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Out of Control

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Out of Control Out of Control the New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World Kevin Kelly Illustrated Edition Photos by Kevin Kelly Copyright © 994 by Kevin Kelly Photos Copyright © 2008 by Kevin Kelly c o n t e n t s THE MADE AND THE BORN 6 Neo-biological civilization 6 The triumph of the bio-logic 7 Learning to surrender our creations 8 2 HIVE MIND 9 Bees do it: distributed governance 9 The collective intelligence of a mob 1 Asymmetrical invisible hands 13 Decentralized remembering as an act of perception 15 More is more than more, it’s different 20 Advantages and disadvantages of swarms 2 The network is the icon of the 2st century 25 3 MACHINES WITH AN AttITUDE 28 Entertaining machines with bodies 28 Fast, cheap and out of control 37 Getting smart from dumb things 4 The virtues of nested hierarchies 44 Using the real world to communicate 46 No intelligence without bodies 48 Mind/body black patch psychosis 49 4 ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY 55 Biology: the future of machines 55 Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds 58 Random paths to a stable ecosystem 60 How to do everything at once 62 The Humpty Dumpty challenge 65 5 COEVOLUTION 67 What color is a chameleon on a mirror? 67 The unreasonable point of life 70 Poised in the persistent state of almost falling 73 Rocks are slow life 75 Cooperation without friendship or foresight 78 6 THE NATURAL FLUX 83 Equilibrium is death 83 What came first, stability or diversity? 86 Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop 89 The origins of variation 90 Life immortal, ineradicable 92 Negentropy 95 The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming 97 7 EMERGENCE OF CONTROL 99 In ancient Greece the first artificial self 99 Maturing of mechanical selfhood 102 The toilet: archetype of tautology 104 Self-causing agencies 108 8 CLOSED SYSTEMS 112 Bottled life, sealed with clasp 112 Mail-order Gaia 115 Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man 118 The very big ecotechnic terrarium 120 An experiment in sustained chaos 123 Another synthetic ecosystem, like California 130 9 POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE 133 Co-pilots of the 00 million dollar glass ark 133 Migrating to urban weed 136 The deployment of intentional seasons 138 A cyclotron for the life sciences 143 The ultimate technology 145 0 INDUSTRUAL ECOLOGY 147 Pervasive round-the-clock plug in 147 Invisible intelligence 149 Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms 15 Programming a commonwealth 154 Closed-loop manufacturing 155 Technologies of adaptation 158 NETWORK ECONOMICS 16 Having your everything amputated 16 Instead of crunching, connecting 162 Factories of information 165 Your job: managing error 169 Connecting everything to everything 173 2 E-MONEY 176 Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins 176 The fax effect and the law of increasing returns 182 Superdistribution 184 Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a fiscal charge 189 Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks 195 Fear of underwire economies 196 3 GOD GAMES 198 Electronic godhood 198 Theories with an interface 199 A god descends into his polygonal creationTo 203 The transmission of simulacra 208 Memorex warfare 209 Seamless distributed armies 23 A 0,000 piece hyperreality 25 The consensual ascii superorganism 26 Letting go to win 29 4 IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM 22 An outing to the universal library 22 The space of all possible pictures 225 Travels in biomorph land 228 Harnessing the mutator 23 Sex in the library 233 Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps 236 Tunnelling through randomness 239 5 ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION 24 Tom Ray’s electric-powered evolution machine 24 What you can’t engineer, evolution can 245 Mindless acts performed in parallel 247 Computational arms race 25 Taming wild evolution 253 Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules 254 Death is the best teacher 258 The algorithmic genius of ants 26 The end of engineering’s hegemony 264 6 THE FUTURE OF CONTROL 267 Cartoon physics in toy worlds 267 Birthing a synthespian 269 Robots without hard bodies 272 The agents of ethnological architecture 275 Imposing destiny upon free will 276 Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald 278 Searching for co-control 28 7 AN OPEN UNIVERSE 283 To enlarge the space of being 283 Primitives of visual possibilities 284 How to program happy accidents 285 All survive by hacking the rules 288 The handy-dandy tool of evolution 290 Hang-gliding into the game of life 292 Life verbs 294 Homesteading hyperlife territory 296 8 THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE 300 The revolution of daily evolution 300 Bypassing the central dogma 302 The difference, if