Speakers Kevin Kelly: Digital visionary

Kevin Kelly has been publisher of the Whole Earth Review, exec editor at WIRED, founder of visionary nonprofits, and writer on biology and business and "cool tools." He's admired for his new perspectives on technology and its relevance to history, biology and religion.

Why you should listen to him:

Perhaps there is no one better to contemplate the meaning of cultural change -- bad? good? too slow? too bold? -- than Kevin Kelly, whose life story reads like a treatise on the value of technology. Whether by renouncing all material things save his bicycle (which he then rode 3,000 miles), founding an organization (the All-Species Foundation) to catalog all life on earth, or by touting new gadgets in WIRED, Kelly hasn't stopped exploring the phenomena of technical and biological creation.

In articles for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, among others, he has celebrated scientific breakthroughs, and at the Long Now Foundation, where he serves on the board, he champions projects that look 10,000 years into the future. One such project is the Rosetta Project, which will catalogue more than 1,000 languages on a disks to be placed nearby the 10,000 Year Clock. Kelly's newest book What Technology Wants asks what appears to be his life's core question: "How should I think about new technology when it comes along?"

Kelly discusses the 7th Kingdom at length in the July 18, 2007, edition of Edge.org.

"Thinker, environmentalist and philosopher extraordinaire ... A one-man force of nature."

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Quotes by Kevin Kelly

“What technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an ‘infinite game.’ … A finite game is played to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing.”
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“All these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers — what we’re getting out of all these connections is we’re getting one machine. … We’re constructing a single, global machine.”
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“Of all the animals that we have domesticated, the most important animal that we’ve domesticated has been us.”
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“Technology is anything that doesn’t work yet.” — quoting Danny Hillis
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“Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.” — quoting Alan Kay
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