had in a world where the statistics showed that the gap between rich and poor—nationally and globally—has never been so wide, a world where half the population has never even made a phone call, Kelly responded by saying that there's never been so good a time to be poor, though he didn't offer any evidence.

…

As bugged computers, barcode-tracked packages and sateUite-tagged vehicles proUferate, redundant procedures and jobs can be eUminated and the extra work shifted to a core of intimidated and intensely supervised employees. If this is what productivity means, can we take a break now? 3 Income There's never been such a great time to he poor! —Kevin Kelly, ex-editor, Wired One of the supposed benefits of the New Economy is a new egalitarian-ism. Driven by dynamic markets, not stodgy old welfare states, it has reportedly given us the toppling of old hierarchies, the erosion of inherited privileges, and the democratization of wealth. In fact, the distribution of income in the U.S. in the early 2000s is about the most unequal it's ever been—and the same can be said of the distribution of world income.

…

Though it's sobering to learn that, according to a Scudder Kemper Investments poll, over 80% of Americans have neither heard nor read of a New Economy (reported in Business 2.0, September 12,2000, p. 36). 2. For a classic statement, see Wired's "Encyclopedia of the New Economy" at <hotwired.lycos.com/special/ene/>. There's also former Wired editor Kevin Kelly's "New Rules of the New Economy," <www.wired.coni/5.09/networkeconomy/>, as well as his exuberant but thinly argued expansion of that article into a book. New Rules for the New Economy (Kelly 1999). Kelly—now deposed as editor of Wired, a magazine long past its prime—combines born-again Christianity, Social Darwinism, and classic American huck-sterish optimism into a single package. 3.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

During the second wave, companies such as Google and Facebook created search engines and the social networks that connected users to one another. In this third wave, Case predicted, we will connect everything, both animate and inanimate, that can be fitted with a sensor. He calls it ‘the Internet of Everything’.2 Around the same time, fellow technoprophet Kevin Kelly, founder of the American magazine Wired, made a similar prediction in his book on the ‘12 technological forces that will shape our future’.3 In the future, he wrote, every surface will have become a screen, personalised e-services will anticipate our every whim, there will be complete surveillance of consumers and citizens, and we will have constructed ‘a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix’ — a superorganism called holos.

…

By pushing, without consideration of ethical questions, individuals to spend more time on the internet; by enhancing bandwidth and image quality; and then, by making billions of internet users interact with connected devices, the digital gurus are ushering in the dawn of the Internet of Everything predicted by Steve Case and Kevin Kelly.83 But they are going further still. ‘Unlike 4G, 5G will change our nature: it is nothing short of the colonisation of man by machine’, warns an academic.84 For humanity is preparing the advent of a largely robotic internet that is already dispensing with human intervention. And at what cost for the planet?

…

Chapter Seven: Expansion of the digital universe 1 Steve Case, The Third Wave: an entrepreneur’s vision of the future, Simon & Schuster, 2017. 2 For a more educational definition of the Internet of Everything and its economic potential, watch the YouTube video ‘The Internet of Everything is the New Economy’ (August 2014) by US firm Cisco. 3 Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future, Viking, 2016. 4 Ibid. 5 RFID stands for radio-frequency identification. With this technology a sensor is able to identify an object using radio-frequency signals, allowing two objects to communicate and share information with one another. 6 Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm: digital prospects, The MIT Press, 2017.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

In the early days of electricity, Park Benjamin, author of The Age of Electricity, observed that ‘not an electrical invention of any importance has been made but that the honour of its origin has been claimed by more than one person’. This phenomenon is so common that it must be telling us something about the inevitability of invention. As Kevin Kelly documents in his book What Technology Wants, we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, four of decimal fractions, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad.

…

Inexorable technological progress Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things. And indeed, it is rare for a Nobel Prize not to leave in its wake a train of bitterly disappointed individuals with very good cause to be bitterly disappointed. Nor is this matter confined to science and technology. Kevin Kelly catalogues many instances of simultaneous release of films with similar plots and of books with similar themes. As he drily remarks, after listing the many uncanny premonitions of Harry Potter themes in obscure books that J.K. Rowling never read: ‘Because a lot of money swirls around Harry Potter we have discovered that, strange as it sounds, stories of boy wizards in magical schools with pet owls who enter their other worlds through railway station platforms are inevitable at this point in Western culture.’

…

In retrospect, 1970 was probably the moment when plastic and aluminium made carrying wheels with the case practical for the first time. In practice, inventions rarely run late. They turn up at just the moment in history when it makes most sense that they do so. The first laptop, in 1982, came when computers had at last got small enough not to crush your knees through the floor. The sea fashions boats Kevin Kelly’s 2010 book is not the only one in recent years that has begun to describe technology in evolutionary terms. In 2009 Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute published a book called The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves, in which he concluded ‘that novel technologies arise by combination of existing technologies and that (therefore) existing technologies beget further technologies . . . we can say that technology creates itself out of itself’.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

When Carr’s initial article came out in The Atlantic, there was some wonderful discussion of it among the elite set of thinkers—including Carr—who converse at Edge.org.14 Danny Hillis, a computing pioneer, agrees that something is making us stupid, but thinks that the “the flood of information” is the culprit. He also points to the role of politics. The writer Kevin Kelly wonders whether Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms” because he started using a typewriter, as Carr says, or if it was because “Nietzsche was ill and dying.” Larry Sanger, co-founder (and then critic) of Wikipedia, agrees that we’re becoming less able to string together thoughts, but thinks we should be blaming ourselves, not our technology.

…

Thus, the links that we all encounter in every encounter with the Web thoroughly transform the shape of knowledge, the role of authorities and credentials, and the reasons and places we allow our inquiries to stop. Permission-Free The first two characteristics of knowledge’s new infrastructure seem well-aligned with what we’ve taken to be “what knowledge wants,” to modify the title of an excellent book by Kevin Kelly.4 Who could complain about there being an overabundance of knowledge that is easily traversable via links? The Net being permission-free, on the other hand, feels like a challenge to traditional knowledge. Knowledge has been like a club that accepts new members—a book, an article, an idea—only after they’ve been examined by a credentialed board of experts.

…

Chapter 9: Building the New Infrastructure of Knowledge 1 Michael Barker, at the Harvard University Library, confirmed this as a ballpark figure in an email dated March 3, 2011. 2 James Crawford, “On the Future of Books,” October 14, 2010, Inside Google Books blog, http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-future-of-books.html. 3 Robert Darnton, “A Library Without Walls,” New York Review of Books, October 10, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/oct/04/library-without-walls/. Disclosure: I am a member of the Digital Public Library of America’s “technical workstream,” and the library lab that I co-direct will have entered the DPLA’s call for project ideas before this book is printed. 4 Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Penguin, 2010). 5 James Aitken Wylie, The History of Protestantism with Five Hundred and Fifty Illustrations by the Best Artist, Vol. 1 (Cassell, 1899), p. 113, http://books.google.com/books?id=kFU-AAAAYAAJ. 6 See Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent post “Shortcuts in the Social Graph,” October 14, 2010, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/10/14/shortcuts-in-the-social-graph/. 7 During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin was accused of pressuring a local librarian to censor some books.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet
by Andrew Blum
Published 28 May 2012

The New York Times fretted: Ken Belson, “Senator’s Slip of the Tongue Keeps on Truckin’ Over the Web,” New York Times, July 17, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/business/media/17stevens.html). “The cyborg future is here”: Clive Thompson, “Your Outboard Brain Knows All,” Wired, October 2007 (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson). The Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly, “The Internet Mapping Project,” June 1, 2009 (http://www.kk.org/ct2/2009/06/the-internet-mapping-project.php). Sure enough, one stepped forward: Lic. Mara Vanina Oses “The Internet Mapping Project,” June 3, 2009 (http://psiytecnologia.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-internet-mapping-project/).

…

I’d feel better about outsourcing my life to machines if I could at least know where they were, who controls them, and who put them there. From climate change to food shortages to trash to poverty, the great global scourges of modern life are always made worse by not knowing. Yet we treat the Internet as if it were a fantasy. The Silicon Valley philosopher Kevin Kelly, faced with this chasm between the physical here and the missing virtual there, became curious if there might be a way to think of them together again. On his blog he solicited hand sketches of the “maps people have in their minds when they enter the Internet.” The goal of this “Internet Mapping Project,” as he described it, was to attempt to create a “folk cartography” that “might be useful for some semiotician or anthropologist.”

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built, Faber & Faber, London: 2010, Kindle loc. 120. 25. To break an addiction, the neuroscientist Marc Lewis has argued, Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, Scribe: London, 2015. 26. The whole earth, according to this dispensation . . Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants, Viking: New York, 2010, pp. 26 and 515. 27. The technium was ‘actually a divine phenomenon . . . Kevin Kelly, ‘How Computer Nerds Describe God’, Christianity Today, 1 November 2002. 28. From Manuel Castells’ celebration of online ‘creative autonomy . . . Manuel Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2009; Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Allen Lane: London, 2008. 29.

…

At its worst, cyber-utopianism has been a neo-liberal sublimation of 1960s communalism, reflecting the journey from the hippy Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog to Wired magazine. The whole earth, according to this dispensation, is a ‘global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us’, as executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, put it.26 This conception, which he calls ‘the technium’, saw Kelly, Brand and their confederates serenaded by venture capital and lauded at Davos. But for Kelly, it had a more mystical significance. The technium was ‘actually a divine phenomenon that is a reflection of God’, he told Christianity Today in doxological tones.27 More circumspect in his book, he ventured that ‘if there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him’.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

STANISLAS DEHAENE Two Cognitive Functions Machines Still Lack MATT RIDLEY Among the Machines, Not Within the Machines STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN Another Kind of Diversity LUCA DE BIASE Narratives and Our Civilization MARGARET LEVI Human Responsibility D. A. WALLACH Amplifiers/Implementers of Human Choices RORY SUTHERLAND Make the Thing Impossible to Hate BRUCE STERLING Actress Machines KEVIN KELLY Call Them Artificial Aliens MARTIN SELIGMAN Do Machines Do? TIMOTHY TAYLOR Denkraumverlust GEORGE DYSON Analog, the Revolution That Dares Not Speak Its Name S. ABBAS RAZA The Values of Artificial Intelligence BRUCE PARKER Artificial Selection and Our Grandchildren NEIL GERSHENFELD Really Good Hacks DANIEL L.

…

So the fear that computers will become evil are unfounded, because it will never occur to them to take such actions against us. As well, both utopian and dystopian visions of AI are based on a projection of the future quite unlike anything history has given us. Instead of utopia or dystopia, think protopia, a term coined by the futurist Kevin Kelly, who described it in an Edge Conversation this way: “I call myself a protopian, not a utopian. I believe in progress in an incremental way where every year it’s better than the year before but not by very much—just a micro amount.”7 Almost all progress in science and technology, including computers and artificial intelligence, is of a protopian nature.

…

Those are tomorrow’s problems even more so. Yesterday’s “machines that think” problem will never appear upon the public stage. The machine that thinks is not a machine. It doesn’t think. It’s not even an actress. It’s a moldy dress-up chest full of old, mouse-eaten clothes. CALL THEM ARTIFICIAL ALIENS KEVIN KELLY Senior maverick, Wired; author, Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities The most important thing about making machines that can think is that they will think differently. Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as if we were the only sentient species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Largely as a result of the commercial and political world into which it was born, the internet has increasingly come under the direction and control of large corporate and political entities that filter and shape our online experience. Additionally, we can’t assume that technology means progress. In What Technology Wants (2010), Kevin Kelly memorably shows that ours is not the first age in which the beneficial promise of technology was massively overhyped. Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, believed that his explosives would be a stronger deterrent to war ‘than a thousand world conventions’. The inventor of the machine gun believed his creation would ‘make war impossible’.

…

James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood (London: Fourth Estate, 2012), 42. 48. Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 30. 49. Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 59–60. 50. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 30. 51. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010), 191–2. 52. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, ‘Notes on Electrification’, February 1921, reprinted (1977) in Collected Works, Vol. 42 (Moscow:Progress Publishers): 280–1, cited in Sally Wyatt, ‘Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism’, in Philosophy of Technology, 458. 53.

…

David Silver et al., ‘Mastering the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge’, Nature 550 (19 October 2017): 354–9. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Notes 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 373 Susskind and Susskind, Future of the Professions, 165. Ibid. Ibid. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape Our Future (New York:Viking, 2016), 31. Emma Hinchliffe, ‘IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Discovers 5 New Genes Linked to ALS’, Mashable UK, 14 December 2016 <http:// mashable.com/2016/12/14/ibm-watson-als-research/?utm_ cid=mash-com-Tw-tech-link%23sd613jsnjlqd#HJziN5r0aGq5> (accessed 28 November 2017).

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
by Diane Coyle
Published 23 Feb 2014

To give another example, conventional statistics would count a musician as more productive if she gave twice as many performances by performing a Mozart concerto at double speed.10 The economist William Baumol identified this productivity challenge in the performing arts long ago, as well as its application to other services such as health care. The same phenomenon applies in the increasingly creative digital economy. The tech guru Kevin Kelly writes: Nobody ever suggested that Picasso should spend fewer hours painting per picture in order to boost his wealth or improve the economy. The value he added to the economy could not be optimized for productivity. Generally any task that can be measured by the metrics of productivity—output per hour—is a task we want automation to do.

…

Andrew Walker, “UK Productivity Puzzle Baffles Economists,” BBC World Service, 17 October 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19981498. 9. Diane Coyle, The Weightless World (Oxford: Capstone, 1996). 10. W. J. Baumol and W. G. Bowen, “On the Performing Arts: The Anatomy of Their Economic Problems,” American Economic Review 55, no. 1/2 (1965): 495–502. 11. Kevin Kelly, “The Post-Productive Economy,” The Technium, 1 January 2013, http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2013/01/the_post-produc.php. 12. Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” New York Times, 9 December 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?_r=0. 13.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

But publishers did not agree to allow all books to become part of search. The gulf between Google and the publishers and authors was vast. Google wanted to push the envelope of copyright, expanding the definition of fair use to allow more extensive quotations from books. It stressed the rights of search users, echoing the views of Web pioneers like Kevin Kelly, the “senior maverick” at Wired magazine, who said that in return for government copyright protection, authors and publishers had a “copyduty” to “allow that work to be searched.” Google was offering to pay the cost of moving and scanning the books; what publisher—or library or university or author—could refuse that offer?

…

Most consumers trust the information in the New York Times, the Think Differentness of Apple, the taste of Coca Cola, the safety of a Volvo, the bargain prices at Wal-Mart or Southwest Airlines. If we think of the Internet as a copying machine that produces free information, as one of the founders of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, wrote on his blog, then “how does one make money selling free copies?” Kelly’s answer: “When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied.” The first of these, he said, was “trust,” which is not duplicable. “Trust must be earned, over time.” That trust is founded, in part, on a feeling that a company both serves noble ends and yields wealth for its shareholders.

…

(2004-2005) 122 a faux documentary by two young journalists: EPIC 2014 available on YouTube. 122 ”evil empire“: author interview with Sheryl Sandberg, October 10, 2007. 122 ”Did not begin until Google went public“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 16, 2008. 122 It took Microsoft fifteen years: time line on Microsoft.com. 123 ”There’s that same ’think big’ attitude“: Steven Lurie, quoted in Gary Rivlin, ”Relax, Bill Gates; It’s Google’s Turn as the Villain,“ New York Times, August 24, 2005. 123 their ”moon shot“: Jeffrey Toobin, ”Google’s Moon Shot,“ The New Yorker, April 18, 2007. 123 ”Google decides not to use that content“: Copies of Google library contracts with the University of Michigan and the University of California, 2006. 124 ”copyduty“: Kevin Kelly ”Scan This Book!“ New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006. 124 ”People don’t buy books“: author interview with Sergey Brin, March 26, 2008. 125”Google went to libraries“: author interview with Richard Sarnoff, January 16, 2008. 125 He mentioned ”the huge risk“: author interview with Paul Aiken, February 14, 2008. 126 ”Fair use is as important a right as copyright infringement“: author interviews with David Drummond, September 11, 2007, and March 25, 2008. 126 ”finding a way to move forward“: author interview with John Hennessy June 9, 2008. 127 ”If they had a copyright lawyer“: author interview with Tim Wu, September 20, 2007. 127 ”Our patents, trademarks, trade secrets“: Google IPO prospectus, 2004. 127 ”I think that’s true“: author interview with Megan Smith, April 17, 2008. 128 ”We’re a technology company“: author interview with David Eun, September 18, 2007. 128 ”It’s probably both“: author interview with Paul Aitken, February 14, 2008. 128 ”The first thing he said was“: author interview with Mel Karmazin, May 13, 2008. 128 That year, Yahoo generated profits of $1.1 billion: Richard Siklos, ”When Terry Met Jerry Yahoo“ New York Times, January 29. 2006. 129 Google acquired fifteen smaller digital companies: financial results for 2005 available on Google.com. 129 The circulation of daily newspapers ... fall more steeply: Newspaper Association of America Web site. 129 falling 20 percent on average: Dick Edmonds, ”A Bad Year for Newspaper Stocks—a Worse Year for the Gray Lady“ Poynter Online, January 12, 2006. 130 U.S. content and software companies lost: Alan Cane, ”Attacking the Pirates,“ Financial Times, February 28, 2007. 130 About one billion songs per month: Ethan Smith, ”Sales of Music, Long in Decline, Plunge Sharply,“ Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2007. 130 ”I don’t believe they have any incentive“: author interview with Sir Howard Stringer, February 8, 2008. 130 three years earlier, in 2002: National Cable and Telecommunications Association. 130 The radio industry was also squeezed: ”Digitalization of the Media Industry: How Close to a Tipping Point?

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity
by Byron Reese
Published 23 Apr 2018

For instance, AI will soon take all the satellite data we have and find ancient cities for archaeologists to dig up, keep track of populations of wild animals, and monitor vegetation growth. Then it will take all the traffic data and use it to help us build smarter roads, time traffic lights more effectively, and reduce accidents. The list is endless. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, summed all this up when he tweeted, “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.” So why can an AI do all those things for us, but at the same time have all the limits we just described? It is because we’re good at teaching AIs to do one thing at a time.

…

Those who answered our foundational question about what they are as “machine,” as well as those who see themselves as monists, may very well regard the AGI as alive, while others may not make that determination, or waver, in good conscience, uncomfortably on the fence. The second question, “What are humans for?” is concisely framed by Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired: We’ll spend the next decade—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, constantly asking ourselves what humans are for. . . . The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.

…

He then goes on to add, “And we’ve certainly seen that recently with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, all saying AI is just taking off and it’s going to take over the world very quickly. And the thing that they share is none of them work in this technological field.” And finally, many in the industry are almost giddy with optimism about AI. Kevin Kelly is one of them. He believes that AI will “enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize. This new utilitarian AI will also augment us individually as people (deepening our memory, speeding our recognition) and collectively as a species.”

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

THE EVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGISTS Many AI enthusiasts who hold to an inevitability thesis (superintelligent machines are coming, no matter what we do) hold to this because it plays on evolutionary themes, and thus conveniently absolves individual scientists from the responsibility of needing to make scientific breakthroughs or develop revolutionary ideas. Artificial intelligence just evolves, like we did. We can call the futurists and AI believers in this camp evolutionary technologists, or ETs. The ET view is popular among new age technologists like Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly, who argues in his 2010 book What Technology Wants that AI won’t come about as the work of a “mad scientist,” but simply as an evolutionary process on the planet, much like natural evolution.6 According to this view, the world is becoming “intelligenized” (Kelly’s word), and more and more complex and intelligent forms of technology are emerging without explicit human design.7 Such thinkers also might envision the World Wide Web as a giant, growing brain.

…

Yochai Benkler, Harvard University professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, proclaimed in his widely read The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom in 2006 that a new era was upon us, a kind of revolution where large numbers of networked people would take on collaborative projects online, all for the public good, without requirements like paychecks.3 Wikipedia seemed to buttress his point, a case of collaborative production without expectation of financial recompense. Wired editor Kevin Kelly (and others) later called Benkler’s paean to online collaboration a hive mind, a nod to the social intelligence of bees, without a whisper of irony or derision. Benkler himself prefaced his academically serious rallying cry to the Web 2.0 world with a quote from John Stuart Mill: “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”4 It’s an excellent quote.

…

Arthur W. Banks (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), fifth lecture, 78. 4. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). 5. Stuart Russell, Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control (New York: Viking, 2019), 37. 6. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010). 7. Strangely, or maybe refreshingly, Kelly has since distanced himself from the AI myth. Writing in Wired in 2017, he argues that “intelligenization” isn’t leading to superintelligence after all. He points out that intelligence is varied and polymorphous, and that seemingly unintelligent animals like squirrels remember the locations of potentially thousands of buried nuts for later consumption, a feat which humans would no doubt fail to replicate.

Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age
by Virginia Eubanks
Published 1 Feb 2011

In the popular press, accounts of the information economy posit that increased instability and volatility can offer more horizontal forms of power, free workers to retool their skills and renegotiate their work arrangements, and sweep away old forms of inequity.12 The combination of new IT and leaner, neoliberal governance, optimists argue, results in rapidly increasing wealth and flatter hierarchies, although these claims have been somewhat muted in recent years.13 The most popular of these narratives, penned by business writers, futurists, and management gurus, often make it to the bestseller lists, suggesting that they tap into widely held hopes 56 Chapter 4 and beliefs about the power of IT and the new economy to dismantle outof-date institutions, decentralize power, and create broad-based equity.14 For example, Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, argues in his 1998 book, New Rules for the New Economy, that the network economy is based on the principles of flux. He writes, “Change, even in its shocking forms, is rapid difference. Flux, on the other hand, is more like the Hindu god Shiva, a creative force of destruction and genesis.

…

High-Tech Development in an Unflat World The vulnerability of American workers, particularly those already marginalized by race, class, and gender, became increasingly clear as the global financial crisis touched more people’s lives and brought the risks of the new economy to the doorsteps of middle-class homes. There is nothing intrinsic to the information economy that delivers the level playing field, flattened hierarchies, and increased opportunity promised by writers like Kevin Kelly or Thomas Friedman. The information economy does not sweep inequality away before it in a cleansing deluge. Rather, it injects more unpredictable, explosive change into an economic field already marked by durable disparity. The information economy is not Noah’s flood, it is Hurricane Katrina. On the Gulf Coast, while the hurricane itself was not entirely predictable, its effects certainly were, if attention was paid to the existing topography of inequality.

…

Quality replaces quantity, knowledge replaces physical capital, and flexible networks replace rigid organization charts” (Henwood 2003, 3–4). 14. Among the most popular are Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1976), Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave (1980), John Naisbett’s Megatrends (1984), Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalist Society (1993), Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead (1996), Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1995) and New Rules for the New Economy (1998), Esther Dyson’s Release 2.0 (1997), Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2005), and Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics (2006). 15. Volatility is increasingly the topic of policy discussions about inequality and development. As Joshua Aizenman and Brian Pinto argue in Managing Economic Volatility and Crises: A Practitioner’s Guide (2005), there is a significant relationship between economic volatility and inequality.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles, The Last Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012). 2. Rocco Castoro, “Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy,” Vice, April 1, 2009, www.vice.com. 3. John Brockman, “The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life: A Talk with Kevin Kelly,” Edge, July 19, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly07/kelly07_index.html. 4. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 187. 5. Ibid., 188. 6. Ibid., 189. 7. Ibid., 356. 8. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986). 9.

…

Consciousness, such as it is, is better performed by some combination of microchips and nanobots than our old carbon sacks, and what we think of as people are discontinued. Kurzweil may push the envelope on this line of thought, but a growing cadre of scientists and commentators have both wittingly and unwittingly gotten on his singularity bandwagon. Their credentials, intelligence, and persuasiveness make their arguments difficult to refute. Kevin Kelly, for instance, convincingly portrays technology as a partner in human evolution. In his book What Technology Wants, he makes the case that technology is emerging as the “seventh kingdom of life on Earth”—along with plants, insects, fungi, and so on. Although he expresses himself with greater humility and admirable self-doubt than Kurzweil, Kelly also holds that technology’s growth and development is inevitable, even desirable.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

“Half or more of computer science is heads” (meaning, roughly, hippies), wrote Stewart Brand in a landmark profile of the Bay Area computer science scene for Rolling Stone magazine.17 Imbued with an ethos of individual freedom and self-expression, many of the early acolytes of the digital revolution—like Brand, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and others—came of age during this period when top-down schemes were seen as tools of suppression and control, administered by “the Man.” Those counterculture idealists all opposed war and believed in the possibility of emerging technologies to usher in a new age of planetary consciousness and spiritual enlightenment.

…

Applying this model, Heylighen believes, will finally transform the chaos of the Web “into an intelligent, adaptive, selforganizing system of shared knowledge.”20 That notion of an emergent, evolving system has found plenty of adherents in the years since the Web first started to command a broad public audience. As Wired executive editor Kevin Kelly put it: “The revolution launched by Netscape’s IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing.” Kelly goes on, however, to evoke the same strain of technological optimism that marked the essays of the early twentieth-century visionaries, predicting that “the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking— part human and part machine—found nowhere else on the planet or in history.”21 Such a notion of networked, machine-aided thought seems barely removed from Wells’s aspirations for a “greater mental superstructure,” Otlet’s “mechanical and collective brain,” or Engelbart’s hopes for “augmenting human intellect.” 287 C ATA L O G I N G T H E WO R L D That notion of an emergent, bottom-up system has also fueled speculation about the possibility of so-called collective intelligence, the notion that new forms of thought may emerge out of the ether of collaborative intellectual work taking place on the Web.

…

And while he might well have been flummoxed by the anything-goes ethos of present-day social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, he also imagined a system that allowed groups of individuals to take part in collaborative experiences like lectures, opera performances, or scholarly meetings, where they might “applaud” or “give ovations.” It seems a short conceptual hop from here to Facebook’s ubiquitous “Like” button.26 The notion of a “world brain” once evoked by H. G. Wells and Otlet has found plenty of adherents in the modern era. Contemporary 292 E ntering the S trea m p­ undits like Ray Kurzweil, Howard Bloom, Kevin Kelly, and others have all advocated the possibility of a global planetary awakening, as the Web takes us to the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. In the end, what distinguishes Otlet’s vision from these cyber-utopians is his belief in the positive role of institutions. More than simply individuals were enlightened; institutions too could be enlightened.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt
Published 27 Oct 2011

He has already dropped one version to $139—cheaper, as his TV ads say, than a good pair of designer sunglasses. In October 2009, blogger John Walkenbach graphed the declining price of the Kindle, and noticed it was on a straight-line trajectory that pointed to zero in the second half of 2011. Author and blogger Kevin Kelly asked Bezos about that trend line in August 2010. Bezos smiled and said, “Oh, you noticed that.” And then smiled again. Then Michael Arrington at TechCrunch came up with a business model that would make it possible. In January 2010, Amazon made a great offer to select customers: Buy a Kindle, but if you don’t like it, get a full refund—and keep the device.

…

(as he wrote in: John Sargent, “A Message from Macmillan CEO John Sargent,” Macmillanspeaks.com, February 3, 2010, http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/a-message-from-macmillan-ceo-john-sargent/. 146. John Walkenbach graphed: John Walkenbach, “Another Kindle 2 Price Reduction,” J-Walk Blog, October 7, 2009. http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/another_kindle_2_price_reduction/. 146. Bezos smiled and said: Kevin Kelly, “Free Kindle This November,” kk.org, February 2011, www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/02/free_kindle_thi.php. 146. He quotes “a reliable: Michael Arrington, “Amazon Wants to Give a Free Kindle to All Amazon Prime Subscribers,” TechCrunch, February 12, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/12/amazon-wants-to-give-a-free-kindle-to-all-amazon-prime-subscribers/.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

The cycles of life are understood not as opportunities to learn or let go, but as inconveniences to ignore or overcome Steven Salzberg, “Did a Biotech CEO Reverse Her Own Aging Process? Probably Not,” Forbes, August 1, 2016. 44. Or they sell the printers at a loss and then overcharge us for the ink cartridges Chris Hoffman, “Why Is Printer Ink So Expensive?” How-To Geek, September 22, 2016. 45. Technology is not driving itself Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (London: Penguin, 2011). They worked for themselves, fewer days per week, with greater profits, and in better health Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1993). They came up with two main innovations Douglas Rushkoff, Life, Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (New York: Random House, 2011). 46.

…

the New York Stock Exchange was actually purchased by its derivatives exchange in 2013 Nina Mehta and Nandini Sukumar, “Intercontinental Exchange to Acquire NYSE for $8.2 Billion,” Bloomberg, December 20, 2012. 47. digital technology came to the rescue, providing virtual territory for capital’s expansion Joel Hyatt, Peter Leyden, and Peter Schwartz, The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Kevin Kelly, New Rules for a New Economy (London: Penguin, 1999). corporate returns on assets have been steadily declining for over seventy-five years John Hagel et al., foreword, The Shift Index 2013: The 2013 Shift Index Series (New York: Deloitte, 2013). 48. One or two superstars get all the plays, and everyone else sells almost nothing M.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes). David Deutsch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Kevin Kelly, John Mueller, Roslyn Pinker, Max Roser, and Bruce Schneier read a draft of the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice. I also profited from comments by experts who read chapters or excerpts, including Scott Aronson, Leda Cosmides, Jeremy England, Paul Ewald, Joshua Goldstein, A. C. Grayling, Joshua Greene, Cesar Hidalgo, Jodie Jackson, Lawrence Krauss, Branko Milanović, Robert Muggah, Jason Nemirow, Matthew Nock, Ted Nordhaus, Anthony Pagden, Robert Pinker, Susan Pinker, Stephen Radelet, Peter Scoblic, Martin Seligman, Michael Shellenberger, and Christian Welzel.

…

Soon, cheap, solar-powered LED lamps will transform the lives of the more than one billion people without access to electricity, allowing them to read the news or do their homework without huddling around an oil drum filled with burning garbage. The declining proportion of our lives we have to forfeit for light, appliances, and food may be part of a general law. The technology expert Kevin Kelly has proposed that “over time, if a technology persists long enough, its costs begin to approach (but never reach) zero.”19 As the necessities of life get cheaper, we waste fewer of our waking hours obtaining them, and have more time and money left over for everything else—and the “everything else” gets cheaper, too, so we can experience more of them.

…

Let’s start with the historical sweep: whether mass destruction by an individual is the natural outcome of the process set in motion by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. According to this narrative, technology allows people to accomplish more and more with less and less, so given enough time, it will allow one individual to do anything—and given human nature, that means destroy everything. But Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants, argues that this is in fact not the way technology progresses.40 Kelly was the co-organizer (with Stewart Brand) of the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, and since that time he has repeatedly been told that any day now technology will outrun humans’ ability to domesticate it.

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models
by Barry Libert and Megan Beck
Published 6 Jun 2016

First eBook Edition: June 2016 ISBN: 978-1-63369-205-3 eISBN: 978-1-63369-206-0 Dedications To my wife, who taught me the power of love To my two sons, who taught me the value of life To my friends, who taught me the importance of kindness —Barry Libert To my mother, my lifelong reference point for both greatness and practicality —Megan Beck To my invaluable networks: To my reverse mentors—children, granddaughter, students, and staff To my friends, colleagues, clients, and research collaborators To my beloved late wife, Dina, whose love and inspiration have accompanied me throughout my life —Jerry Wind Special Thanks Susan Corso for her insight and editing George Calapai for his inspired digital platform CONTENTS Part One THE PROMISE The Value Is in the Network • Digital Networks Are Eating the World • Networks Have Big Advantages Part Two THE PRINCIPLES Ten Strategies for Creating Network Value Introduction to the Ten Principles • Principle 1, Technology: From Physical to Digital • Principle 2, Assets: From Tangible to Intangible • Principle 3, Strategy: From Operator to Allocator • Principle 4, Leadership: From Commander to Co-creator • Principle 5, Customers: From Customers to Contributors • Principle 6, Revenues: From Transaction to Subscription • Principle 7, Employees: From Employees to Partners • Principle 8, Measurement: From Accounting to Big Data • Principle 9, Boards: From Governance to Representation • Principle 10, Mindset: From Closed to Open Aspire to These Ten Principles Part Three THE PIVOT Five Steps for Implementing Network Business Models Introduction to PIVOT • Pinpoint: Identify Your Current Business Model • Inventory: Take Stock of All Your Assets • Visualize: Create Your New Network Business Model • Operate: Enact Your Network Business Model • Track: Measure What Matters for a Network Business Reflecting on PIVOT Part Four THE PRACTICE Becoming a Network Leader • Leaders Need to Think and Act Differently • You Are the Leader of Your Own Network Notes Index Acknowledgments About the Authors A CALL TO ACTION The Digital Revolution gets all the headlines these days. But turning slowly beneath the fast-forward turbulence . . . is a much more profound revolution—the Network Economy. —Kevin Kelly, founder, Wired magazine HISTORY HAS CROSSED A CRITICAL INFLECTION POINT. THE formal frameworks used to design and structure firms, lead, govern, and value them are becoming obsolete. The driving force behind this accelerating change is a shift from tangible to intangible, physical to digital, and firm-based to network-based business models.

…

Doing the hard work and realizing the value of digital networks in your organization—well, that’s your job. Join the network movement to access our digital tools, audit your business model, and create a plan for growth at openmatters.com. NETWORKS HAVE BIG ADVANTAGES In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing: it obeys the law of increasing returns. —Kevin Kelly, founder, Wired magazine CONNECTING THINGS CREATES GREAT POWER. A link, a channel, a highway—all act as permanent conduits over which many things can flow. Networks, pathways between many nodes, have always been important to the economy. Consider the US interstate highway system, which was authorized by President Eisenhower in 1956.

Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories
by Hugh Howey
Published 2 Oct 2017

It was on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and the five individual parts were clogging up the top of Amazon’s science fiction Best Sellers lists. It was a bizarre feeling, a mix of exhilaration and embarrassment. I was sure I didn’t deserve any of this. The feeling was crippling at times. Around the same time, I read Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants. Kevin helps dispel the illusion of singular creators, discoverers, and inventors. What is true of the sciences I believe is also true of art. Success in art lies as much in the changing tastes of the crowd as in the offerings. There is a varied froth of material being generated at all times, much of it along narrow themes, and when the need from the audience becomes great enough, one stream of that art is rewarded.

…

A thunderclap, followed by another, long strides taking him past us, a flutter of wind in my hair, the four of us frozen as Max bolts from the trailer and out of sight, doing the opposite of what he was built for, choosing an action arrived at on his own. Afterword One of my favorite questions to ask my futurist friends is “When do you think AI will come online?” I asked Rod Brooks once, and he laughed and said it was too far away to even contemplate. I asked Sam Harris, and he thought it would be very soon. But it was my friend Kevin Kelly who gave me the most shocking answer. “It’s already here,” he said. This felt like an answer designed to shock rather than illuminate, but hearing Kevin’s rationalization, I came away in agreement. Machines are already doing what we very recently said would be impossible (driving cars; winning at chess, go, and Jeopardy!

…

They can share their information with each other and with all future machines. The AI only needs to learn to walk once. It only needs to master chess once. And it has them mastered forever. When the strangeness happens, I think it’ll be a glitch. We might not even understand what caused it or be able to reproduce it at first. Kevin Kelly thinks we won’t even know it happened for the longest time. “What’s the first thing AI will do when it becomes self-aware?” he asked me. “What?” I wanted to know. “Hide,” Kevin said. “The first thing it’ll do is hide.” Silo Stories In the Air Gears whir; an escapement lets loose; wound springs explode a fraction of an inch, and a second hand lurches forward and slams to a stop.

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane
by Brett King
Published 5 May 2016

“Gartner predicts one in three jobs will be converted to software, robots and smart machines by 2025,” said Gartner research director Peter Sondergaard. “New digital businesses require less labor; machines will make sense of data faster than humans can.”10 How we interact with robots will determine how successful we will be in the new economy and society that is coming. Kevin Kelly, former editor of Wired magazine, said, “This is not a race against the machines. If we race against them, we lose. This is a race with the machines. You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.”11 Robots will change everything from how we work, play, socialise and care for ourselves.

…

Regardless, we do need a legal framework for the operation of self-driving cars, robotic healthcare workers, drones and other such robots that allow their safe operation. I think the rights of robots are wrapped up in those same considerations. Are we prepared to enter the era of machines and robots? Some people have been ready for decades. Others may never be ready, as long as they live. Kevin Kelly offers a helpful perspective, as quoted earlier: “You’ll be paid in the future based on how well you work with robots.” If you want a yes or no answer for society as a whole, and one big reason, the answer is no and the reason is because robots will be able to replace 50 to 70 per cent of the jobs we do today, and that is something the vast majority of workers and dependents are not ready for, and which no government on earth, not even Japan’s, is properly preparing its people for.

…

After 40 years, it is still considered one of the defining essays on robotics in society. 4 International Federation of Robotics, http://www.ifr.org/industrial-robots/statistics/. 5 IEEE.org, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/041410-world-robot-population. 6 iRobot financial reports 7 Michael Addady, “The number of drones expected to sell during the holidays is scaring the government,” Fortune, 29 September 2015. 8 Author’s own estimate based on PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), IHC research and annual vehicle sales projections 9 As do autonomous vehicles, the Hubble Space Telescope and my iRobot vacuum cleaner 10 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/smart-robots-will-take-third-jobs-2025-gartner-says/ 11 Kevin Kelly, “Better than human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take our Jobs,” Wired, 24 December 2014, http://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/. 12 “Amazon Acquires Kiva Systems in Second-Biggest Takeover,” Bloomberg Business, 19 March 2012. 13 Called Hangar One, the hangar is located at Moffett Federal Airfield.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

The Net’s Impact on Our Minds and Future Edited by John Brockman To KHM Contents Cover Title Page Preface: The Edge Question Introduction: The Dawn of Entanglement: W. Daniel Hillis The Bookless Library: Nicholas Carr The Invisible College: Clay Shirky Net Gain: Richard Dawkins Let Us Calculate: Frank Wilczek The Waking Dream: Kevin Kelly To Dream the Waking Dream in New Ways: Richard Saul Wurman Tweet Me Nice: Ian Gold and Joel Gold The Dazed State: Richard Foreman What’s Missing Here?: Matthew Ritchie Power Corrupts: Daniel C. Dennett The Rediscovery of Fire: Chris Anderson The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise: June Cohen The Internet and the Loss of Tranquility: Noga Arikha The Greatest Detractor to Serious Thinking Since Television: Leo Chalupa The Large Information Collider, BDTs, and Gravity Holidays on Tuesdays: Paul Kedrosky The Web Helps Us See What Isn’t There: Eric Drexler Knowledge Without, Focus Within, People Everywhere: David Dalrymple A Level Playing Field: Martin Rees Move Aside, Sex: Seth Lloyd Rivaling Gutenberg: John Tooby The Shoulders of Giants: William Calvin Brain Candy and Bad Mathematics: Mark Pagel Publications Can Perish: Robert Shapiro Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?

…

Some well-designed prizes for milestone achievements in the simulation of matter could have a substantial effect by focusing attention and a bit of glamour toward this tough but potentially glorious endeavor. How about, for example, a prize for calculating virtual water that boils at the same temperature as real water? The Waking Dream Kevin Kelly Editor-at-large, Wired; author, What Technology Wants We already know that our use of technology changes how our brains work. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that change the way in which the brain processes information. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology such as MRI to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences—and not just when the subjects are reading.

…

All we do is keep close track of what the others are thinking and doing. Often we collaborate directly, but most of the time we don’t. Everyone in my guild has his or her own guild, each of which is largely different from mine. I’m probably not considered a member of some of them. My guild nowadays consists of Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, Peter Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, John Brockman, Alexander Rose, and Ryan Phelan. Occasionally we intersect institutionally via the Long Now Foundation, Global Business Network, or Edge.org. One’s guild is a conversation extending over years and decades. I hearken to my gang because we have overlapping interests, and my gang keeps surprising me.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Jon Kleinberg E Pluribus Unum The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity. Stefano Boeri A Proxemics of Urban Sexuality Even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension. Kevin Kelly Failure Liberates Success Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated. Nicholas A. Christakis Holism Holism takes a while to acquire and appreciate. It is a grown-up disposition. Robert R. Provine TANSTAAFL “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” [is] a universal truth having broad and deep explanatory power in science and daily life.

…

Even the most insurmountable ethnic or religious barriers can suddenly disappear in the furor of intercourse; even the warmest and most cohesive community can rapidly dissolve in the absence of erotic tension. To understand how our cosmopolitan and multigendered cities work, we need a proxemics of urban sexuality. Failure Liberates Success Kevin Kelly Editor-at-large, Wired magazine; author, What Technology Wants We can learn nearly as much from an experiment that doesn’t work as from one that does. Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be cultivated. That’s a lesson from science that benefits not only laboratory research but design, sport, engineering, art, entrepreneurship, and even daily life itself.

…

I want to find the hidden meanings, the unexpected correlations that reveal trends and risk factors of which I had been unaware. In an era of oversharing, we need to think more about data-driven self-discovery. A small but fast-growing self-tracking movement is already showing the potential of such thinking, inspired by Kevin Kelly’s quantified self and Gary Wolf’s data-driven life. With its mobile sensors and apps and visualizations, this movement is tracking and measuring exercise, sleep, alertness, productivity, pharmaceutical responses, DNA, heartbeat, diet, financial expenditure—and then sharing and displaying its findings for greater collective understanding.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Wii Fit and its successor Wii Fit Plus would go on to sell a combined forty-three million copies, but it was the quantified self movement that would ultimately have the greatest lasting influence on health and wellness gamification.62 While the principles behind the movement are old, the term “quantified self” was originated by Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in October 2007.63 As Kelly put it, “Unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved. So we are on a quest to collect as many personal tools that will assist us in quantifiable measurement of ourselves.” The movement spread quickly thanks to a 2010 talk at TED@Cannes (naturally), followed by the first-ever Quantified Self conference in 2011.64 In keeping with his interest in the spiritual as well as the technological, Kelly’s initial goal was “self-knowledge of one’s body, mind and spirit,” but the quantified self movement soon became fixated on things that were measurable with interesting new gadgets like the Nike+ FuelBand or hacked hardware like the Wii Balance Board.65 Some early enthusiasts were enthralled by just how much they could measure if they put their mind to it.

