Quotes by Kevin Kelly

Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.

As Stewart Brand says, the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the protocommercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyperdrive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business.

Talk of generosity, of information that wants to be free, and of virtual communities is often dismissed by businesspeople as youthful new age idealism. It may be idealistic but it is also the only sane way to launch a commercial economy in the emerging space.

The hard part is keeping it simple. Says Farmer, "The more complex the problem is, the simpler the models that you end up having to use. It's easy to fit the data perfectly, but if you do that, you invariably end up just fitting to the flukes. The key is to generalize." Prediction machinery is ultimately theory-making machinery -- devices for generating abstractions and generalizations. Prediction machinery chews on the mess of seemingly random chicken-scratch data produced by complex and living things. If there is a sufficiently large stream of data over time, the device can discern a small bit of pattern. Slowly, the technology shapes an internal ad hoc model of how the data might be produced. The apparatus shuns "overfitting" the pattern on specific data and leans to the fuzzy fit of a somewhat imprecise generalization. Once it has a general fit -- a theory -- it can make a prediction. In fact, prediction is the whole point of theories. "Prediction is the most useful, the most tangible, and, in many respects, the most important consequence of having a scientific theory," Farmer declares.