“The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.”
“Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.”
“Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.”
“All imaginable futures are not equally possible.”
“One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.”
“The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.”
“This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.”
“An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.”
“An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.”
“A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness.”
“We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.”