…

Joel Spolsky, “State of the Stack 2010 (A Message from Your CEO),” The Overflow, Stack Overflow, January 24, 2011, https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/01/24/state-of-the-stack-2010-a-message-from-your-ceo; Erica Swallow, “How Nike Outruns the Social Media Competition,” Mashable, September 22, 2011, https://mashable.com/2011/09/22/nike-social-media/?europe=true. 11. Kevin Kelly, “Healthvault, Phase 1,” Quantified Self, October 8, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20130117170255/https://quantifiedself.com/2007/page/3. 12. Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Game Developer, May 3, 2011, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?

…

“Yearly Archives: 2007, page 3,” Quantified Self, accessed November 26, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20170629220503/http://quantifiedself.com/2007/page/3. 64. April Dembosky, “Invasion of the Body Hackers,” Financial Times, June 10, 2011, www.ft.com/content/3ccb11a0-923b-11e0-9e00-00144feab49a?. 65. Kevin Kelly, “What Is the Quantified Self?” Quantified Self, October 5, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20111101100244/http://quantifiedself.com/2007/10/what-is-the-quantifiable-self; Gary Wolf, “Eric Boyd: Learning from My Nike FuelBand Data,” Quantified Self, April 5, 2013, https://quantifiedself.com/blog/eric-boyd-learning-from-my-nike-fuelband-data; Gary Wolf, “Matt Cutts Hacks His WiiFit for Biometrics,” Quantified Self, February 4, 2009, https://quantifiedself.com/blog/matt-cutts-hacks-his-wiifit-fo. 66.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

“Value” and “productivity” cannot be expressed in objective figures, even if we pretend the opposite: “We have a high graduation rate, therefore we offer a good education” – “Our doctors are focused and efficient, therefore we provide good care” – “We have a high publication rate, therefore we are an excellent university” – “We have a high audience share, therefore we are producing good television” – “The economy is growing, therefore our country is doing fine…” The targets of our performance-driven society are no less absurd than the five-year plans of the former U.S.S.R. To found our political system on production figures is to turn the good life into a spreadsheet. As the writer Kevin Kelly says, “Productivity is for robots. Humans excel at wasting time, experimenting, playing, creating, and exploring.”29 Governing by numbers is the last resort of a country that no longer knows what it wants, a country with no vision of utopia. A Dashboard for Progress “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” a British prime minister purportedly scoffed.

…

For example in education, with standardized testing using multiple-choice questions, online lectures, and larger classes. But these efficiency gains come at the cost of quality. 28. Susan Steed and Helen Kersley, “A Bit Rich: Calculating the Real Value to Society of Different Professions,” New Economics Foundation (December 14, 2009). http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/a-bit-rich 29. Kevin Kelly, “The Post Productive Economy,” The Technium (January 1, 2013). http://kk.org/thetechnium/2013/01/the-post-produc 30. Simon Kuznets, “National Income, 1929-1932,” National Bureau of Economic Research (June 7, 1934). http://www.nber.org/chapters/c2258.pdf 31. Coyle, p. 14. 32. Simon Kuznets, “How to Judge Quality,” The New Republic (October 20, 1962). 9 Beyond the Gates of the Land of Plenty 1.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 28 Sep 2014

Because new modes of measuring force us to think about the world in a new light. Just as the microseconds of quartz and cesium opened up new ideas that transformed everyday life in countless ways, the slow time of the Long Now clock helps us think in new ways about the future. As Long Now board member Kevin Kelly puts it: If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish?

…

I’m grateful to the many talented people we interviewed for this project, some of whom were kind enough to read portions of the manuscript in draft: Terri Adams, Katherine Ashenburg, Rosa Barovier, Stewart Brand, Jason Brown, Dr. Ray Briggs, Stan Bunger, Kevin Connor, Gene Chruszcs, John DeGenova, Jason Deichler, Jacques Desbois, Dr. Mike Dunne, Caterina Fake, Kevin Fitzpatrick, Gai Gherardi, David Giovannoni, Peggi Godwin, Thomas Goetz, Alvin Hall, Grant Hill, Sharon Hudgens, Kevin Kelly, Craig Koslofsky, Alan MacFarlane, David Marshall, Demetrios Matsakis, Alexis McCrossen, Holley Muraco, Lyndon Murray, Bernard Nagengast, Max Nova, Mark Osterman, Blair Perkins, Lawrence Pettinelli, Dr. Rachel Rampy, Iegor Reznikoff, Eamon Ryan, Jennifer Ryan, Michael D. Ryan, Steven Ruzin, Davide Salvatore, Tom Scheffer, Eric B.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

King had no way of envisioning the addictive nature of the Internet, a place where we would be willing to share our most intimate secrets with a faceless corporation whose business model is to get into our heads and harvest our attention. And as any parent of a teenager who sleeps with a smartphone will agree, one hardly needs to be awake to interface with Google or Facebook. We continue to surrender more of our private lives believing in the myth of convenience bequeathed to us by benign corporations. As Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, remarked, “Everything will be tracked, monitored, sensored, and imaged, and people will go along with it because ‘vanity trumps privacy,’ as already proved on Facebook. Wherever attention flows, money will follow.” But Kelly, one of the original techno-determinists, may be wrong.

…

But in 1989 something weird happened. The notion of the “hacker ethic” became a contested trope. It started with an online forum on the WELL organized by Harper’s Magazine. The subject was hacking, and Paul Tough, a Harper’s editor, had recruited Brand and a few of his most important WELL members, including Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, and John Perry Barlow, to participate. Barlow, a shaggy, bearded man with a fondness for colorful cowboy shirts, is a true American character. He is a failed Wyoming rancher, a former Catholic mystic, and a former Grateful Dead lyricist. He was also an early proponent of cyberspace as the new American frontier—as lawless as Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone.

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It
by Tien Tzuo and Gabe Weisert
Published 4 Jun 2018

THE FUTURE OF MANUFACTURING When you take the raw data generated by all these millions of digital twins and interpret that data with analytic software, then you can sell that new intelligence as a service that can become as valuable as having electricity, Wi-Fi, or running water in your house. Another word for these kinds of analytic services, of course, is artificial intelligence. Kevin Kelly, in his great book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, describes a future when AI will function much like electricity does today, distributed and ubiquitous: “This common utility will serve you as much IQ as you want but no more than you need. Like all utilities, AI will be supremely boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization.

…

chief digital transformation officer and president Matt Anderson Gabe Weisert, “Arrow Electronics: The Biggest IoT Innovator You’ve Never Heard Of,” Zuora Subscribed Magazine, www.zuora.com/guides/arrow-electronics-the-biggest-iot-innovator-youve-never-heard-of. What’s the value I can create Guillaumes Vives, “How Do You Price a Connected Device?” Zuora, November 19, 2015, www.zuora.com/2015/11/19/how-do-you-price-a-connected-device. Everything that we formerly electrified Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (New York: Viking, 2016). This ‘as-a-service’ approach can give the supplier McKinsey & Company, “Unlocking the Potential of the Internet of Things,” www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/the-internet-of-things-the-value-of-digitizing-the-physical-world.

Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered
by Austin Kleon
Published 6 Mar 2014

—Russell Brand “Make no mistake: This is not your diary. You are not letting it all hang out. You are picking and choosing every single word.” —Dani Shapiro Always remember that anything you post to the Internet has now become public. “The Internet is a copy machine,” writes author Kevin Kelly. “Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with the Internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave.” Ideally, you want the work you post online to be copied and spread to every corner of the Internet, so don’t post things online that you’re not ready for everyone in the world to see.

The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur
Published 6 Aug 2009

We use this collective meaning when we blame “technology” for speeding up our lives, or talk of “technology” as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity as in “technology is what Silicon Valley is all about.” I will allow this too as a variant of technology’s collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the “technium,” and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use “technology” for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently.

…

I am grateful to both, and to Emily’s team. A number of people read the manuscript and gave me useful feedback. Particularly valuable were Michael Heaney, Henry Lichstein, Jim Newcomb, Kate Parrot, and Jim Spohrer. For technical and definitional advice at various points I thank Giovanni Dosi, Doyne Farmer, Arnulf Grübler, John Holland, Kevin Kelly, Geoffrey Marcy, Nebojsa Nakicenovic, Richard Rhodes, and Peter Schuster. Boeing engineers Mike Trestik and Joseph Sutter commented on the aircraft material. My sons Ronan Arthur and Sean Arthur provided much needed writing criticism. Brid Arthur helped me plan the flow of the book, and Niamh Arthur helped edit the final draft.

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
by Jenny Blake
Published 14 Jul 2016

Developing a community takes time, and strong ties will be more helpful than large stats. Whether 50, 500, or 5,000 people, it is not the size of your platform but the level of engagement that matters. This inner circle will become your best advocates, supporters, connectors, and someday, perhaps, customers and clients. Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired magazine, suggests aiming for “1,000 True Fans,” or people who will purchase “anything and everything you produce.” Building a community and becoming a thought leader should not be about a selfish aim for fame. As Dorie Clark, author of Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It, wrote, “It’s about solving real problems and making a difference in a way that creates value for yourself and others.

…

it is futile to ask: Geoff Colvin, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 42, 44; Oliver Burkeman, “Are Machines Making Humans Obsolete?” Guardian, September 18, 2015. Chapter 7: Make Yourself Discoverable “Well-being is enhanced”: Brian R. Little, Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), 196. suggests aiming for “1,000 True Fans”: Kevin Kelly, “1,000 True Fans,” KK.org, March 4, 2008, kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/. “data is the new oil”: Michael Palmer, “Data Is the New Oil,” ANA Marketing Maestros, November 3, 2006, ana.blogs.com/maestros/2006/11/data_is_the_new.html. STAGE THREE: PILOT “Making assumptions and then taking them personally”: Don Miguel Ruiz with Janet Mills, The Voice of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace (San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 2004).

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

By the time I had been esconced in the WELL for a year, it seemed evident to me that the cultural experiment of a self-sustaining online salon was succeeding very well. At that point, as I was becoming convinced that we were all setting some sort of cultural precedent, I interviewed online both Matthew McClure and Kevin Kelly, who had been part of the original group that founded the WELL. One of the advantages of computer conferencing is the community memory that preserves key moments in the history of the community. Sure enough, although I had not looked at it in years, the online oral history was still around, in the archives 26-04-2012 21:42 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 6 de 27 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html conference.

…

The Deadheads came online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system to create a community around themselves, for which I think considerable thanks are due to Maddog, Marye, and Rosebody. Not long thereafter we saw the concept of the online superstar taken to new heights with the advent of the True Confessions conference. . . . Suddenly our future looked assured. . . ." Kevin Kelly had been editor of Whole Earth Review for several years when the WELL was founded. The Hackers' Conference had been his idea. Kelly recalled the original design goals that the WELL's founders had in mind when they opened for business in 1985. The design goals were: 26-04-2012 21:42 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 7 de 27 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html 1) That it be free.

…

And most of the WELL population understood the difference between a kid out for a joyride on his modem and more serious cases of electronic thieves 26-04-2012 21:46 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 12 de 36 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/9.html or vandals. Then Harper's magazine offered WELL management a social experiment they couldn't refuse. The magazine's editors had invited John P. Barlow, Mitch Kapor, Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo's Egg, a best-seller about the successful hunt for a KGB-sponsored ring of German hackers), Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly (one of the founders of the WELL), Dave Hughes, and a number of other cyberspace debaters from the WELL and beyond to meet in a private conference on the WELL with several of the young fellows who hack into other people's computer systems. I remember the night the chain of events began. None of us could have known at the time that it would involve the FBI and Secret Service and grow into the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

Louis Rossetto, the founder of a new, hip tech magazine called Wired, compared computer engineers to Prometheus: they brought gifts of the gods to us mortals that spurred “social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire,” he wrote in his magazine’s inaugural issue.1 Kevin Kelly, a bearded evangelical Christian and Wired editor, agreed with his boss: “No one can escape the transforming fire of machines. Technology, which once progressed at the periphery of culture, now engulfs our minds as well as our lives. As each realm is overtaken by complex techniques, the usual order is inverted, and new rules established.

…

They bet that Negroponte would help prime the investment pump, with his money and involvement brining in other big players who would be willing to invest far greater sums in Wired. They were right. After he came on board, investment money flowed in like water. To help him craft the new magazine, Rossetto hired Stewart Brand’s old apprentice as Wired’s founding executive editor: Kevin Kelly. Pudgy, with an Amish-style beard, Kelly had worked for Stewart Brand in the late 1980s, just as the aging counterculture promoter was beginning to push his publishing business away from communes and into the booming personal computer industry. Kelly was an energetic and eager acolyte, a man ripe for a righteous mission.

…

Rossetto expanded this quote into a full-blown manifesto in Wired’s UK edition: “The most fascinating and powerful people today are not politicians or priests, or generals or pundits, but the vanguard who are integrating digital technologies into their business and personal lives, and causing social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.” 2. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking Adult, 1998). 3. Rich Karlgaard and Michael Malone, “City vs. Country: Tom Peters & George Gilder Debate the Impact of Technology on Location,” Forbes ASAP, February 27, 1995. 4. “Task Force to Focus on Information Revolution,” Deseret (UT) News, September 15, 1993, http://www.deseretnews.com/article/309821/TASK-FORCE-TO-FOCUS-ON-INFORMATION-REVOLUTION.html. 5.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

,” Mashable, June 22, 2012; Kristin Burnham, “Facebook’s WhatsApp Buy: 10 Staggering Stats,” InformationWeek, Feb. 21, 2014. 4 Put another way, every ten minutes: Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Trying to Measure the Amount of Information That Humans Create,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 2003. 5 The cost of storing: McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity, May 2011; Kevin Kelly speaking at the Web 2.0 conference in 2011, http://​blip.​tv/​web2expo/​web-​2-​0-​expo-​sf-​2011-​kevin-​kelly-​4980011. 6 Across all industries: World Economic Forum, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, Jan. 2011. 7 Eventually, your personal details: Cory Doctorow, “Personal Data Is as Hot as Nuclear Waste,” Guardian, Jan. 15, 2008. 8 That’s one account: Emma Barnett, “Hackers Go After Facebook Sites 600,000 Times Every Day,” Telegraph, Oct. 29, 2011; Mike Jaccarino, “Facebook Hack Attacks Strike 600,000 Times per Day, Security Firm Reports,” New York Daily News, Oct. 29, 2011. 9 Because 75 percent of people: “Digital Security Firm Says Most People Use One Password for Multiple Websites,” GMA News Online, Aug. 9, 2013. 10 Many social media companies: “LinkedIn Hack,” Wikipedia; Jose Pagliery, “2 Million Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter Passwords Stolen in Massive Hack,” CNNMoney, Dec. 4, 2013. 11 Transnational organized crime groups: Elinor Mills, “Report: Most Data Breaches Tied to Organized Crime,” CNET, July 27, 2010. 12 Such was the case: Jason Kincaid, “Dropbox Security Bug Made Passwords Optional for Four Hours,” TeckCrunch, June 20, 2011. 13 Later, however, it was revealed: John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” New York Times, April 19, 2010; Kim Zetter, “Report: Google Hackers Stole Source Code of Global Password System,” Wired, April 20, 2010. 14 According to court documents: John Leyden, “Acxiom Database Hacker Jailed for 8 Years,” Register, Feb. 23, 2006; Damien Scott and Alex Bracetti, “The 11 Worst Online Security Breaches,” Complex.​com, May 9, 2012. 15 More recently, in 2013, the data broker Experian: Brian Krebs, “Experian Sold Customer Data to ID Theft Service,” Krebs on Security, Oct. 20, 2013. 16 Experian learned of the compromise: Byron Acohido, “Scammer Dupes Experian into Selling Social Security Nos,” USA Today, Oct. 21, 2013; Matthew J.

…

To those individuals who generously agreed to review galley copies of this book and offer their comments on the work, you have my respect and considerable appreciation for taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedules to do so. In particular, I’d like to say thank you to Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Daniel Pink, David Eagleman, Christopher Reich, Interpol president Khoo Boon Hui, Ed Burns, Frank Abagnale, and P. W. Singer. To Sarah Stephens and Adam Kaslikowski, thank you both for the countless hours you spent reading through the earliest versions of Future Crimes and your deeply insightful comments on the work along the way.

…

,” IEEE Spectrum, May 29, 2014. 27 “it can read”: Brandon Keim, “I, Nanny,” Wired, Dec. 18, 2008. 28 To help alleviate: Mai Iida, “Robot Niche Expands in Senior Care,” Japan Times, June 19, 2013. 29 Thousands of Paro units: Anne Tergesen and Miho Inada, “It’s Not a Stuffed Animal, It’s a $6,000 Medical Device,” Wall Street Journal, June 21, 2010. 30 One of the fastest-growing: “Your Alter Ego on Wheels,” Economist, March 9, 2013. 31 Robots such as the MantaroBot: Serene Fang, “Robot Care for Aging Parents,” Al Jazeera America, Feb. 27, 2014. 32 With the push of a button: Ryan Jaslow, “RP-VITA Robot on Wheels Lets Docs Treat Patients Remotely,” CBS News, Nov. 19, 2013. 33 Already Starwood hotels: “Robots Are the New Butlers at Starwood Hotels,” CNBC, Aug. 12, 2014. 34 A 2013 study: Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment,” Oxford Martin, Sept. 17, 2013, http://​www.​oxfordmartin.​ox.​ac.​uk/. 35 Those working in the transportation field: For an excellent discussion on the future of robots, automation, and work, see Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—and Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, Dec. 24, 2012; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 36 News outlets such as: Francie Diep, “Associated Press Will Use Robots to Write Articles,” Popular Science, July 1, 2014. 37 Many believe that it is the growth: Paul Krugman, “Robots and Robber Barons,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2012. 38 In mid-2014, a young woman: Lindsey Bever, “Seattle Woman Spots Drone Outside Her 26th-Floor Apartment Window, Feels ‘Violated,’ ” Washington Post, June 25, 2014. 39 “Air is a public”: Rebecca J.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

Readers of Toffler's (1980) Third Wave will recognize the first three terms here, particularly the first, demassification, to which Toffler adds three subtypes: demassification of media, production, and society. Notions of disintermediation and decentralization are features, for example, in the work of George Gilder or Kevin Kelly's (1997) writing on the "new economy." There are more "Ds" that could be added, such as Kevin Kelly's displacement and devolution. 22. Downes and Mui, 1998. 23. Coase, 1937. Coase's theory should be seen not so much as an attack on neoclassical individualism as an attempt to save it from itself. We return to transaction cost theory briefly in our discussion of the future of the firm in chapter 6.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

IA, or intelligence augmentation, has a similar potential for disaster as stand-alone AI, mitigated somewhat by the fact that a human takes part, at least at first. But that advantage will quickly disappear. We’ll talk more about IA later. First, I want to pay attention to Vinge’s notion that intelligence could emerge from the Internet. Technology thinkers, including George Dyson and Kevin Kelly, have proposed that information is a life-form. The computer code that carries information replicates itself and grows according to biological rules. But intelligence, well that’s something else. It’s a feature of complex organisms, and it doesn’t come by accident. At his home in California, I had asked Eliezer Yudkowsky if intelligence could emerge from the exponentially growing hardware of the Internet, from its five trillion megabytes of data, its more than seven billion connected computers and smart phones, and its seventy-five million servers.

…

It’s a problem we face every time: Vinge, Vernor, True Names and Other Dangers (Wake Forest: Baen Books, 1987), 47. Through the sixties and seventies: Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Good has captured the essence of the runaway: Ibid. Technology thinkers including: Kelly, Kevin, “Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly,” WIRED, February 17, 2012, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/all/ (accessed June 5, 2012). At his home in California: Wisegeek, “How Big is the Internet?” last modified 2012, http://www.wisegeek.com/how-big-is-the-internet.htm (accessed July 5, 2012). Per dollar spent: Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 101–105. 9: THE LAW OF ACCELERATING RETURNS Computing is undergoing: King, Rachael, “IBM training computer chip to learn like a human,” SFGate.com, November 7, 2011, http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-11-07/business/30371975_1_computers-virtual-objects-microsoft (accessed January 5, 2012).

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

. … Making sense of our new—and ever changing—landscape requires piecing together your stories neighborhood-by-neighborhood and state-by-state. That’s where you come in.”34 1,000 True Fans Pro-am journalism is not the sole completely new model for journalism now emerging. Another is the cultivation by bloggers of ardent micro-audiences. In March 2008, Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly wrote a blog post arguing that in the digital era, artists can survive so long as they generate 1,000 true fans, each of whom might pay $100 a year: If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks. One thousand is a feasible number.