any, between learning and evololution 304 The evolution of evolution 307 The explanation of everything 309 9 POSTDARWINISM 30 The incompleteness of Darwinian theory 30 Natural selection is not enough 32 Intersecting lines on the tree of life 34 The premise of non-random mutations 35 Even monsters follow rules 38 When the abstract is embodied 320 The essential clustering of life 32 DNA can’t code for everything 322 An uncertain density of biological search space 324 Mathematics of natural selection 325 20 �����������������������THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS 328 Order for free 328 Net math: A counter-intuitive style of math 329 Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets 33 A question worth asking 333 Self-tuning vivisystems 337 2 RISING FLOW 340 A 4 billion year ponzi scheme 340 What evolution wants 343 Seven trends of hyper-evolution 346 Coyote trickster self-evolver 350 22 PREDICTION MACHINERY 352 Brains that catch baseballs 352 The flip side of chaos 355 Positive myopia 357 Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability 358 Varieties of prediction 366 Change in the service of non-change 369 Telling the future is what the systems are for 370 The many problems with global models 370 We are all steering 375 23 WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES 377 What ever happened to cybernetics? 377 The holes in the web of scientific knowledge 380 To be astonished by the trivial 382 Hypertext: the end of authority 385 A new thinking space 389 24 THE NINE LAWS OF GOD 392 How to make something from nothing 392 ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY 398 6 1 The Made and the Born Neo-biological civilization I AM SEALED in a cottage of glass that is completely airtight. Inside I breathe my exha- lations. Yet the air is fresh, blown by fans. My urine and excrement are recycled by a system of ducts, pipes, wires, plants, and marsh-microbes, and redeemed into water and food which I can eat. Tasty food. Good water. Last night it snowed outside. Inside this experimental capsule it is warm, humid, and cozy. This morning the thick interior windows drip with heavy condensation. Plants crowd my space. I am surrounded by large banana leaves—huge splashes of heart- warming yellow-green color—and stringy vines of green beans entwining every vertical surface. About half the plants in this hut are food plants, and from these I harvested my dinner. I am in a test module for living in space. My atmosphere is fully recycled by the plants and the soil they are rooted in, and by the labyrinth of noisy ductwork and pipes strung through the foliage. Neither the green plants alone nor the heavy machines alone are sufficient to keep me alive. Rather it is theunion of sun-fed life and oil-fed machinery that keeps me going. Within this shed the living and the manufactured have been unified into one robust system, whose purpose is to nurture further complexities—at the mo- ment, me. What is clearly hap- pening inside this glass capsule is happening less clearly at a great scale on Earth in the closing years of this millennium. The realm of the born—all that is nature—and the realm of the made—all that is humanly constructed—are becoming one. Machines are becoming biologi- cal and the biological is becoming engineered. The author in the sealed test capsule. That’s banking on some ancient metaphors. Images of a machine as or- ganism and an organism as machine are as old as the first machine itself. But now those enduring metaphors are no longer poetry. They are becoming real—profitably real. This book is about the marriage of the born and the made. By extracting the logical principle of both life and machines, and applying each to the task of building extremely complex systems, technicians are conjuring up contraptions that are at once both made 7 and alive. This marriage between life and machines is one of convenience, because, in part, it has been forced by our current technical limitations. For the world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to under- stand how to manage it. That is, the more mechanical we make our fabricated environ- ment, the more biological it will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. Our future is technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. Rather our technological future is headed toward a neo-biological civilization. The triumph of the bio-logic NATURE HAS ALL ALONG YIELDED her flesh to humans. First, we took nature’s materials as food, fibers, and shelter. Then we learned to extract raw materials from her biosphere to create our own new synthetic materials. Now Bios is yielding us her mind—we are taking her logic. Clockwork logic—the logic of the machines—will only build simple contraptions. Truly complex systems such as a cell, a meadow, an economy, or a brain (natural or arti- ficial) require a rigorous nontechnological logic.
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