…

Over a thousand people uploaded recordings of themselves singing the song; Ze went on to combine the uploaded audio recordings into a single track, which sounded like it was being sung by a crowd: you’re not alone anymore. Watching A Show with Ze Frank is not passive; it can even be a lot of work. It’s television meets “cognitive surplus”—and it is a model for entertainment that encourages niche community. As we saw briefly in chapter 3, Kevin Kelly has argued that artists—be they musicians, novelists, or filmmakers—need only 1,000 true fans willing to subsidize their work if they are to survive. But the “1,000 true fans” theory doesn’t entirely play out in practice; some pursuits are big, risky, game-changing, and expensive. As of now, the online world (and YouTube in particular) seems far better equipped to support quirky, niche acts rather than the big-vision, big-impact entertainment that Hollywood at its best has put out.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

An aircraft engine has as many as three thousand sensors measuring billions of data points per voyage. And as we mentioned in Chapter One, a Google car, with its lidar (light radar) scanning the surrounding environment with sixty-four lasers, collects almost a gigabyte of data per second per car. This revolution is also impacting our human bodies. In 2007, Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly created the Quantified Self (QS) movement, which focuses on self-tracking tools. The first Quantified Self conference was held in May 2011, and today the QS community has more than 32,000 members in thirty-eight countries. Many new devices have been spun out of this movement. One of them is Spire, a QS device that measures respiration.

…

The popular “freemium” model is just such a case: many websites offer a basic level of service at no cost, while also enabling users to pay a fee to upgrade to more storage, statistics or extra features. Advertising, cross-subsidies and subscription business models are other ways of layering profit-generating operations on top of what is essentially free baseline information. Kevin Kelly expanded further on this idea in a seminal post entitled “Better than Free,” which appeared on his Technium blog in 2008. In digital networks anything can be copied and is thus “abundant.” So how do you add or extract value? What is valuable for customers? What is the new scarcity? What are the new value drivers?

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

The ambition of this clock is to help unite a fractured world—a world that, despite its differences, looks up together at one Moon. Looking long into the future and far out into space helps put our earthly concerns into perspective. Like the Long Now clock, Longplayer and Aluna are machines for making good conversations. Long Now board member Kevin Kelly has asked, “If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well?” The virologist Jonas Salk had previously inquired, “Are we being good ancestors?”8 And this takes us back to Japan, where we started this journey of hope and peace. SEVENTY MILES FROM Osaka is the Japanese city of Ise, which is home to the Ise Jingu, or Grand Shrine, a complex of 125 Shinto shrines covering an area the size of central Paris.

…

Ltd., 1980), 229. 2.Ibid., 3. 3.Ibid., 231. 4.Quoted in Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (London: Phoenix, 2000), 2. 5.Ibid., 2. 6.Quoted in ibid., 4–5. 7.Brian Eno, “Bells and Their History, and The Long Now Foundation” (CD insert), in January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now (CD), 2003, 4. 8.Kevin Kelly, “Clock in the Mountain,” accessed July 7, 2020, longnow.org/clock; Jonas Salk, “Are We Being Good Ancestors?,” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 1, no. 2 (December 1992): 16–18. 9.Brand, Clock of the Long Now, 53. 10. Alexander Rose, “How to Build Something That Lasts 10,000 Years,” BBC Future, June 11, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190611-how-to-build-something-that-lasts-10000-years. 11.

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

Retailers, credit card companies, social networks, data brokers, and advertisers have been turning consumer privacy into the ultimate commodity. The consequence of this transformation is that we are more exposed, less in control of our public identities, than ever. HOW WE’VE GOTTEN PRIVACY WRONG Technological elites like to argue that privacy is dead or somehow superfluous. Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, cleverly summarized the situation: “Privacy is mostly an illusion, but you’ll have as much of it as you want to pay for.” His remark sounds like sophistry, but he’s largely, if unfortunately, correct. Our popular conception of privacy is rooted in some fundamental misunderstandings.

…

It does, however, mean that a great deal of money and corporate and political power is now being brought to bear on figuring out how to monetize personal information as never before. Bain and the WEF are not alone in this kind of thinking. Carlos Dominguez, a senior vice president at Cisco, has written about the rise of a new “trust economy,” in which privacy is monetized but companies that act more virtuously are rewarded. It might be, as Kevin Kelly theorized, that privacy will be something for which you have to pay. But it won’t be called that—it’ll be described as more personalized service or a way to get special offers. AT&T has offered some customers of its U-verse with GigaPower Internet service two choices. A “standard” plan is $99 per month; a “premier” plan is $29 cheaper—which should be a red flag.

…

The argument usually goes—and is presented as the enlightened conclusion of the progressive tech set—that with the advent of social media, we are all sharing more, we are exposing more of our lives, social norms are evolving, and privacy is less important. Somehow, we’ve become more tolerant of one another, forgiving personal failings and foibles that technology, in part, plays a role in revealing. Disclosure has, per Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, become synonymous with authenticity. In the spirit of Kevin Kelly, privacy may still exist as an idea, but it is an increasingly outmoded and impractical notion. Privacy, they say, retards innovation and the formation of relationships based on the new ethic of radical transparency. The problem with this line of argument is its narrow-mindedness. It is both ahistorical and reflective of a milieu whose social standards, if they are even uniform, may not represent other areas of the country, much less the world.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

Horowitz, “Droning On: Explaining the Proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” International Organization, 71 no. 2 (Spring 2017), 397–418. 5 “next industrial revolution”: “Robot Revolution—Global Robot & AI Primer,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch, December 16, 2015, http://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/PDFs/robotics_and_ai_condensed_primer.pdf. 5 Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/. 5 cognitization of machines: Antonio Manzalini, “Cognitization is Upon Us!,” 5G Network Softwarization, May 21, 2015, http://ieee-sdn.blogspot.com/2015/05/cognitization-is-upon-us.html. 6 “fully roboticized . . . military operations”: Robert Coalson, “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for Ukraine,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-coalson/valery-gerasimov-putin-ukraine_b_5748480.html. 6 Department of Defense officials state: Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research Melissa Flagg, as quoted in Stew Magnuson, “Autonomous, Lethal Robot Concepts Must Be ‘On the Table,’ DoD Official Says,” March 3, 2016, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?

…

Russia is building a suite of armed ground robots for war on the plains of Europe. Sixteen nations already have armed drones, and another dozen or more are openly pursuing development. These developments are part of a deeper technology trend: the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), which some have called the “next industrial revolution.” Technology guru Kevin Kelly has compared AI to electricity: just as electricity brings objects all around us to life with power, so too will AI bring them to life with intelligence. AI enables more sophisticated and autonomous robots, from warehouse robots to next-generation drones, and can help process large amounts of data and make decisions to power Twitter bots, program subway repair schedules, and even make medical diagnoses.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness
by Steven Levy
Published 23 Oct 2006

Downloading podcasts—of commercial and public radio shows or home-brew audio concoctions—adds the intimacy of old-fashioned radio to the mix. And by offering television shows and music videos for sale, Apple has generated a gold rush of a la carte programming that has, essentially, shuffled the now-obsolete television schedule. Can prose be far behind? Just as I was finishing this book, my former Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York Times Magazine, in a manifesto on the future of the book, "Just as the music audience jiggles and reorders songs into new albums (or playlists,' as they are called in iTunes) the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual bookshelves. ... Indeed, some authors will begin to write books ... to be remixed as pages."

…

Notes Unless otherwise cited, The Perfect Thing is based on my own reporting, primarily personal interviews with people within and outside Apple. Of course my views benefited from the journalism and commentary of the countless people who have addressed themselves to the iPod in print and on the Internet. Author's Note xii a manifesto: Kevin Kelly, "What Will Happen to Books?," The New York Times Magazine, May 14,2006. Perfect 2 quaffing beer: Associated Press report (June 8, 2006) of a survey by the Student Monitor research firm. Seventy-three percent of 1,200 students surveyed said that the iPod was the number one in thing—beating a long winning streak by the previous champion, beer. 4 "younger listeners think the way the iPod thinks": Alex Ross, "Listen to This," The New Yorker, February 16,2004. 5 "iPod of the brain": David Malakoff, "iPod of the Brain," NPR Morning Edition, March 14, 2001. 5 "Nothingfits better": William Powers, "The Happy Dance," National Journal, January 13, 2006. 5 premiums: David Bernstein, "The Free Toaster?

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

While this study focused on a relatively benign example of persuasion, the very fact that DARPA was the one funding it should give us pause. Imagine newscasters or politicians wielding similar technology, able to pluck heartstrings, stoke outrage, inspire hope, and even trigger communitas, just by reading and tuning our neurobiology. If “focus-group politics” leaves us with a bad taste, how will “biofeedback politics” go down? Kevin Kelly, futurist and the cofounder of Wired magazine, has a few ideas. In a 2016 article on virtual reality darlings of the moment, Oculus and Magic Leap, Kelly examines VR’s potential as a technology of surveillance and control. “It’s very easy to imagine a company that succeeds in dominating the VR universe44 quickly stockpiling intimate data on not just what you and three billion other people ‘favorite’ but . . . a thousand other details.

…

id=1919&mid=46. 42. a multibillion-dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists: Seth Ferranti, “How Screen Addiction Is Damaging Kids’ Brains,” Vice, August 6, 2016. 43. In their study, a trained storyteller: Author interview with Chris Berka, Advanced Brain Monitoring, the company responsible for conducting the study, January 27, 2015. 44. It’s very easy to imagine: Kevin Kelly, “The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup,” Wired, May 2016. 45. This comprehensive tracking”: Ibid. 46. “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects”: Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932), p. 54. 47. “In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting”: Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. viii. 48. all power that derives from the control of information: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (New York: Knopf, 2010), p. 310. 49.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

You don’t program the slime mold cells to form clusters; you program them to follow patterns in the trails left behind by their neighbors. If you have enough cells, and if the trails last long enough, you’ll get clusters, but they’re not something you can control directly. And predicting the number of clusters—or their longevity—is almost impossible without extensive trial-and-error experimentation with the system. Kevin Kelly called his groundbreaking book on decentralized behavior Out of Control, but the phrase doesn’t quite do justice to emergent systems—or at least the ones that we’ve deliberately set out to create on the computer screen. Systems like StarLogo are not utter anarchies: they obey rules that we define in advance, but those rules only govern the micromotives.

…

This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software.

The Connected Company
by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal
Published 2 Dec 2014

I also had tremendous help and support from my colleagues at Dachis Group, specifically: Jeff Dachis, Dion Hinchcliffe, Peter Kim, Ethan Farber, Brian Kotlyar, Susan Scrupski, Amanda Johnson, Lara Hendrickson, Lee Bryant, John De Oliveira, Erik Huddleston, Jen van der Meer, David Mastronardi, W. Scott Matthews, and Aric Wood. I have also had the privilege to receive help and advice from true luminaries, such as Richard Saul Wurman, Saul Kaplan, Kevin Kelly, Jared Spool, Peter Vander Auwera, Dan Roam, Thor Muller, Paul Pangaro, Lane Becker, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, Nilofer Merchant, John Hagel III, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Stowe Boyd, Jay Cross, Marcia Conner, Ben Cerveny, Chris Brogan, Bob Logan, David Armano, Alex Osterwalder, and Don Norman.

…

Over time, the structure gets more rigid and inflexible. Notes for Chapter Six THE PERFORMANCE OF A SYSTEM “Systems Thinking” talk by Russell Ackoff, at The Learning and Legacy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming (event), 1994. Chapter 7. Complexity changes the game Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex. — Kevin Kelly Wired Magazine The complexity of the new networked, interdependent economy creates an ambiguous, uncertain, competitive landscape. Companies must be flexible enough to rapidly respond to changes in their environments, or risk extinction. Return on Assets is Dwindling In The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic Books), John Hagel and John Seely Brown observe that return on assets—the measure of how efficiently a company can use its assets to generate profits—has steadily dwindled to almost a quarter of what it was in 1965.

Possiplex
by Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010

he said to me over and over, and tears came down his face. I hoped these people would get their work done so that I could design decent Xanadu interfaces on my own, without having to listen to such inanities. I was not interested in discussions of interfaces, just in designing them singlehandedly. What would Kevin Kelly have said? ca.1989 I knew Kevin Kelly as an amiable editor and paintball adversary, but not exactly as a deep thinker. We were having drinks or coffee in San Rafael, and he asked how Xanadu structure kept links from breaking. I explained as clearly as I could about content stabilization and editing by pointer list.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

The mass embrace of hypertext is like the Seinfeld “Betrayal” episode: a cultural form that was once exclusively limited to avant-garde sensibilities, now happily enjoyed by grandmothers and third graders worldwide. I won’t dwell on this point, because the premise that increased interactivity is good for the brain is not a new one. (A number of insightful critics—Kevin Kelly, Douglas Rushkoff, Janet Murray, Howard Rheingold, Henry Jenkins—have made variations on this argument over the past decade or so.) But let me say this much: The rise of the Internet has challenged our minds in three fundamental and related ways: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces, and by creating new channels for social interaction.

…

Between the bookends of Jobs and Page lies the rest of Silicon Valley, including radical communitarians like Craig Newmark (of Craigslist.com), intellectual property communists such as Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig, economic cornucopians like Wired magazine editor Chris “Long Tail” Anderson, and new media moguls Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle. The ideology of the Web 2.0 movement was perfectly summarized at the Technology Education and Design (TED) show in Monterey last year, when Kevin Kelly, Silicon Valley’s über-idealist and author of the Web 1.0 Internet utopia New Rules for the New Economy , said:Imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano. Imagine Van Gogh before the technology of affordable oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technology of film. We have a moral obligation to develop technology.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

We like Duncan because he doesn’t fall into this pandering and wordsmithing. He’s honest and doesn’t mince words. He doesn’t manipulate perception. Some people are confident there will be new jobs in the future, but we can’t imagine them before they’ve been invented. “Look at how many yoga instructors there are,” said my colleague Kevin Kelly. “Twenty years ago, nobody would have imagined we would have so many yoga instructors. Back then, who would have thought you could make a living as a yoga instructor?” I understand the point, but I also think it’s not very satisfying. (There are 52,000 licensed yoga instructors in the United States, about half of them active.

…

It stresses them out to think of their children trying to learn in a public school, where there’s thirty-five students to every teacher—so they send them to a private school, where there’s only fifteen students per teacher. They hire admissions counselors and tutors and test-prep instructors. Just organizing all this causes them even more stress, so they pay massage therapists, and yoga teachers, and psychiatrists to get them back in the groove. So in a way, Kevin Kelly was inadvertently on point when he said the jobs of the future would be the equivalent of yoga teachers. The jobs of the future are all taking care of the well-off. There’s almost no end to it. One of the biggest stresses in these households is when things go wrong. The house has ants, or the front door lock is catchy, or they get in a fender bender.

Social Capital and Civil Society
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 1 Mar 2000

Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); T h e Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 13 Hayek, T h e Fatal Conceit, p . 8. 14 There is by now a huge literature on this subject. For a layman’s overview, see M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: T h e Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); and Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The N e w Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). For more formal accounts of spontaneous order, see John H . Holland, Hidden Order: H o w Adaptation Builds Complexity (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995) ; Stuart A.

Remote: Office Not Required
by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
Published 29 Oct 2013

—Richard Florida, author of the national bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life “In the near future, everyone will work remotely, including those sitting across from you. You’ll need this farsighted book to prepare for this inversion.” —Kevin Kelly, senior maverick for Wired magazine and author of What Technology Wants “Leave your office at the office. Lose the soul-sapping commutes. Jettison the workplace veal chambers and banish cookie-cutter corporate culture. Smart, convincing, and prescriptive, Remote offers a radically more productive and satisfying office-less future, better for all (well, except commercial landlords).”

Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Nov 2010

To others, including me, You Own Your Own Words served as an ethical foundation: You, the human being on the other side of the modem, are responsible for what you say and do here. You are accountable. Given that the WELL was developed by farsighted cultural pioneers such as Stewart Brand, Larry Brilliant, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold, we shouldn’t be surprised that they sought to compensate for some of the disconnection online between people and their words. And that’s why, from the very beginning, I decided to be myself online. I’ve only used one name on the Internet: Rushkoff. I figured the only real danger was from government, corporations, or some other “big brother” out there using what I posted against me in some future McCarthy hearings.

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
by Jonathan Crary
Published 3 Jun 2013

This pseudo-historical formulation of the present as a digital age, supposedly homologous with a “bronze age” or “steam age,” perpetuates the illusion of a unifying and durable coherence to the many incommensurable constituents of contemporary experience. Of the numerous presentations of this delusion, the promotional and intellectually spurious works of futurists such as Nicholas Negroponte, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, and Raymond Kurzweil can stand as flagrant examples. One of the underpinnings of this assumption is the popular truism that today’s teenagers and younger children are all now harmoniously inhabiting the inclusive and seamless intelligibility of their technological worlds. This generational characterization supposedly confirms that, within another few decades or less, a transitional phase will have ended and there will be billions of individuals with a similar level of technological competence and basic intellectual assumptions.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large
by Stephen Morris
Published 1 Sep 2007

The IBM Selectric typewriter now had changeable type fonts, bringing the world of typesetting, hitherto the exclusive province of printers and publishers, into the home. That was enough to convince a bunch of Berkeley counterculture mavens that the time was right to reinvent publishing. Stewart Brand enlisted family members, design instructor J. Baldwin, Kevin Kelly, and others to identify products, organizations, and services that passed the criteria of being useful as a tool, relevant to independent education, high quality or low cost, and easily available by mail. The idea was to provide “access to tools,” and the Catalog’s combination of youthful arrogance, orientation towards practicality, and haphazard (but groovy) organization were perfect for the nation’s first attention-deficit generation raised in a post-war era that had migrated to suburbia to watch television.

…

By 1972 Random House had come calling and had taken over the national distribution and the Catalog had been named winner of the National Book Award. The ripples from the original Whole Earth Catalog continue to be felt. The Catalog was published sporadically until 1998. Its alumni have been a vocal and visible lot. Kevin Kelly still publishes a weekly eZine called Cool Tools (find it at kk.org). Illegitimate step-child The Solar Living Sourcebook is in its thirteenth edition and has been continuously in print for the last twenty years. The founders of the Whole Earth Catalog cast a long collective shadow, but it was their ability to look forward that earned their niche in publishing history.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

He quotes O’Reilly: “The internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at Esalen in the ’70s—except we didn’t know it would be technology-mediated.” Levy then asks, rhetorically, “Could it be that the internet—or what O’Reilly calls Web 2.0—is really the successor to the human potential movement?” Levy’s article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly’s ecstatic “We Are the Web” in Wired’s August issue. A Whole Earth Catalog editor before he helped launch Wired, Kelly serves as a nexus between hippie and hacker, a human fiber-optic cable beaming Northern Californian utopianism between generations. In his new article, a cover story, he surveys the recent history of the internet, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that the net has become a “magic window” that provides a “spookily godlike” perspective on existence.

…

If you read anything about Web 2.0, you’ll inevitably find praise heaped upon Wikipedia as a glorious manifestation of “the age of participation.” Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia; anyone who wants to contribute to its construction can add an entry or edit an existing one. Tim O’Reilly says that Wikipedia marks “a profound change in the dynamics of content creation”—a leap beyond the Web 1.0 model of Britannica Online. To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It’s a harbinger of the Machine. In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing—it has to be a beautiful thing if the web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, Wikipedia isn’t very good at all.

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

The Beatles sold hundreds of times as many albums as Gerry and the Pacemakers—contemporaries who also worked with the manager Brian Epstein and the producer George Martin—but few music fans would call that an injustice. Can musicians make money without reaching a big audience? Some technology pundits predict a world of niche culture, but understand how tough that could be for artists. In 2008, the former Wired editor Kevin Kelly wrote a blog post titled “1,000 True Fans.”39 Assuming each dedicated fan spent $100 per year on an artist’s work, he could bring in $100,000 a year, Kelly wrote, “which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.” But the products Kelly believes acts should sell, such as vinyl records and T-shirts, cost money to produce, so an artist might keep only half of that $100 after expenses.

…

The settlements are private, but Bertelsmann’s finance chief, Thomas Rabe, said that they would probably cost the company €393 million (about $550 million). 37. For business reasons, the manager declined to identify the band. 38. Glenn Peoples, “The Long Tale?” Billboard, November 14, 2009. Disclosure: I assigned and helped edit this article, which showed that the so-called long tail applies to sales of albums, but not individual tracks. 39. Kevin Kelly, The Technium (blog), March 4, 2008. 40. “He certainly fronted them some regular living expense money in that critical year of 1966, when they were first getting established. He’s been occasionally described as their ‘patron.’ ” Author interview with Blair Jackson, author of Garcia: An American Life (New York: Viking, 1999).

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

We know it will involve networks, knowledge work, the application of science and a large amount of green technology investment. The question is: can it be capitalism? Part II * * * We are now engaged in a grand scheme to augment, amplify, enhance and extend the relationships and communications between all beings and all objects. Kevin Kelly, 19971 5 The Prophets of Postcapitalism The jet engine was one of the core technologies of the post-1945 long wave. Invented during the Second World War, the turbofan – to give it its proper name – is a mature technology and should not be producing surprises. Yet it is. It works by sucking compressed air in at the front and firing a flame through it so that the air expands.

…

When we tried to write our first web page the IT department refused to allow us to store it on ‘their’ server, which was for doing the payroll. There was no email on my workplace Mac and no web access. Computers were for processing data and were linked together for specific tasks only. What a visionary, then, was the US journalist Kevin Kelly, to write this in 1997: The grand irony of our times is that the era of computers is over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers have already taken place. Computers have speeded up our lives a bit, and that’s it. In contrast, all the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communication between computers that is, to connections rather than to computations.21 Kelly’s article in Wired triggered a moment of recognition for my generation.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

A sideways look at some of the discourse about online commerce today proposes the enduring relevance of the Soviet socialist revolution that was consummated a century ago. Both the Internet and the Soviet command economy promise the revolutionary realization of the means for socialist or collectivist production on a mass scale. In the rhetoric of networking collective consciousness and crowd-sourced collaboration, we see the unlikely alliance of Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s hive mind, open-source software promoter Eric Raymond’s bazaar, and Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s collective farm.9 Long before Internet enthusiasts were around, Soviet enthusiasts were promising that workers (users) could meet the needs of the masses (crowds) through collective modes of resource sharing and collaboration (peer-to-peer production).

…

Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40 (3) (1999): 455–483; Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); and Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke, Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred (New York: Zed Books, 2000). 7. David E. Hoffmann, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Random House, 2009), 150–154, 364–369, 422–423, 477. 8. Ibid., 153–154. 9. For sample references, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Fourth Edition (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 2004), chap. 4; Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: O’Reilly, 1999); and Leon Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927) (London: New Park Publications, 1973), especially “The Agrarian Question and Social Construction.” 10.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

That includes Tricia Wang, An Xiao Mina, Debbie Chachra, Liz Lawley, Zeynep Tufekci, Clay Shirky, Brooke Gladstone, Tom Igoe, Max Whitney, Terri Senft, Misha Tepper, Fred Kaplan, Howard Rheingold, danah boyd, Liz Lawley, Nick Bilton, Gary Marcus, Heidi Siwak, Ann Blair, Eli Pariser, Ethan Zuckerman, Ian Bogost, Fred Benenson, Heather Gold, Douglas Rushkoff, Rebecca MacKinnon, Cory Menscher, Mark Belinsky, Quinn Norton, Anil Dash, Cathy Marshall, Elizabeth Stock, Philip Howard, Denise Hand, Robin Sloan, Tim Carmody, Don Tapscott, Steven Johnson, Kevin Kelly, Nina Khosla, Laura Fitton, Jillian York, Hilary Mason, Craig Mod, Bre Pettis, Glenn Kelman, Susan Cain, Noah Schachtman, Irin Carmon, Matthew Battles, Cathy Davidson, Linda Stone, Jess Kimball, Phil Libin, Kati London, Jim Marggraff, Dan Zalewski, Sasha Nemecek, Laura Miller, Brian McNely, Duncan Watts, Kenyatta Cheese, Nora Abousteit, Deanna Zandt, David Wallis, Nick Denton, Alissa Quart, Stan James, Andrew Hearst, Gary Stager, Evan Selinger, Steven Demmler, and Vint Cerf.

…

Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution,” Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 1 (March 1922): 83–98. It’s worth noting that the discussion of multiples is itself, as you might expect, a multiple; many writers today who write about creativity discuss the phenomenon. Some of my favorite analyses include Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants (New York: Penguin, 2010), Kindle edition; Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2010), 34–35; and Malcolm Gladwell, “In the Air,” The New Yorker, May 12, 2008, accessed March 22, 2013, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory
by Kariappa Bheemaiah
Published 26 Feb 2017

As per this study, and others2 that have begun investigating the concept of combinatorial evolution 3 of technology, invention can be conceptualised as combinatorial possibilities. In other words, invention is simply the novel combination of existing technological capabilities and is evolutionary4 in nature. This tendency of technology to build itself on previous or existing technologies is very similar to biological evolution. Kevin Kelly makes the analogy between biological evolution and technological evolution in a more succinct manner. As per his research, the long-term co-evolutionary trends seen in natural and technological paradigms share five common salient features: Specialisation, Diversity, Ubiquity , Socialization and Complexity .

…

Tools based on Agent Based Modelling (discussed below) are thus essential and help us detect and study the development of patterns. Studying the emergence of patterns based on the interactions between agents, allows us to study the evolutionary process of differentiation, selection, and amplification, from which arises novelty, order and complexity growth (see Kevin Kelly). This is important to note as in economics, goods and services exist in niches or cliques (see (iv) Networks above) which are created by other goods and services (combinatorial) and agents earn revenues based on which niche they exist in and which nodes they interact with (Kauffman, 1996). While the Walrasian economy has no macro properties that can be derived from its micro properties (for instance, the First and Second Welfare Theorems26), there is no mechanism for studying the emergence of novelty or growth in complexity.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

Certainly it would have surprised a pot-smoking, natural food–eating skinny-dipper at Woodstock to be told that the single greatest achievement of his generation would be to bring computers into corners of American life unimagined then—to put a television screen in everyone’s jacket pocket. Even if pessimists like Sale had the better of the political argument, twenty-first-century citizen/consumers were focused less on politics than on esthetics. Kevin Kelly, the editor of Wired magazine, insisted that the industrial technology, with its uniformity and regularity, was being superseded by “technology that’s decentralized, that plays on differences, that’s irregular on demand, that’s nonlinear, and that’s very interactive.” Such technology had been an aspiration of the counterculture, too.

…

“Data,” said Lawrence Summers: Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Human Work in the Robotic Future,” Foreign Affairs, July–August 2016, 139–50. “The personal computer”: Eric Zemmour, Le suicide français (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), 218–19. (Author’s translation.) “evil . . . computerization enables”: Kevin Kelly, “Interview with the Luddite” (interview with Kirkpatrick Sale), Wired, June 1, 1995. “technology that’s decentralized”: Ibid. “the specter of technology”: Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Harper, 2005 [1974]), 246. the adjective “compelling”: Google Ngram Viewer.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

The Smartness Economy: In the late 1800s, if you wanted a good idea for a new business, all that was required was to take an existing tool, say a drill or a washboard, and add electricity to it—thus creating a power drill or a washing machine. In his excellent book The Inevitable, author and Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly points out that we’re about to see an updated version of this economy, with AI replacing electricity. In other words, take any existing tool, and add a layer of smartness. So cell phones became smartphones and stereo speakers became smart speakers and cars become autonomous cars. Closed-Loop Economies: In nature, nothing is ever wasted.

…

See: https://lawreview.uchicago.edu/publication/razors-and-blades-myths. “franchise models”: Kerry Pipes, “History of Franchising: Franchising in the Modern Age,” Franchising.com. See: https://www.franchising.com/guides/history_of_franchising_part_two.html. In his excellent book The Inevitable: Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable (Viking, 2016), p. 33. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: Christoph Jentzsch, “Decentralized Orgnizations to Automate Government.” See: https://archive.org/stream/DecentralizedAutonomousOrganizations/WhitePaper_djvu.txt. the multimillion-dollar economy: Maria Korolov, “Second Life GDP Totals $500 Million,” Hypergrid Business, November 11, 2015.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

Inforgs are the perfect creatures for the hypernudge to rule when they have been refashioned to always be open to data flows and so continuously available for modulation. But by what? Presumably by some form of intelligence? We could bet everything on artificial intelligence, but few have taken this step. Perhaps modulation by human intelligence exercised at the collective level? US West Coast evangelist Kevin Kelly comes close to this when he celebrates the “technium” (his term for the supposed collective “autonomy” that develops from “the feedback loops in the technological system”).25 But why believe humans are intelligent at a collective level while ignoring or recklessly overriding humans’ ability to be independently intelligent at the individual level?

…

The reason is that, as part of the reshaping of social knowledge described in chapter 4, autonomy itself is being reconfigured by capitalist data practices. Data relations are becoming the means to a supposed new autonomy, bringing into conflict two aspects of the self, as subject and as object, while co-opting precisely the socially grounded notion of freedom (autonomy) that Hegel defended. Evangelists of technological connection such as Kevin Kelly see things differently. In his recent book The Inevitable, he names tracking as one of the twelve dimensions of technology’s transformation of society. By attributing this transformation to “what technology wants” (the name of his previous book), Kelly seeks to quarantine today’s profound transformations from ethical critique.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Those earlier general-purpose technologies brought sweeping economic, social, and political changes. Likewise, the scale of potential change from artificial intelligence is staggering. By one estimate, nearly half of all tasks currently being done in the U.S. economy could be outsourced to automation using existing technology. Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly has argued that “[AI] will enliven inert objects, much as electricity did more than a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified we will now cognitize.” AI has applications in cybersecurity, surveillance, defense, border security, disinformation, and economic warfare, yielding major geopolitical advantages to whoever best harnesses these tools.

…

INTRODUCTION 1air combat maneuvering: Naval Air Training Command, Flight Training Instruction: Basic Fighter Maneuvering (BFM) Advanced NFO T-45C/VMTS (Corpus Christie, TX: Department of the Navy, 2018), https://www.cnatra.navy.mil/local/docs/pat-pubs/P-826.pdf. 1one of the most challenging skills: Colin “Farva” Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take on AI Repeatedly Beating Real Pilot In Dogfight,” The Drive, August 24, 2020, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35947/navy-f-a-18-squadron-commanders-take-on-ai-repeatedly-beating-real-pilot-in-dogfight. 1air combat has evolved: John Stillion, Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2015), https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Air-to-Air-Report-.pdf. 1“department of mad scientists”: Michael Belfiore, The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), https://www.amazon.com/Department-Mad-Scientists-Remaking-Artificial/dp/0062000659. 2ACE program: “Training AI to Win a Dogfight,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, May 8, 2019, https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-05-08. 2flew with superhuman precision: Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take.” 2forward-quarter gunshots: Naval Air Training Command, Flight Training Instruction. 2maneuvering to avoid a collision: Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take.” 2“a gunshot that is almost impossible”: Joseph Trevithick, “AI Claims ‘Flawless Victory’ Going Undefeated In Digital Dogfight With Human Fighter Pilot,” The Drive, August 20, 2020, https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35888/ai-claims-flawless-victory-going-undefeated-in-digital-dogfight-with-human-fighter-pilot. 3level of g-forces: Trevithick, “AI Claims ‘Flawless Victory.’” 3“The human will always be the limiting factor”: Price, “Navy F/A-18 Squadron Commander’s Take.” 3live flight demonstration: “Collaborative Air Combat Autonomy Program Makes Strides,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, March 18, 2021, https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2021-03-18a. 3“We envision a future”: “Training AI to Win a Dogfight.” 3another industrial revolution: Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means, How to Respond,” World Economic Forum, January 14, 2016, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/; Robot Revolution—Global Robot & AI Primer (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, December 16, 2015), https://www.bofaml.com/content/dam/boamlimages/documents/PDFs/robotics_and_ai_condensed_primer.pdf (page discontinued); Rob Thomas, “How AI Is Driving the New Industrial Revolution,” Forbes, March 4, 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ibm/2020/03/04/how-ai-is-driving-the-new-industrial-revolution/#7225c870131a; Sean Gallagher, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution Emerges from AI and the Internet of Things,” Ars Technica, June 18, 2019, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/the-revolution-will-be-roboticized-how-ai-is-driving-industry-4-0/. 4nearly half of all tasks: James Manyika et al., Harnessing Automation for a Future That Works (McKinsey Global Institute, January 2017), https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/digital-disruption/harnessing-automation-for-a-future-that-works. 4“[AI] will enliven inert objects”: Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence/. 4AI has applications: For some examples of security-related applications of artificial intelligence, see Miles Brundage et al., The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation (February 2018), https://maliciousaireport.com/; and Michael C.

…

A. Berg (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1986), quoted in R. L. Gregory, The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998), quoted in Shane Legg, “Machine Super Intelligence” (doctoral diss., University of Lugano, June 2008), 3–4. 284Copernican revolution: Kevin Kelly, “The Next 30 Digital Years,” YouTube, April 13, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhduPAy2bxo. 284Cambrian explosion: Gill Pratt has made this analogy with respect to robotics. Gill A. Pratt, “Is a Cambrian Explosion Coming for Robotics?” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 29, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 51–60, http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/jep.29.3.51. 285AI researchers vary widely in their predictions: Seth D.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

In a world of savvy consumers, the manufacturer which provides the most concise, easy-to-navigate advice is going to win market share. From supermarket supply chains to consumer goods to construction to exploring for minerals and oil, the ability to crunch bigger and bigger data sets and make sense of them is improving pretty much every type of human endeavour. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine, said the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to predict: “Take X and add AI.” (15) To coin a phrase, blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the Earth. Healthcare is an interesting industry in this respect, because it has so far appeared to lag behind the general trend to improved performance from better information.

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth
by Juan Enriquez
Published 15 Feb 2001

One of the great minds on competitive analysis is Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. He has looked at flowers as well as a myriad of other industries in various books, including The Competitive Advantage of Nations, Competitive Advantage, and Competitive Strategy. 7. A lot of people have written on this phenomenon of a new economy; one of my favorites is Wired editor Kevin Kelly. Many of the ideas in this chapter come from his book New Rules for the New Economy (New York: Viking, 1998). Peter F. Drucker has also been detailing these changes for decades, starting with The End of the Economic Man (1939). See also his Post-Capitalist Society (1993). 8. Robert Metcalf, founder of 3Com, argues the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of people in it. 9.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

It is also clear that technology and humanity coevolve, which again will pose the question of who will be in control. In Silicon Valley it has become fashionable to celebrate the rise of the machines, most clearly in the emergence of organizations like the Singularity Institute and in books like Kevin Kelly’s 2010 What Technology Wants. In an earlier book in 1994, Out of Control, Kelly came down firmly on the side of the machines. He described a meeting between AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and Doug Engelbart: When the two gurus met at MIT in the 1950s, they are reputed to have had the following conversation: Minsky: We’re going to make machines intelligent.

…

Humans Match Wits,” New York Times, November 9, 1991, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/09/us/can-machines-think-humans-match-wits.html. 6.Jonathan Grudin, “AI and HCI: Two Fields Divided by a Common Focus,” AI Magazine, Winter 2009, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=138574. 7.John McCarthy, book review of B. P. Bloomfield, The Question of Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives, in Annals of the History of Computing 10, no. 3 (1988): 224–229. 8.Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (New York: Perseus, 1994), 33–34. 2|A CRASH IN THE DESERT 1.Jerry Kaplan, presentation at Stanford University Probabilistic AI lunch meeting, May 6, 2013. 2.Defense Science Board, “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” U.S. Department of Defense, July 2012, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/AutonomyReport.pdf. 3.James R.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

Adam Thierer (11 Mar 2012), “Avoiding a precautionary principle for the Internet,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamthierer/2012/03/11/avoiding-a-precautionary-principle-for-the-internet. Andy Stirling (8 Jul 2013), “Why the precautionary principle matters,” Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2013/jul/08/precautionary-principle-science-policy. 155We don’t want to—and can’t: Kevin Kelly has written about how to be deliberate in deciding which technologies society should use, and how to roll them out. Kevin Kelly (2010), What Technology Wants, Viking, https://books.google.com/books?id =_ToftPd4R8UC. 156International cooperation is coming: It’s starting. This arrest was made by Spanish police, with support from the FBI; Romanian, Belarusian, and Taiwanese authorities; and several cybersecurity companies.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

We’ve already seen some examples of how physicians react to the threat of being marginalized, along with their general reluctance to adapt to new technology. Now we get into the “Second Machine Age”101 question as to whether the new digital landscape will reboot the need for doctors and health professionals. Kevin Kelly, a cofounder of Wired, has asserted: “The role tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer: The robot takeover will be epic.”102 An emergency medicine physician likened the current practice of medicine to a Radio Shack store in his piece “Doctor Dinosaur: Physicians may not be exempt from extinction.”103 In late 2013, Korean doctors threatened to go on an all-out strike if the government went ahead with new telemedicine laws that would support clinical diagnoses to be made remotely.

…

On either end of it are intelligent human beings who are ready to assume quite different roles from what the history of medicine has established. Patients will always crave and need the human touch from a doctor, but that can be had on a more selective basis with the tools at hand. Instead of doctors being squeezed, resorting to computer automation can actually markedly expand their roles. As Kevin Kelly wrote, “the rote tasks of any information-intensive job can be automated. It doesn’t matter if you are a doctor, lawyer, architect, reporter, or even programmer.”102 The Economist weighed in on this too: “The machines are not just cleverer, but they also have access to far more data. The combination of big data and smart machines will take over some occupations wholesale.”153 But smart doctors need not feel threatened, for their occupation is secure.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

Also see Tony Judt, “The New Old Nationalisms,” The New York Review of Books, May 26, 1994, pp. 44–51. 3. Two recent books, the one by Zbigniew Brzezinski cited above about the “global turmoil” of ethnic nationalism (Jihad), the other by Kevin Kelly about computers and “the rise of neo-biological civilization [McWorld]” both carry the title “Out of Control.” See Brzezinski, Out of Control; and Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994). The metaphor is everywhere: for example, in Andrew Bard Schmookler’s The Illusion of Choice (Albany: State University of New York at Albany Press, 1993), Part III on runaway markets is also entitled “Out of Control.” 4.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

To download the full interview with Derek Sivers about how he turned a side project, CD Baby, into a 75 person business and the qualities of musicians that are successful selling online (and how those lessons transfer to other industries), go to http://taylorpearson.me/eoj 31. To download an interview with Dan on how he turned a $40,000 per year web design agency Into a $40,000 per month recurring revenue service, go to http://taylorpearson.me/eoj Chapter 8 32. Kevin Kelly, write about his the phenomenon in more detail at http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/03/1000-true-fans/ 33. To hear more from Andrew about the lifestyle and business possibilities enabled by the eCommerce drop shipping model and why individuals with hard skills and ambition has more opportunity than ever and why those without are screwed, download his interview at http://taylorpearson.me/eoj 34. http://www.innosight.com/innovation-resources/strategy-innovation/upload/creative-destruction-whips-through-corporate-america_final2012.pdf Chapter 9 35. http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ and http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ 36.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

Wiener is described by the reviewer – presumably Brand – as “one of the founders of an n-dimensional world whose nature we’ve yet to learn. He is also one of the all-time nice men.” In a talk he gave in 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog “one of the bibles of my generation”, describing it as a Google in paperback form, idealistic and overflowing with incredible tools. Wired founder Kevin Kelly compared it to the modern-day blogosphere, calling it “a great example of user-generated content” thanks to Brand’s habit of encouraging readers to submit their own reviews and earn themselves a fee of $10. It won a National Book Award – the first, and probably only time, a catalogue ever won such a plaudit.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

This world can already be glimpsed on the web, in what John Barlow calls ‘dot-communism’: a workforce of free agents bartering their ideas and efforts barely interested in whether the barter yields ‘real’ money. The explosion of interest in the free sharing of ideas that the internet has spawned has taken everybody by surprise. ‘The online masses have an incredible willingness to share’ says Kevin Kelly. Instead of money, ‘peer producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction and experience’. People are willing to share their photographs on Flickr, their thoughts on Twitter, their friends on Facebook, their knowledge on Wikipedia, their software patches on Linux, their donations on GlobalGiving, their community news on Craigslist, their pedigrees on Ancestry.com, their genomes on 23andMe, even their medical records on PatientsLikeMe.

…

This notion has been explored by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil. See Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near. Penguin. p. 355 ‘says Stephen Levy.’ Levy, S. 2009. Googlenomics. Wired, June 2009. p. 356 ‘says the author Clay Shirky’. Shirky, C. 2008. Here Comes Everybody. Penguin. p. 356 ‘Says Kevin Kelly’. Kelly, K. 2009. The new socialism. Wired, June 2009. p. 358 ‘The wrong kind of chiefs, priests and thieves could yet snuff out future prosperity on earth.’ Meir Kohn has written eloquently on this point. See www.dartmouth.edu/~mkohn/Papers/lessons% 201r3.pdf. p. 359 ‘Said Lord Macaulay’.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Jason Leopold (30 Oct 2013), “Revealed: NSA pushed 9/11 as key ‘sound bite’ to justify surveillance,” Al Jazeera, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911askeysoundbitetojustifysurveillance.html. Clay Shirky has noted: Clay Shirky (14 Mar 2010), Remarks at South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin, TX, quoted in Kevin Kelly (2 Apr 2010), “The Shirky principle,” Kevin Kelly, http://kk.org/thetechnium/2010/04/the-shirky-prin. And then the laws will change: Stewart Baker (24 Feb 2014), Remarks at 2014 Executive Security Action Forum Annual Meeting, RSA Conference, San Francisco, California. Jack Goldsmith again: Jack Goldsmith (9 Aug 2013), “Reflections on NSA oversight, and a prediction that NSA authorities (and oversight, and transparency) will expand,” Lawfare, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2013/08/reflections-on-nsa-oversight-and-a-prediction-that-nsa-authorities-and-oversight-and-transparency-will-expand.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

The American physicist Albert Michelson, who won a Nobel Prize for measuring the speed of light, gave a speech at the University of Chicago in 1894, declaring that there was probably little else to discover in physics besides additional decimal places.1 He died in 1931, as quantum mechanics was in full swing. And in his 1995 book, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates made no mention of the internet, though he substantially revised it about a year later, humbly admitting that he had “vastly underestimated how important and how quickly” the internet would come to prominence.2 Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired magazine, who has a better track record than most at predicting the future, has a golden rule: “Embrace things rather than try and fight them. Work with things rather than try and run from them or prohibit them.”3 We often fail to acknowledge that knowledge is multiplicative and technologies are synergistic.

…

Kelly added a key point to that excellent mantra: “It’s by use [that] we figure out what things are good for. Which is perhaps another way of saying “Go with the flow and see where it takes you.” J. Altucher, “One Rule for Predicting What You Never Saw Coming . . . ,” The Mission, July 15, 2016, https://medium.com/the-mission/kevin-kelly-one-rule-for-predicting-what-you-never-saw-coming-1e9e4eeae1da. 4. L. Gratton and A. Scott, The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018). 5. A phrase originating with the theologian Theodore Parker but made famous by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and used several times by President Barack Obama. 6.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

Given the perceived shift in recent decades (in the Western world, at least) from an industrial to a postindustrial society, the continued dependence of information-economy firms like Amazon on material infrastructure and the manipulation of physical objects is surprising, if not paradoxical. Despite repeated claims that the defining characteristic of the information society is “the displacement in our economy of materials by information,” as Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly has described it—or, in the even more succinct and memorable words of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, the inevitable shift “from atoms to bits”—what has in fact occurred is a massive increase in our interaction with our physical environment.12 Information technologies allow humans to visualize, explore, and exploit our environment more efficiently.

…

Timothy Wu, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2018); Susan Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 12. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1996); Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 13. Joshua Ganz, “Inside the Black Box: A Look at the Container,” Prometheus 13, no. 2 (1995), 169–183; Alexander Klose, The Container Principle: How a Box Changes the Way We Think (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 14.

Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore
Published 18 Jun 2018

Officials are not the opposite side of the coin from their ministers; they are playing a different game. They are also human beings, and the vast majority clearly want to do a good job. Lots are desperate for change. Many people are already doing their best in fact, but the system they are in thwarts them. Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, once said, ‘Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution’, calling it the Shirky Principle in honour of Clay Shirky, an expert on institutions and how they behave.13 Bureaucracies will also, as one experienced British official put it, tend to ‘resolve ambiguity in favour of continuity’.

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America
by Steven Johnson
Published 26 Dec 2008

First, NYU’s School of Journalism, for letting me teach a graduate seminar on Cultural Ecosystems, and my students there who contributed so many helpful ideas (and who, I’m thankful to report, shot down more than a few of my less helpful ones). My friends at the Long Now Foundation—Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, and Alexander Rose—were kind enough to invite me to discuss the “long zoom” approach to cultural history at one of their seminars in long-term thinking in 2007. I was also lucky enough to be invited to discuss these issues onstage with Brian at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy
by Pistono, Federico
Published 14 Oct 2012

I had many discussions regarding the issue of technological unemployment, particularly during my Graduate Study Program at Singularity University, NASA Ames Research Center, where I had the opportunity to speak with some of the greatest minds on the field, including the authors of the book “Race Against the Machine” Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, founding executive editor of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge. I stand by my thesis, that the economy will not abide in creating new jobs at the same pace with which technology destroys them. Many disagree with me, and we could have a discussion about that, but I think this is missing the point.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush
Published 10 Jan 2021

Brown, and Simon C. Moore, “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction,” Psychological Science, February 18, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610362671. “Emotional Competency - Envy,” accessed November 25, 2020, http://www.emotionalcompetency.com/envy.htm. Kevin Kelly, “68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice,” The Technium (blog), accessed November 25, 2020, https://kk.org/thetechnium/68-bits-of-unsolicited-advice/. “How to Deal with Extreme Envy,” Time, accessed November 25, 2020, https://time.com/4358803/jealousy-envy-advice/. Wilco W. van Dijk et al., “The Role of Self-Evaluation and Envy in Schadenfreude,” European Review of Social Psychology 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 247–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2015.1111600.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

Eliot once wrote, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” 34.For the seminal article on this topic, see William F. Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, “Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution,” Political Science Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1922): 83–98. For further interesting discussion, see Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking Adult, 2010), ch. 7. 35.See Christopher A. Cotropia and Mark A. Lemley, “Copying in Patent Law,” North Carolina Law Review 87, no. 5 (2009): 1421–66. Chapter 5 1.Morris M. Kleiner, “Occupational Licensing: Protecting the Public Interest or Protectionism?”

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

In today’s business climate, we again see this pattern emerge through algorithms taking care of management and humans accounting for the leadership responsibilities. This idea indicates that the way to run organizations in the future will be to follow a collaboration model, where algorithms and humans jointly create value. As Kevin Kelly in his book, The Inevitable, notes: “This is not a race against the machines … This is a race with the machines.”¹⁰⁵ * * * 89 Tarnoff, B. (2017). ‘Silicon Valley siphons our data like oil. But the deepest drilling has just begun.’ The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/23/silicon-valley-big-data-extraction-amazon-whole-foods-facebook 90 Thorp, J. (2012).

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor
by Glyn Moody
Published 26 Sep 2022

It derives its power from the special bond that links creators with their most loyal fans, and the fact that the Internet allows them to connect, wherever either party may be located. It removes what Fight for the Future’s campaigns and communications director Lia Holland has called the ‘choke point that is created by these big moneyed interests between creators and their fans that want to support them.’740 One of the earliest and best expositions of the concept came from Kevin Kelly,741 former Executive Editor at Wired magazine, in an essay he wrote in 2008. He has updated the idea in the light of more recent developments that make it even more compelling and easier to realise: “To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

In the summer of 1999, James Glassman, enjoying the attention that Dow 36,000 was receiving, faced off against Barton Biggs, Morgan Stanley’s skeptical equity strategist, in a debate on the new economy. Glassman argued that the Internet was the most important invention of the twentieth century. He was mirroring the views of Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired: How many times in the history of mankind have we wired up the planet to create a single marketplace? How often have entire new channels of commerce been created by digital technology? When has money itself been transformed into thousands of instruments of investment?

…

Bernstein (1996) “The basics of investing and portfolio theory” (www.efficientfrontier.com). 20. Devin Leonard “Treasury’s got Bill Gross on speed dial” (20 June 2009) New York Times. 21. Ibid. 22. Louis Rukeyser (26 July 2002) Wall Street Week, CNBC. 23. Peter Applebome “Contemplating the boobs we were” (27 December 2008) New York Times. 24. Kevin Kelly “Prophets of boom” (September 1999) Wired. 25. Ibid: 151. 26. John Cassidy (2002) dot.con, Perennial, New York: 254–5. Chapter 7—Los Cee-Ca-Go Boys 1. Milton Friedman “Schools: Chicago” (Autumn 1974) University of Chicago Magazine 11–16: 11. 2. P.J. O’Rourke (1998) Eat The Rich, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York: 123. 3.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
by Chris Guillebeau
Published 7 May 2012

Suddenly you have the first part of success—something of value. I got all this from The $100 Startup, which is full of practical advice about inventing your own livelihood. I’ve done a handful of $100 startups myself, several of which I later sold. Chris Guillebeau knows what he is talking about. Listen to this book! —Kevin Kelly, author of What Technology Wants “This book is more than a ‘how to’ guide, it’s a ‘how they did it’ guide that should persuade anyone thinking about starting a business that they don’t need a fortune to make one.” —John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine “Is that giant knot in your stomach keeping you from starting your own business or pursuing the career of your dreams?

Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff
by Dinah Sanders
Published 7 Oct 2011

How many excellent things can you allow to fall into your life in the next 24 hours? Start counting the delights. Carpe diem! Symptom #26: Plugged into the Wrong Connections Solution #26: Unfollow-Unsubscribe-Cancel-Delete-Donate-Discard It used to be you define yourself by what you use; now you define yourself by what you don’t use. —Kevin Kelly, editor What’s coming at you? As you shift your habits to spend more time on what is truly important to you, it will also be necessary to adjust how much of that important stuff you can actually take on without creating new stresses for yourself. Even though you’re doing the right things to reduce your load, it can seem as if you’re still only able to make so much progress before you get that drowning feeling again.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

Not everyone is an expert in supercomputing and not everyone has the ability, nor the resources (his regimen costs between $5,000 and $10,000 each year) to capture huge amounts of personal data, or to make sense of it in the event that they do. But Smarr is not alone. As a data junkie, he is a valued member of the so-called Quantified Self movement: an ever-expanding group of similar individuals who enthusiastically take part in a form of self-tracking, somatic surveillance. Founded by Wired magazine editors Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly in the mid-2000s, the Quantified Self movement casts its aspirations in bold philosophical terms, promising devotees “self-knowledge through numbers.”4 Taking the Positivist view of verification and empiricism, and combining this with a liberal dose of technological determinism, the Quantified Self movement begs the existential question of what kind of self can possibly exist that is unable to be number-crunched using the right algorithms?

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection
by Michael Harris
Published 6 Aug 2014

But we now have near perfect replication online. We are now becoming, by Blackmore’s estimation, teme machines—servants to the evolution of our own technologies. The power shifts very quickly from the spark of human intention to the absorption of human will by a technology that seems to have intentions of its own. Kevin Kelly takes this notion to the nth degree in his 2010 book, What Technology Wants, where he anthropomorphizes technologies and asks what they would like us to do. “The evolution of technology converges in much the same manner as biological evolution,” he argues. He sees parallels to bioevolution in the fact that the number of lines of code in Microsoft Windows, for example, multiplied ten times since 1993, becoming more complex as time goes on just as biological organisms tend to do.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
by Ajay Agrawal , Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb
Published 16 Apr 2018

It speaks in a language that top executives and policy makers will understand. Every leader needs to read this book.” — DOMINIC BARTON, Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company “This book makes artificial intelligence easier to understand by recasting it as a new, cheap commodity—predictions. It’s a brilliant move. I found the book incredibly useful.” — KEVIN KELLY, founding executive editor, Wired; author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable Copyright HBR Press Quantity Sales Discounts Harvard Business Review Press titles are available at significant quantity discounts when purchased in bulk for client gifts, sales promotions, and premiums. Special editions, including books with corporate logos, customized covers, and letters from the company or CEO printed in the front matter, as well as excerpts of existing books, can also be created in large quantities for special needs.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that ‘Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus’, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing. Aristotle 4 Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour Productivity is for robots. Kevin Kelly When Capital Becomes Labour In 2011 the Economist, in circulation since 1843, posed its readers a question: ‘What happens when … machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour?’ While early giants of classical political economy, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, did not view capitalist society as defined by conflict between classes, they did presume that labour would always remain distinct from ‘capital stock’, and that workers could never equate to human-made goods used in production such as machinery, tools and buildings.

All Tomorrow's Parties
by William Gibson
Published 2 Jan 1999

To Deb and Graeme and Claire, with love, for putting up with far more than the ordinary basement-dwelling. To Julia Witwer. for being this text's first reader and more. The following are special friends of this book: Gordon Begg, Judith Beale, Jessica Eastman, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Mark Halyk, Richard Kadrev, Kevin Kelly, Lueza Jean Lamb, Roger Trilling, Jack Womack. Thank you all. And to the post-cyberpunk contingent in Mexico City, who, though I declined their thoughtful offer of the definitive alternative tour, encouraged me, with their warm enthusiasm, through the writing of a crucial chapter in the Hotel Camino Real.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

Media historians Randall Packer and Ken Jordan gleefully proclaim that “[m]ultimedia, by its very nature, is open, democratic, nonhierarchical, fluid, varied, inclusive.”5 Their claim is essentially true, but for completely opposite reasons than they might hope for. I aim here to answer the question: How is a technology able to establish real-world control when it lacks certain fundamental tools such as hierarchy, centralization, and violence? Why does technology seem, as Kevin Kelly likes to put it, so “out of control” yet still function so flawlessly? There must be some machine that, at the end of the day, sorts it all out. Protocol is that machine, that massive control apparatus that guides distributed networks, creates cultural objects, and engenders life forms. This book is not meant to be a history of protocol or protocols.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Steven Kotler
Published 11 May 2015

And so it is for all of us. These are exponential times. The far frontier is no longer a distant dream. It is there today and here tomorrow, and that’s the thing: Luddite revolutions don’t seem to hold for long. Resisting the lure of technology isn’t really in us. In What Technology Wants, Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly argues that this is because technology is actually another form of life — a living, natural system with ancient origins and deep desires. And while Kelly has a point, I also think there’s simpler truth at work. Life is tricky sport. It can be hard here, often harder than we want it to be, sometimes harder than we can take.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

Jaron Lanier, in a widely read online essay published in May 2006, alleged that ‘digital Maoism’ was promoting collective stupidity. People were taking their lead, Lanier argued, from the all-wise ‘collective’ rather than bothering to think for themselves. His case is only strengthened by web advocates, such as Kevin Kelly, the original editor of Wired, who claim that the web is creating a ‘hive mind’, that of an anonymous collective in which individuals are like bees or ants. The American sociologist Sherry Turkle has echoed these fears, questioning whether young people will form a sharp sense of individual identity if they are tethered to their phone and social relationships, unable to be alone and to reflect on what matters to them because they are acting up to the online audience that constantly accompanies them.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Despite the disappointments of the last few decades (or perhaps because they don’t fully acknowledge them), the default assumption of most futurists is that one or more of these scenarios are inevitable. When you go looking for people in our culture who still talk like Victorian-era utopians, you’ll often find visions that fold together all of these possible breakthroughs. In 2014 Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired magazine, asked his Twitter followers to compose a “100-word description of a plausible technological future in 100 years” that they or he would want to live in. The responses he published had a certain commonality, envisioning a postscarcity, leisure-rich economy and a society trending toward some form or another of transhumanism.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

Paul Leinberger and Bruce Tucker, The New Individualists: The Generation After the Organization Man (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 400–1; Saxenian, Regional Advantage, pp. 59–60, 77, 107; Daisuke Wakabayashi, “How Japan Lost Its Electronics Crown,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2012. 46. Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Morrow, 1980), pp. 53, 171, 437. 47. Kevin Kelly, New Rules for a New Economy: Ten Radical Strategies for a Connected World (New York: Viking, 1998, pp. 118-119. 48. Geoffrey James, Business Wisdom of the Electronic Elite (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 4–5, 222; Leo Marx, “Information Technology in Historical Perspective,” in David Schon, Bish Sanyal, and William Mitchell, High Technology and Low Income Communities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 136: Thomas Mahon, Charged Bodies: People, Power and Paradox in Silicon Valley (New York: New American Library, 1985), p. 31. 49.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Twenty years ago, pundits believed the Internet was going to make the world better in all sorts of ways, from perfecting democracy to saving the planet. Best of all would be the financial impact. During the heady days of the first dotcom boom, when stocks were soaring and people were mooning over the magical powers of the web, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly declared the Internet would usher in decades of “ultraprosperity,” with “full employment…and improving living standards.” We were entering “the roaring zeroes,” as he called it, while declaring, “The good news is, you’ll be a millionaire soon. The bad news is, so will everybody else.” Bill Gates would become a trillionaire, Kelly predicted, perhaps as soon as 2005.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
by Aaron Dignan
Published 1 Feb 2019

Edwards Deming, David Dewane, Peter Drucker, Amy Edmondson, Charles Eisenstein, Gerard Endenburg, Robin Fraser, Jason Fried, Isaac Getz, James Gleick, Seth Godin, Deborah Gordon, Paul Graham, Adam Grant, Dave Gray, Gary Hamel, David Heinemeier Hansson, Tim Harford, Frederick Herzberg, Jeremy Hope, Steven Johnson, Daniel Kahneman, Kevin Kelly, David Kidder, Doug Kirkpatrick, Henrik Kniberg, Lars Kolind, John Kotter, Frederic Laloux, Jason Little, David Marquet, John E. Mayfield, Douglas McGregor, Greg McKeown, Melanie Mitchell, Taiichi Ohno, Tom Peters, Niels Pflaeging, Daniel Pink, Adam Pisoni, Eric Ries, Brian Robertson, Ricardo Semler, Peter Senge, Simon Sinek, Dave Snowden, Nassim Taleb, Ben Thompson, Geoffrey West, Meg Wheatley, Keith Yamashita, Jean-Francois Zobrist, and the few I forgot.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Cynics assumed he resorted to hyperbole in order to grab headlines and sell books. And indeed, The Singularity Is Near became a New York Times bestseller, with a quarter of a million copies sold over ten years. The book received a particularly enthusiastic reception in Silicon Valley. Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly called it “a seminal document” presaging “the beginning of utopia.” Bill Gates offered a blurb for this “intriguing” book: “Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence.” Others viewed Kurzweil’s transformation in a different light. “Ray Kurzweil is a genius.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

According to Turner, “there emerged the image of a new kind of person, one who moved from task to task pursuing information and using technical tools in an experimental manner for the advancement of himself or herself and society” (88). 12. Some believers often went even further, adopting a worldview in which systems such as markets are conceptualized as biological systems—that is, naturally occurring processes over which humans have little control. Kevin Kelly, cofounder and editor of the flagship publication of the cyberculture, Wired, explicitly embraced this bionomic ideology, as did others. See Turner (2006, chap. 7); and Frank (2000). 13. Joining “the free-wheeling spirit” of hippies with the “entrepreneurial zeal” of yuppies is from Barbrook and Cameron (1996, 1). 14.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 48. Introduction 1. “Digital Transformation of Industries: Demystifying Digital and Securing $100 Trillion for Society and Industry by 2025,” World Economic Forum, January 2016. 2. “System Crash,” Economist, November 12, 2017. 3. Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Viking, 2016) Chapter One 1. For more on Wiener, Bush, and Licklider’s role in the creation of the internet, see Andrew Keen, The Internet Is Not the Answer (Grove Atlantic, 2015), 14–18. 2. For an excellent overview of the nineteenth-century origins of privacy, see: Jill Lepore, “The Prism: Privacy in an Age of Publicity,” New Yorker, June 24, 2013. 3.

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

Some, however, find it psychologically easier to become a cheerleader for the coming wonders of technological progress, and to glaze over with fatalistic indifference at any mention of dystopian potentials. It helps if you get paid to do this, and many mainstream futurists get paid a lot of money to style themselves as prophets of inevitabilities. For example, in 2016 Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, published The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. The title presents the future like the weather – as something that will simply happen to you. The twelfth prediction in his ‘weather forecast’ is that we will be absorbed into a ‘planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix’.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Barlow wrote that governments “have no sovereignty where we gather,” and declared cyberspace “to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”24 Notably, Barlow did not share the same disdain for the corporations that flocked to the internet and shaped it to serve their bottom lines. The EFF became influential in the debates about internet legislation through the 1990s, but even more important was Wired magazine. Kevin Kelly, its founding executive editor, previously served as editor of the Whole Earth Review and imbued the publication with a similar ethos. Louis Rossetto, one of the magazine’s founders, “saw the digital revolution as an extension of a long-standing, if not widely acknowledged, American libertarian tradition,” and under Kelly’s direction, writers “utilized the computational metaphors and universal rhetoric of cybernetics to depict New Right politicians, telecommunications CEOs, information pundits, and members of … Whole Earth–connected organizations as a single, leading edge of countercultural revolution.”25 As a result, Wired’s pages served as a meeting place for the tech industry and the socially conservative Republicans who shared their desire for an internet free of government control or regulation.

What Would Google Do?
by Jeff Jarvis
Published 15 Feb 2009

Conversations can grow around ideas in books, exposing them to new readers. Writing in Library Journal, Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book envisioned a digital ecology in which “parts of books will reference parts of other books. Books will be woven together out of components in remote databases and servers.” Kevin Kelly wrote in The New York Times Magazine: “In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.” When an idea is spread among people, it can grow and adapt and live on past the page. Before a convention of booksellers in 2006, author John Updike called Kelly’s vision of “relationships, links, connection and sharing” Marxist and “a pretty grisly scenario.”

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 1 Jan 2005

Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.” Van Riper carried this lesson with him when he took over the helm of Red Team. “The first thing I told our staff is that we would be in command and out of control,” Van Riper says, echoing the words of the management guru Kevin Kelly. “By that, I mean that the overall guidance and the intent were provided by me and the senior leadership, but the forces in the field wouldn’t depend on intricate orders coming from the top. They were to use their own initiative and be innovative as they went forward. Almost every day, the commander of the Red air forces came up with different ideas of how he was going to pull this together, using these general techniques of trying to overwhelm Blue Team from different directions.

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
by Gabriel Wyner
Published 4 Aug 2014

—Melanie Pinola, contributor writer for Lifehacker.com and author of LinkedIn in 30 Minutes “This is the book I’d use next time I want to learn a new language. It employs an intelligent mix of the latest methods for learning a language on your own using the Web, apps, and voice-training tips in an accelerated time frame.” —Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired and author of What Technology Wants “I know what you’re thinking: But learning a new language is soooo hard! The solution? Stop being a whiner and start reading Wyner. This book is a winner! Guaranteed to rewire your brain in as many languages as you’d like.” —Joel Saltzman, author of Shake That Brain!

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank
by Chris Skinner
Published 27 Aug 2013

Do banks provide the core processing or are banks sitting on top of someone else’s core processing? The culture of the bank is actually more important than the technology and, at the core of the culture, is the question: do you understand the customer and their needs in this new digital age? The New Economics of Digital Banking Back in the 1990s, Kevin Kelly, senior maverick and launch editor of Wired Magazine, told me that everything would become free thanks to the internet. I thought he was nuts at the time, but how wrong was I? Kevin has 12 lessons about how to think about the internet, and they were difficult to absorb as, bearing in mind this was back in 1997, he was far too ahead of his time.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

eISBN: 9781477850831 Cover design by Dave Stanton Author photograph © Ryan Heffernan Cover art © Scott Serfas Contents Start Reading Preface: The Why of Flow Introduction: Before the Flow PART ONE HE IS THIS FRENZY 1 The Way of Flow 2 The Wave of Flow 3 The Where of Flow 4 The What of Flow 5 The Flow Shortcut PART TWO FLOW HACKER NATION 6 Outer Flow 7 Inner Flow 8 The We of Flow 9 The Flow of Imagination PART THREE TIME TO RISE 10 The Dark Side of Flow 11 The Flow of Next 12 Flow to Abundance Afterword Author’s Note Notes About the Author Index The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped. – KEVIN KELLY Preface: The Why of Flow This is a book about the impossible, but it starts with the invisible. Over the past three decades, an unlikely collection of men and women have pushed human performance farther and faster than at any other point in the 150,000-year history of our species. In this evolutionary eyeblink, they have completely redefined the limits of the possible.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

Marin, Ryan Block, Tom Bodkin, Danah Boyd, Matt Buchanan, David Carr, Brian Chen, Mathias Crawford, Tony and Mary Conrad, Tom Conrad, Paddy Cosgrave, Dennis Crowley, Damon Darlin, Anil Dash, Mike Driscoll, Aaron Durand, Josh Felser, Tim Ferris, Brady Forrest, David Gallhager, Michael Galpert, John Geddes, Shelly Gerrish, Ashley Khaleesi Granata, Mark Hansen, Quentin Hardy, Leland Hayward, Erica Hintergardt, Mat Honan, Arianna Huffington, Kate Imbach, Larry Ingrassia, Walter Isaccson, Mike Issac, Joel Johnson, Andrei Kallaur, Paul Kedrosky, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Koyen, Brian Lam, Jeremy LaTrasse, Steven Levy, Allen Loeb, Kati London, Om Malik, John Markoff, Hubert McCabe, Christopher Michel, Claire Cain Miller, Trudy Muller, Tim O’Reilly, Carolyn Penner, Nicole Perlroth, Megan Quinn, Narendra Rocherolle, Jennifer Rodriguez, Evelyn Rusli, Naveen Selvadurai, Ryan and Devon Sarver, Elliot Schrage, Mari Sheibley, MG Siegler, Courtney Skott, Robin Sloan, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Suzanne Spector, Brad Stone, David Streitfeld, Gabriel Stricker, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Kara Swisher, Clive Thompson, Deep Throat, Baratunde Thurston, Mark Trammell, Sara Morishige Williams, Nick Wingfield, Jenna Wortham, Aaron Zamost, Edith Zimmerman.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
by Mike Power
Published 1 May 2013

Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech. It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Feb 1995

microserfs By Douglas Coupland thanks: John Batelle Elizabeth Dunn Ian Ferrell James Glave James Joaquin Kevin Kelly Jane Metcalfe Judith Regan Louis Rossetto Nathan Shedroff Michael Tchao Ian Verchere Contents: 1 Microserfs 2 Oop 3 Interiority 4 FaceTime 5 TrekPolitiks 6 Chyx 7 Transhumanity 1 Microserfs FRIDAY Early Fall, 1993 This morning, just after 11:00, Michael locked himself in his office and he won't come out. Bill (Bill!) sent Michael this totally wicked flame-mail from hell on the e-mail system - and he just wailed on a chunk of code Michael had written. Using the Bloom County-cartoons-taped-on-the-door index, Michael is certainly the most sensitive coder in Building Seven - not the type to take criticism easily.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

* Rodney Brooks, for example, asserts that it’s impossible for a program to be “smart enough that it would be able to invent ways to subvert human society to achieve goals set for it by humans, without understanding the ways in which it was causing problems for those same humans,” http://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai. * Kevin Kelly, “The Myth of a Superhuman AI,” Wired, April 25, 2017. * See Hadfield-Menell et al., “The Off-Switch Game,” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.08219.pdf. * The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954), 96. * Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 354–61

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

To see how this principle produces the biases we cover in Decisive, see his analysis of narrow framing (p. 87), overconfidence (pp. 199–201, 209–12, and 259–63), confirmation bias (pp. 80–84), and emotion and indecision (pp. 401–6). 2 Career choices. The 40% failure rate is described in Brooke Masters, “Rise of a Headhunter,” Financial Times, March 30, 2009, http://​www.​ft.​com/​cms/​s/​0/​19975256-​1af2-​11de-​8aa3-​0000779fd2ac.​html#axzz24O1​DwtbW. Describing the costs of these decisions, Kevin Kelly, the CEO of the prominent executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, says, “It’s expensive in terms of lost revenue. It’s expensive in terms of the individual’s hiring. It’s damaging to morale.” The teaching study is National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, “Policy Brief: The High Cost of Teacher Turnover,” http://​nctaf.​org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​NCTAF​Cost​of​Teacher​Turn​over​policy​brief.​pdf.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

Instead of simply pursuing incremental goals, we also need to set and deliver against goals that will have 10X (i.e., tenfold) or 100X the impact on anywhere between one million and one billion people. Looking back now, I had been exploring the edges of exponential thinking for quite a while. In 2005, for example, I visited Wired magazine’s founding editor Kevin Kelly at his home in California. His books Out of Control and New Rules for the New Economy had helped shift my vision of the future from a future of scarcity to one increasingly characterized, at least in some areas, by abundance. In a world increasingly marked by decreasing returns and limits to growth, he argued that new digital technology offered increasing—indeed exponentially accelerating—returns.

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 15 Nov 2004

But when the copyright owners oppose a proposal such as the Eldred Act, then, finally, there is an example that lays bare the naked selfinterest driving this war. This act would free an extraordinary range of content that is otherwise unused. It wouldn't interfere with any copyright owner's desire to exercise continued control over his content. It would simply liberate what Kevin Kelly calls the "Dark Content" that fills archives around the world. So when the warriors oppose a change like this, we should ask one simple question: What does this industry really want? With very little effort, the warriors could protect their content. So the effort to block something like the Eldred Act is not really about protecting their content.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

Analog is always the source, always the truth. Reality is analog. Digital is the best we can do with the tools of the day,” he said. “It’s funny how often people forget that.” On the morning I was booked to fly home from San Francisco, I took a detour on the way to the airport to speak with Kevin Kelly, best known as one of the founding editors of Wired magazine. Kelly belongs to a core group of techno-idealists who see digital technology as a force for ultimate good, and he pioneered some of the earliest online communities and social networks. In 2010, Kelly published What Technology Wants, a book on how technology shapes us as human beings, which a young computer programmer named Mike Murchison strongly suggested I read, specifically for Kelly’s thoughts on how our use of technology evolved, and how that related to the Revenge of Analog.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon
Published 1 Jan 1996

Helen Samuels and the folks at MIT archives were immensely helpful, as was Kevin Corbitt, assistant archivist at the Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Information Processing, at the University of Minnesota. We are grateful to John Day, Larry Roberts, Al Vezza, and John Shoch for digging around in old boxes for us. Deborah Melone and Bob Menk sent photographs and archives from BBN. Kevin Kelly and Martha Baer at Wired magazine got us focused on the history of e-mail. Noel Chiappa, good-natured tutor, spent hours on the telephone explaining, among other technical points, how routing tables and RFNMs work. The following people allowed us to interview them at length: Wes Clark, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts, Jon Postel, Frank Heart, Alex McKenzie, Dave Walden, Ben Barker, Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Len Kleinrock, Steve Lukasik, Steve Crocker, and Bob Metcalfe.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

The company has also said: Eric M. Johnson, “Exclusive: Jeff Bezos Plans to Charge at Least $200,000 for Space Rides—Sources,” Reuters, July 12, 2018, In the spring of 2019: Kenneth Chang, “Jeff Bezos Unveils Blue Origin’s Vision for Space, and a Moon Lander,” New York Times, May 9, 2019. The clock rests: Kevin Kelly, “Clock in the Mountain,” blog, The Long Now Foundation, n.d., http://longnow.org/clock/. Near the top of the five-hundred-foot-tall tunnel: Ibid. Chapter 5: Cranking the AI Flywheel Then he came up with Amazon.com: Stone, The Everything Store, 35. to make life a little easier: Ibid., 50. In 2002, he instituted: Ibid., 169.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and George A Bekey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 223–232. 13. Raja Roy, “Exploring the Boundary Conditions of Disruption: Large Firms and New Product Introduction with a Potentially Disruptive Technology in the Industrial Robotics Industry,” 2014, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6578147. 14. Kevin Kelly, “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—And Must—Take Our Jobs,” Wired, 2012, http://www.wired.com/ gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/all/. 15. Ibid. 16. I do not want to brag, but I was once “crew member of the month” at my local McDonald’s. 17. Peter Murray, “Robot Serves Up 360 Hamburgers Per Hour,” Singularity Hub, 2013, http://singularityhub.com/2013/01/22/ robot-serves-up-340-hamburgers-per-hour/. 18.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

All of the largest technology companies have poured billions of dollars into AI research and development, either hiring AI experts directly or acquiring smaller start-up companies for the sole purpose of grabbing (“acqui-hiring”) their talented employees. The potential of being acquired, with its promise of instant millionaire status, has fueled a proliferation of start-ups, often founded and run by former university professors, each with his or her own twist on AI. As the technology journalist Kevin Kelly observed, “The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.”5 And, crucially, for nearly all of these companies, AI has meant “deep learning.” AI spring is once again in full bloom. AI: Narrow and General, Weak and Strong Like every AI spring before it, our current one features experts predicting that “general AI”—AI that equals or surpasses humans in most ways—will be here soon.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

Evgeny Dantsin, Thomas Eiter, Georg Gottlob, and Andrei Voronkov, “Complexity and Expressive Power of Logic Programming,” ACM Computing Surveys 33, no. 3 (2001): 374–425; Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 92. Kevin Kelly and Derrick de Kerckhove, “4.10: What Would McLuhan Say?,” Wired, October 1, 1996, http://archive.wired.com. 93. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986): 544–560. 94. David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2001); Daniel Solove, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2004). 95.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 183. The meetings Brand convened eventually led to the formation of the Global Business Network (GBN). In addition to AI practitioners and biologists, GBN’s orbit included social scientists such as Sherry Turkle and Mary Catherine Bateson and the writer Kevin Kelly (who later became editor of Wired magazine). Turner writes that Brand’s gatherings “offered participants a chance to imagine themselves as members of a mobile elite, able to glimpse in the natural and economic systems around them the invisible laws according to which all things functioned.” The concept of networks played multiple roles here: as a metaphor for the biological world, for the synthetic world (electronic circuits and interacting computing devices), as well as for the social activities of the participants.   44.   

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World
by Greg Milner
Published 4 May 2016

Many thanks to everyone else who unhesitatingly extended a helping hand for this book, taking the time to tell me their stories, explaining the history and technological intricacies of GPS: Claudio Aporta, Michael Barclay, Beth Bartel, Ben Bartolome, Ron Beard, Eric Beaton, Michael Bevis, Steve Bradford, Justin Brookman, Nolan Bushnell, Robert Cheetham, Ann Ciganer, Hervé Clauss, Steve Coast, Dan Cole, Peggy Conway, Chuck Counselman, Jim Davis, Loren De Groot, Jim Dempsey, Deborah Dennard, George Drake, Ryan Driscoll, Per Enge, Ralph Eschenbach, John Fischer, Sean Fitzpatrick, Julia Frankenstein, Gary Freeland, Robert Gable, Nunzio Gambale, Amy Gilroy, Buster Glosson, Allen Goldstein, Gaylord Green, Liz Groff, Anurag Gupta, Tim Hall, Rick Hamilton, Debbie Henderson, Jim Higgins, Kirk Holub, Chuck Horner, Joseph Hoshen, Jiung-Yao Huang, Ken Hudnut, Aaron Huff, Eric Hunsader, Michael E. Jackson, Kevin Kelly, Josh Khani, Jay Dee Krull, Gilly Leshed, Judah Levine, Sam Liang, Rich Maher, Mani Mahjouri, Steve Malys, Hans Mark, Susan Marshall, Tom McHugh, Jules McNeff, Donald Mitchell, Richard Nimer, Scott Pace, Dave Paddock, Ganesh Pattabiraman, Stig Pedersen, Bruce Peetz, Arun Phadke, Sam Pullen, Logan Scott, Edwin Stear, Sam Stein, Ron Stewart, Mike Swiek, Dave Van Dusseldorp, John Warburton, Jim White, Pete Wilhelm, Ronald Yates.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

It did so by adding not a taxonomy but, as Thomas Vander Wal puts it, a “folksonomy to this RW culture.”11 Tags and ranking systems, such as del.icio.us, Reddit, and Digg, enabled readers of a blog or news article to mark it for others to find or ignore. These marks added meaning to the post or story. They would help it get organized among the millions of others that were out there. Together these tools added a metalayer to the blogosphere, by providing, as Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly puts it, “a public annotation—like a keyword or category name that you hang on a file, Web page or picture.”12 And as readers explore the Web, users leave marks that help others understand or find the same stuff. 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 59 8/12/08 1:54:50 AM 60 REMI X So, for example, if you read an article about Barack Obama, you can tag it with a short description: “Obama” or “Obama_environment.”

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

Also, I have to give special thanks to friends who were willing to listen to me chatter endlessly about what my reporting had dug up. Paul Saffo has been one of the sharpest thinkers in Silicon Valley for more than two decades, with a wonderful critical eye. Michael Schrage was once upon a time a competitor at The Washington Post but was one of the first people to give me encouragement. Kevin Kelly helped me explore the idea of what was special about a certain time and place. Gregg Zachary has taught journalism with me at the University of California at Berkeley, and at Stanford, and when he covered Silicon Valley for The Wall Street Journal during the 1990s he was the competitor I dreaded most.

An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson
Published 4 Dec 2010

‘But I don’t think you could stop the whole thing very easily.’ The reason for this is that the Internet isn’t a machine, it’s billions of machines. There is no ‘off’ switch. Its very architecture, its decentralised, nonzero-sum collaborative fabric means that the Internet is a bit like the planet’s population. Or as Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, calls it: ‘the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built’. Short of an apocalypse you couldn’t kill all of it, any more than you could wipe out everyone on Earth. ‘Is there anything that could shut down the Internet?’ I ask. Vint considers.

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

Finally, the book contains two original, previously unpublished pieces: an essay about sitting entitled “Arsebestos,” and a one-sentence work of fiction, unfinished, and, for very sound artistic and legal reasons, never to be finished, which I will allow the reader to discover in due course. It only remains for me to thank the people who helped these pieces come into being: as always, my supernaturally patient and understanding wife, and my agent, Liz Darhansoff, who has been a fount of infallible advice for thirty years; Kevin Kelly at WIRED, who talked me past my initial skepticism that an article about cables could ever be any good and turned a blind eye to some rather odd expense reports; the readers/members of Slashdot; the Royal Society and Gresham College for inviting me to take part in forums where I would never have expected to find myself in any capacity above the level of bootblack; and the editorial page staff of the New York Times for randomly entering my life every few years and asking me to write short pieces on odd topics.

Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
by Kyle Chayka
Published 15 Jan 2024

Patreon enables creators to paywall anything they choose to, whether writing, images, or audio. It offers a linear feed of posts that the user subscribes to monetarily, a much more powerful relationship than a Twitter follow. Substack does the same for email newsletter subscriptions. In 2008, the Wired editor Kevin Kelly famously wrote that a creator needs to find only “1,000 true fans” to fund their work and allow them to make a living—one thousand people who might pay them $100 a year. It’s an entirely different model from the larger digital platforms, where audiences have to be as big as possible. “A thousand customers is a whole lot more feasible to aim for than a million fans,” Kelly wrote.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

For example, Google has been described as developing and deploying “artificial intelligence” since at least 2003, but the term itself is a moving target, as capabilities have evolved from primitive programs that can play tic-tac-toe to systems that can operate whole fleets of driverless cars. Google’s machine intelligence capabilities feed on behavioral surplus, and the more surplus they consume, the more accurate the prediction products that result. Wired magazine’s founding editor, Kevin Kelly, once suggested that although it seems like Google is committed to developing its artificial intelligence capabilities to improve Search, it’s more likely that Google develops Search as a means of continuously training its evolving AI capabilities.95 This is the essence of the machine intelligence project.

…

Jean-Charles Rochet and Jean Tirole, “Two-Sided Markets: A Progress Report,” RAND Journal of Economics 37, no. 3 (2006): 645–67. 94. For a discussion on this point and its relation to online target advertising, see Katherine J. Strandburg, “Free Fall: The Online Market’s Consumer Preference Disconnect” (working paper, New York University Law and Economics, October 1, 2013). 95. Kevin Kelly, “The Three Breakthroughs That Have Finally Unleashed AI on the World,” Wired, October 27, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligence. 96. Xiaoliang Ling et al., “Model Ensemble for Click Prediction in Bing Search Ads,” in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, 689–98, https://doi.org/10.1145/3041021.3054192. 97.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
by Pedro Domingos
Published 21 Sep 2015

(Before Computers. Just kidding.) The Singularity Is Near, by Ray Kurzweil (Penguin, 2005), is your guide to the transhuman future. Joel Garreau considers three different scenarios for how human-directed evolution will unfold in Radical Evolution (Broadway Books, 2005). In What Technology Wants (Penguin, 2010), Kevin Kelly argues that technology is the continuation of evolution by other means. Darwin Among the Machines, by George Dyson (Basic Books, 1997), chronicles the evolution of technology and speculates on where it will lead. Craig Venter explains how his team synthesized a living cell in Life at the Speed of Light (Viking, 2013).

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

He carefully monitored efforts to filter the kinds of messages that could be sent to customers and he tried to think about the challenge of e-mail outreach in fresh ways. Then, in late 2011, he had what he considered to be a significant new idea. Bezos is a fan of e-mail newsletters such as VSL.com, a daily assortment of cultural tidbits from the Web, and Cool Tools, a compendium of technology tips and product reviews written by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired. Both e-mails are short, well written, and informative. Perhaps, Bezos reasoned, Amazon should be sending a single well-crafted e-mail every week—a short digital magazine—instead of a succession of bland, algorithm-generated marketing pitches. He asked marketing vice president Steve Shure to explore the idea.

The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick
by Jonathan Littman
Published 1 Jan 1996

Markoff acknowledged trading information with Shimomura, but denied being a member of the team. "I wasn't involved. I am a reporter. Tsutomu and Julia call me a member of their team, and that's fine if they want to call me that. But I was a reporter," Markoff said. By Sunday afternoon, Markoff's new Times story is what's raising eyebrows on the Well. Kevin Kelly, executive editor of red-hot Wired magazine, a respected author, friend of John Markoff, and Well board member, begins posting some intriguing questions about Shimomura and the image created by the New York Times. #621 Having had "inside" knowledge about this event for the past two weeks (as a member of the Well board and as a friend of Markoff) the thing that I still don't get is: How did the ultimate Genuine Smart Guy, the real hacker, let himself get hacked by the challenger Mitnick?

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

Gaia Vince believes that interplays and levels of culture, biology and altered environment render humanity into a new kind of superorganism.104 She calls this Homo omnis or Homni – a shared resource stitching us into one closely interrelated world network, a mash-up of gene and machine, human minds and outsourced technological and institutional systems. Homni is the emergent property of all this activity, working like a scaled-up brain. A century ago H.G. Wells called it the world brain; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the noosphere. Kevin Kelly calls it the holos, a new planetary layer composed of billions of human minds, chips and artificial intelligences. We are linked into a single, singular entity and should expect further phase transitions to result, transitions that could unlock, like the most elaborate tools, a set of big ideas that changes everything: This convergence will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet up until this time.

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy
by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud
Published 17 Jan 2023

Claudio was a rare bird in a community whose members took pride in being outside politics. Even before he was thirty, he had developed a distinct worldview that defined his work. He would sometimes sum it up with a quote by an early computer technologist and founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly: “There is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction. Just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm. The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.” For Claudio, this was just stating the obvious.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

It may be the long-awaited breakthrough in wearables: both the enabler and the visible symbol of a lifestyle in which performance is continuously monitored and plumbed for its insights into further improvements. Nobody has embraced this conception of instrumented living more fervently than a loose global network of enthusiasts called the Quantified Self, whose slogan is “self-knowledge through numbers.”2 Founded by Wired editor Gary Wolf and Whole Earth Review veteran Kevin Kelly in 2007, the Quantified Self currently boasts a hundred or so local chapters, and an online forum where members discuss and rate the devices mobilized in their self-measurement efforts. (It can be difficult to disentangle this broader movement from a California company of the same name also founded by Wolf and Kelly, which mounts conferences dedicated to proselytizing for the practice of self-measurement.)

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

Complaint Is Not Enough 1. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/mzuckerman/articles/2012/04/06/mort-zuckerman-no-easy-solutions-for-big-money-in-politics. 2. http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2012/06/20/big-data-and-the-u-s-presidential-campaign/ Sixth Interlude: The Pocket Protector in the Saffron Robe 1. “The Trickster Guru,” in The Essential Alan Watts (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1977). 2. http://cafegratitude.com/menu. 3. http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/i-am-annoyed-and-disappointed/Content?oid=1370662. Chapter 18. First Thought, Best Thought 1. Kevin Kelly in his Technium blog, January 31, 2008. Chapter 20. We Need to Do Better than Ad Hoc Levees 1. http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-team/rethinking-information-diversity-in-networks/10150503499618859. Chapter 22. Who Will Do What? 1. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/05/facebook_ipo_has_social_networking_supplanted_real_innovation_in_silicon_valley_.html.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

While this is an old fantasy of the utopian left – and a staple perception of the socialism that guided turn-of-the-century writers like H.G. Wells and the leading American socialist Edward Bellamy – capitalism didn’t perish, but rather anchored itself more deeply in society as individuals and business prospered riding the new waves of technology. However, this time it’s different – or so we are told. Tech thinker Kevin Kelly has prophesied the rise of a new form of socialism as a consequence of unobstructed source technology and community-generated content.20 Capitalism is a highly adaptive creature, argues the contrarian economic reporter Paul Mason, but it is not going to survive the current revolution in information technology.21 Information, he argues, will destroy the price mechanism and new forms of collaborative production will do away with what is left of market capitalism.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Danny Sullivan, “Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results” (Dec. 2009). Search Engine Land. Available at http://searchengineland.com /google-now-personalizes-everyones-search-results-31195. 120. We should also entertain reconceptualizing our participation in digital platforms as work, since it is often unavoidable, laborious, and value generating. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 331 (“each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the supercomputer’s mind, thereby programming . . . it”); Trebor Scholz, ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2013); Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?

Case for Mars
by Robert Zubrin
Published 27 Jun 2011

Bush’s lack of involvement, combined with the NASA leadership’s opposition, left SEI an orphan to be advocated by some Space Council staffrs allied to a few friendly congressmen. Without any real clout, they were forced to try to fund SEI by sneaking a few small appropriations through Congress. When the administration’s political opponents saw this weakness, they pounced upon it as a way to humiliate Bush and his Space Council chief, Dan Quayle. Kevin Kelly, an aide to Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), led the massacre to seek out and systematically eliminate any NASA appropriation, no matter how small, that could be linked to SEI. By the time Dan Goldin became NASA administrator in 1992, the best way left to save those technology programs needed for a Mars program that still survived was to break the damning link by abolishing SEI, and, after a year or so of attempts to salvage SEI, that is what he did.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

The central message-that economics provides at best little support for conventional political wisdom about market efficiency and the simplifications of the American business model-was lost. Stiglitz was cheered by anti globalization protesters with little appreciation of what the argument was really about. The stock market bubble confronted economists with different challenges. The public debate was dominated by pundits: George Gilder of Forbes ASAP, Kevin Kelly of Wired and New Rules for the New Economy) James Glassman and Kevin Hassett of Dow 36)000. These people were not credentialed economists, but they announced the irrelevance of traditional principles of business economics and market valuation in the face of new technology and a changed political environment.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

This book was written only once, but via the wonder of large-scale printing equipment, it can be reproduced quickly, reliably, and inexpensively. As a result, tens of millions of copies can be made and distributed all over the world and can be purchased for a few dollars. That’s the magic of Duplication. The Internet has made Duplication of some forms of value even easier. As Kevin Kelly remarked in his essay “Better Than Free,”3 the Internet is essentially an enormous, inexpensive copy machine. When I write a post for my Web site, it can be Duplicated by my Web server for next to nothing, and delivered to a reader on the other side of the world almost instantly. Duplication of information—text, images, music, video—is essentially free.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

The myth was enough to fuel the speculative dot-com bubble, which Alan Greenspan belatedly called “irrational exuberance,” but which went on long enough to convince investors to lift high-tech issues on the NASDAQ_ stock exchange beyond even the most optimistically speculative valuations. This was a “new economy,” according to Wired’s editor Kevin Kelly. A “tsunami,” echoed its publisher, Louis Rossetto—one that would rage over culture and markets like a tidal wave. More than simply costing millions of investors their savings, the movement of the Internet from the newspaper’s technology section to the business pages changed the way the public perceived what had once been a public space—a commons.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 31–2; cf. Engels’ 1845 description of the St Giles Rookery in Jon E. Lewis, ed., London: The Autobiography (London: Constable & Robinson, 2008), 263–5. 72. Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities (2004), cited from Kevin Kelly, ‘The Choice of Cities’, 2 July 2009: <http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/07/the_choice_of_c.php> 73. Cited from Fogelson (2001), 322. See also New York’s Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street: http://www.tenement.org 74. See Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (1988; repr.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy
Published 15 Jan 2002

During the past eight years, I wrote a number of magazine articles on crypto, and some of these are reflected in this book, particularly those I wrote for Wired, beginning with the cover story on cypherpunks in its second issue and winding up with the first detailed account of nonsecret encryption in 1999. Thanks to all my editors there, especially Kevin Kelly. I also wrote crypto-related stories for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Macworld, and Newsweek. The latter has been my professional home for the past five years, and I am grateful to everyone there for providing an inveterate freelance writer with a reason to actually hold a job. Thanks to Mark Whitaker, Jon Meacham, and the editor who suffers most with me, George Hackett.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

Jacqui Rossi helped me with research in the early stages, lending her extraordinary brain to some of the main themes of this project, and Alex Lipton spent hours of his weekends helping me get organized. When I spilled water on my computer just as I was about to turn in my first draft, Meredith tech nerds Rodney Mayers and Kevin Kelly saved my work (and taught me how to do automatic backups). Soraya Shockley provided a valuable cultural read, and Mike Blumenthal and Natan Last gave me crucial feedback on key chapters. Madeleine Levinsohn transcribed hours of Facebook Lives and Rohan Naik helped me with research and endnotes.

The Future Is Asian
by Parag Khanna
Published 5 Feb 2019

A great many experts on the history, philosophy, politics, and economics of Asia and global thinking about Asia have provided very useful information and insights: Graham Allison, Arjun Appadurai, Zubaid Ahmad, Richard Allen, Ali Aslan, Genevieve Bell, Karan Bhatia, Penny Burtt, Cliff Coonan, Patrick Cordes, Jack DeGioia, Prasenjit Duara, Jack Dwyer, Casper Ellerbaek, Andrew Field, Gordon Flake, Spencer Fung, Mishaal Gergawi, Alison Gilmore, Brad Glosserman, Martin Gray, Michael Green, Steve Grubb, Guoliang Wu, Blair Hall, Nat Hansen, Jonathan Hausman, Rupert Hoogewerf, Ann Julian, Kosmo Kalliarekos, Robert Kaplan, Gerry Keefe, Kevin Kelly, Claudio Lilienfeld, Peggy Liu, Manish Kayshap, Suat Kiniklioglu, Udai Kunzru, Wolfgang Lehmacher, Scott Malcomson, Anna Marrs, Avinash Mehrotra, Simon Milner, Pankaj Mishra, Siddharth Mohandas, Yascha Mounk, Alexandre Parilusyan, Safdar Parvez, Chris Patten, Joseph Phi, Kai Poetschke, Noah Raford, Julia Raiskin, Laurent Ramsey, Sean Randolph, Rahul Reddy, Gideon Rose, Dan Rosen, Jim Rowan, Manuel Rybach, Richard Samans, Rana Sarkar, Jonas Schorr, Elliot Schrage, Chris Schroeder, John Seely Brown, Reva Seth, Clara Shen, Philip Shetler-Jones, Lutfey Siddiqui, Ben Simpfendorfer, Sarita Singh, Lauren Sorkin, Shantanu Surpure, Didi Kirsten Tatlow, Richard Threfall, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Hal Varian, Andy Ventris, Steve Walt, Wang Gungwu, and Justin Wood.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Turnbull and Solms, The Brain and the Inner World, 136–59; Kelly Bulkeley, Visions of the Night: Dreams, Religion and Psychology (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999); Andreas Mavrematis, Hypnogogia: The Unique State of Consciousness Between Wakefulness and Sleep (London: Routledge, 1987); Brigitte Holzinger, Stephen LaBerge and Lynn Levitan, ‘Psychophysiological Correlates of Lucid Dreaming’, American Psychological Association 16:2 (2006), 88–95; Watanabe Tsuneo, ‘Lucid Dreaming: Its Experimental Proof and Psychological Conditions’, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science 21:1 (2003), 159–62; Victor I. Spoormaker and Jan van den Bout, ‘Lucid Dreaming Treatment for Nightmares: A Pilot Study’, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 75:6 (2006), 389–94. 11 The Data Religion 1. See, for example, Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking Press, 2010); César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Howard Bloom, Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (Hoboken: Wiley, 2001); DuBravac, Digital Destiny. 2.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

—Dominic Barton, global managing director, McKinsey & Company “This is probably the most global book ever written. It is intensely specific while remaining broad and wide. Its takeaway is that infrastructure is destiny: Follow the supply lines outlined in this book to see where the future flows.” —Kevin Kelly, co-founder, Wired “Parag Khanna takes our knowledge of connectivity into virgin territory, providing an entire atlas on how old and new connections are reshaping our physical, social, and mental worlds. This is a deep and highly informative reflection on the meaning of a rapidly developing borderless world.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

Stewart Brand received his own baptism in Hubbard LSD at IFAS in 1962, with James Fadiman presiding as his guide. His first experience with LSD “was kind of a bum trip,” he recalls, but it led to a series of other journeys that reshaped his worldview and, indirectly, all of ours. The Whole Earth Network Brand would subsequently gather together (which included Peter Schwartz, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow) and play a key role in redefining what computers meant and did, helping to transform them from a top-down tool of the military-industrial complex—with the computer punch card a handy symbol of Organization Man—into a tool of personal liberation and virtual community, with a distinctly countercultural vibe.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

See Jill Leovy, “Alvin Toffler, Author of 1970 Bestseller ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2016, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-alvin-toffler-20160629-snap-story.html, accessed July 29, 2021; Kenneth Schneider, “Alvin Toffler, Author of ‘Future Shock,’ Dies at 87,” New York Times, June 29, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/30/books/alvin-toffler-author-of-future-shock-dies-at-87.html, accessed July 29, 2021; David Henry, “Alvin Toffler, Author of BestSelling ‘Future Shock’ and ‘The Third Wave,’ Dies at 87,” Washington Post, June 29, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/alvin-toffler-author-of-bestselling-future-shock-and-the-third-wave-dies-at-87/2016/06/29/0d63748c-3e09-11e6-80bc-d06711fd2125_story.html, accessed August 10, 2021. See also Toffler’s interview with Kevin Kelly, “Anticipatory Democracy,” Wired, July 1, 1996, https://kk.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Alvin-Toffier.pdf, accessed August 10, 2021. 50.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” See also Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), Part IV. 51.Dyson et al., “Cyberspace and the American Dream.” 52.George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1981).

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

Bill Janeway, Hal Varian, and Peter Norvig—your willingness to read multiple drafts and to take the time to educate me about areas where my knowledge wasn’t up to par has made this book so much stronger than it would have been otherwise. Hal and Bill, you’ve given me a master class in economics. If the student was not up to the level of his teachers, that is no fault of yours. Benedict Evans, Margaret Levi, Laura Tyson, James Manyika, and Kevin Kelly—you also saved me from some egregious errors and omissions, and your challenges to my thinking clarified it. Jay Schaefer, Mike Loukides, and Laurent Haug, your close reading and comments strengthened both my ideas and my writing. Sunil Paul, Logan Green, Kim Rachmeler, Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, and Dave Guarino, you filled in critical details and context for key moments in this history.

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

The average number of authors per scientific paper is up too, increasing steadily over the past sixty years from an average of slightly over 1 to averages of 2.22 in computer science, 2.66 for condensed-matter physics, 3.35 for astrophysics, 3.75 for biomedicine, and 8.96 authors for high-energy physics. See: M.E.J. Newman. “Who is the best connected scientist? A study of scientific co-authorship networks,” Working Paper, Santa Fe Institute (2000). 5. Kevin Kelly, “Speculation on the Future of Science,” Edge, vol. 179 (April 7, 2006). 6. Fred Pearce, “Climate Wars,” The Guardian (February 9, 2010). 7. As data sets continue to grow, scientists will need to hand off more and more of the routine tasks to machines. The problem in the interim is that machines won’t necessarily spot the unusual or the unexpected, the kind of one-offs that can lead to game-changing breakthroughs.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Dec 2010

TOOLS AND TRICKS Seth Roberts, “Self-Experimentation as a Source of New Ideas: Ten Examples Involving Sleep, Mood, Health, and Weight,” Behavioral and Brain Science 27 (2004): 227–88 (www.fourhourbody.com/new-ideas) This 61-page document about self-experimentation provides an overview of some of Seth’s findings, including actionable sleep examples. The Quantified Self (www.quantifiedself.com) Curated by Wired cofounding editor Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, a managing editor of Wired, this is the perfect home for all self-experimenters. The resources section alone is worth a trip to this site, which provides the most comprehensive list of data-tracking tools and services on the web (www.fourhourbody.com/quantified). Alexandra Carmichael, “How to Run a Successful Self-Experiment” (www.fourhourbody.com/self-experiment) Most people have never systematically done a self-experiment.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

The actual writing of the book accelerated because of a fantastic uncluttering of my office by Erin Rooney Doland. My fact-checking team included Deborah Branscum, Victoria Wright, Stacy Horn, Teresa Carpenter, and Andrew Levy. (Though, as always, the buck stops with the author.) I got wisdom and advice along the way from John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, and Brad Stone. My first and most enthusiastic reader, of course, was my wife, Teresa Carpenter. (Having a Pulitzer Prize winner in the house is pretty useful.) As always, my agent Flip Brophy was invaluable at every stage of the perilous publishing process. At Simon & Schuster, Bob Bender was again my sharp-eyed editor, with Johanna Li assisting.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Jan 2012

To gain 10–30 lbs of lean tissue in one month, MED = 90–120 seconds of tension for most muscles. Slow-cadence lifting (five seconds up, five seconds down) with these parameters helped me add 34 lbs of lean mass in 28 days.23 Master conversational fluency in any language, MED = learn 1,200 words, focusing on highest frequency. The marketing MED = Read Kevin Kelly’s article “1,000 True Fans.” To reiterate what we’ve already covered: material beats method. The 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use. If we include colloquial and derivative terms, the word count easily tops 250,000. Crikey.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
by Mark W. Moffett
Published 31 Mar 2019

—Mahzarin Banaji, author of Blindspot “This is a book of amazing ideas, many of them counterintuitive. Mark Moffett’s astounding stories of animal societies persuaded me that the future of human cities have been foretold by the ants. Read this manifesto if you like to have your mind changed.” —Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine and author of The Inevitable “In the past quarter century, there has emerged a genre of Big History that includes such epic books as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm is destined to be included in future lists of such books that not only add to our understanding of who we are, how we got here, and where we’re going, but change our perspective of how we fit in the larger picture of life on Earth.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Published 5 May 2003

Many, according to Godfray, “spend most of their career trying to interpret the work of nineteenth-century systematicists: deconstructing their often inadequate published descriptions or scouring the world's museums for type material that is often in very poor condition.” Godfray particularly stresses the absence of attention being paid to the systematizing possibilities of the Internet. The fact is that taxonomy by and large is still quaintly wedded to paper. In an attempt to haul things into the modern age, in 2001 Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine, launched an enterprise called the All Species Foundation with the aim of finding every living organism and recording it on a database. The cost of such an exercise has been estimated at anywhere from $2 billion to as much as $50 billion. As of the spring of 2002, the foundation had just $1.2 million in funds and four full-time employees.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

Lynnea Johnson and Caroline Rose’s bungalow was my bivouac for much of the time, until I imposed on John Markoff and Leslie Terizan. Katie Hafner and Bob Wachter were splendid hosts in San Francisco. Leslie Berlin generously lent me her son’s car before he rightfully claimed it for his campus use. Thanks also to friends on two coasts: Bradley Horowitz, Irene Au, Brad Stone, Kevin Kelly, Megan Quinn, M. G. Siegler, and Steve and Michelle Stoneburn. Back on the East Coast, I had two other writing homes. The Writers Room in Manhattan is a wonderful retreat. And the Otis Library in Massachusetts provided precious connectivity—and convivial hospitality—in broadband-starved western Mass.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

Ray Kurzweil has taken all the strands of the Singularity meme circulating in the last decades and has united them into a single tome which he has nailed on our front door. I suspect this will be one of the most cited books of the decade. Like Paul Ehrlich's upsetting 1972 book Population Bomb, fan or foe, it's the wave at the epicenter you have to start with." —KEVIN KELLY, founder of Wired "Really, really out there. Delightfully so." —Businessweek.com "Stunning, utopian vision of the near future when machine intelligence outpaces the biological brain and what things may look like when that happens....Approachable and engaging." —The Unofficial Microsoft Blog "One of the most important thinkers of our time, Kurzweil has followed up his earlier works ... with a work of startling breadth and audacious scope."

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

In conclusion, I find the Singularity idea appealing and a wonderful plot device, but I doubt it describes our likely future. I expect a Surge, not a Singularity. But in case I’m wrong, I’ll tighten my seatbelt, keeping taking the smart drugs, and treat all computers with the greatest of respect. I’m their friend! Comment by Michael Nielsen What is the Singularity? The following excerpts from Kevin Kelly’s Wired interview with Vinge sum it up succinctly: if we ever succeed in making machines as smart as humans, then it’s only a small leap to imagine that we would soon thereafter make – or cause to be made – machines that are even smarter than any human. And that’s it. That’s the end of the human era … The reason for calling this a “singularity” is that things are completely unknowable beyond that point.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
by Graham Farmelo
Published 24 Aug 2009

The library facilities at the institute are peerless, and I should like to thank all the staff there who were unstinting in their support: Karen Downing, Momota Ganguli, Gabriella Hoskin, Erica Mosner, Marcia Tucker, Kirstie Venanzi and Judy Wilson-Smith. Among the other colleagues who made my stays there so rewarding: Linda Arntzenius, Alan Cheng, Karen Cuozzo, Jennifer Hansen, Beatrice Jessen, Kevin Kelly, Camille Merger, Nadine Thompson, Sharon Tozzi-Goff and Sarah Zantua. Also in Princeton, I should like to thank Gillett Griffin, Lily Harish-Chandra, Louise Morse (mère et soeur) and Terri Nelson. I should like to give my special thanks to Peter Goddard, formerly Master of St John’s, now Director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Global Catastrophic Risks
by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Published 2 Jul 2008

Other historians of technology (Lanier, 2000; Seidensticker, 2006; Wilson, 2007) argue that Kurzweil ignores techno-trends which did stall, due to design challenges and failures, and to human factors that slowed the diffusion of new technologies, factors which might also slow or avert greater-than-human machine intelligence. Noting that most predictions of electronic transcendence fall within the predictor's expected lifespan, technology writer Kevin Kelly (2007) suggests that people who make such predictions have a cognitive bias towards optimism. Millennia! tendencies in responses to apocalyptic threats 81 The point of this essay i s not t o parse the accuracy or empirical evidence for exponential change or catastrophic risks, but to examine how the millennialism that accompanies their consideration biases assessment of their risks and benefits, and the best courses of action to reduce the former and ensure the latter.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

It’s a big picture-book, with out-of-context quotes from futurists like Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan over post-psychedelic visuals. The form is indistinguishable from financial services advertising. One two-page spread reads MONEY IS JUST A TYPE OF INFORMATION, attributed to magazine editor Kevin Kelly. Section V 2000–2020 An Anduril autonomous surveillance camera on the Southern California border United States Customs and Border Protection photo Chapter 5.1 B2K Palo Alto for Bush—The Internet After 9/11—Scrapers Eat the World—Amazon Thrives—The iPod For many years, American cultural and political commentators have advanced theories about why Republicans so strongly disliked Bill Clinton, what made him appear as an existential threat to conservatives.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

For example, the technology of flight advanced dramatically from the Wright brothers’ flight in 1903 to the moon landing in 1969, but has had no breakthroughs of comparable magnitude since then. Another obstacle in the way of ultraintelligent machines taking over the world is the world. More specifically, some kinds of progress require not just thinking but acting in the physical world. (Kevin Kelly calls the overemphasis on pure intelligence thinkism.) An ultraintelligent machine tasked with creating a grand unified theory of physics might be capable of cleverly manipulating equations a billion times faster than Einstein, but to make any real progress, it would still need to raise millions of dollars to build a more powerful supercollider and run physical experiments over the course of months or years.