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Title: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
ISBN: 0201483408
Author:
Kevin Kelly
Publicate Date: 1995-04-13
Publish: 1995-04-13
List Price: $22.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $9.75
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.84
Amazon Merchant Price: $15.61
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1: This Book Is Out of Control
I must admit that I'm a little ticked at spending a considerable amount of time reading a 500 page book with too many ideas and lack of focus. The editing left a lot to be desired. Throughout the book, the author asserts that if dumb, simple things (e.g. a swarm of bees) continuously communicate with each other they will eventually become capable of performing highly complex tasks not feasible by the will of intelligent beings. Yet, this point is expressed in such a complex manner that it makes one wonder why the author didn't follow his philosophy by dumbing down his arguments and letting the plentiful explain the more difficult concepts.
The main premise of the book is the idea of intelligent beings, in this case humans, giving up control of their creations, which are machines, and letting them "adapt on their own, evolve in their own direction, and grow without human oversight."
There are some intriguing ideas such as: No sustaining ecosystem is in equilibrium or completely "in control". Some chaotic or "out of control" events are required for complex systems to function. For example, the earth's atmosphere is made up of 20% oxygen. This oxygen content is just enough to maintain viable ecosystems without burning up the earth from fires.
"Out of Control" was written in 1994, and 14 years later global warming is a hot button. What happened to the Kelly's grand ideas of recycling (see example of Danish companies recycling each others' waste somewhere in the book)? How much closer are we to eco-friendly intelligent homes and personal belongings? Instead of moving to cheap renewable energy sources, we are experiencing the use of fossil fuels like never before with the fast growing economies of China and India. Crucial counteracting forces seemed to have been completely ignored by the author in projecting a sea of changes in how humans behave. Solar energy will never succeed as a viable energy source unless Big Oil has a monopoly over the sun. Digital cash has been a failure because its success would've destroyed the profits of Visa/Mastercard.
The author is a proponent of the idea of passing down learned behavior innately to offsprings, i.e. through genes. For example, experiments cited from one scientist proved evolution with learned behavior passed down to offsprings is superior to natural evolution. In this instance the author ignored the prospect of passing down negative and undesirable learned behavior that is criminal in nature for example. It's best that all offsprings are created much like computers, and most behavior is learned much like software. It is precisely individuality that facilitates variability, the hallmark of evolution. The author himself even argues for systems thriving at the edge of chaos; systems flexible enough to adapt to the changing environment, yet not rigid enough to become unadaptable. Passing down learned behavior to offsprings would undoubtedly create a more rigid system. Besides, most people already harbor the ill effects of bad parenting. The last thing they need is to acquire this cr*p at conception.
At the end of the book, Mr. Kelly mentions "The Nine Laws of God". One law in particular stood out: "Grow by chunking" which states "The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization-such as intelligence or a market economy-without growing it, inevitably lead to failure..... Time is needed to let each part test itself against all the others...." The failure to observe this law has been aptly demonstrated in the U.S. effort to build democracy in Iraq, and to a lesser degree the pressure exerted on Russia by the west to quickly move to a market economy following the collapse of communism.
In spite of all the criticism, I'm glad I read this book. The ideas could have been expressed in 200 pages fewer and more coherently. Pick up a copy and fasten your seat belt. You will be riding this one for a while.
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2: Perhaps the most important book of the 90s
Why are the three most powerful forces in our world--evolution, democracy and capitalism--so controversial? Hundreds (in the case of democracy, thousands) of years after they were first understood, we still can't quite believe these three phenomena work. Socialist Europe resists capitalism, the religious right in America questions evolution and the Middle East makes a mockery of democracy. When you think about it, it's easy to understand why: all three are radically counterintuitive. "One person, one vote?" What if they vote wrong?
But that's the problem--we're thinking about it. Our brains aren't wired to understand the wisdom of the crowd. Evolution, democracy and capitalism don't work at the anecdotal level of personal experience, the level at which our story-driven synapses are built to engage. Instead, they're statistical, operating in the realm of collective probability. They're not right--they're "righter". They're not predictable and controllable--they're inherently out of control. That's scary and unsettling, but also hugely important to understand in a world of increasing complexity and diminishing institutional power (mainstream media: meet blogs; military: meet insurgency).
Fortunately, this book that makes sense of all of this. Out of Control was first published in 1994, well before its time, but it's one of those rare books that sells better each year it gets older. That's because Kelly recognized that the messy markets of natural selection, enlightened self-interest and invisible hands all anticipated the Internet and the delights of watching peer-to-peer cacophony create the greatest oracle the world has ever seen. Some of the examples may be a bit dated a dozen years later, but the message has only become more true: "There is no central keeper of knowledge in a network, only curators of particular views," he writes. The emergent mob wisdom of the blogosphere and Wikipedia were unimaginable then, but somehow Kelly imagined them all the same. This may be the smartest book of the past decade.
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3: Cyberpunk Fact
The first half of the book is simply as good as it gets. Each Kelly pronouncement reads like a mantra from on high. The second half of the book is merely brilliant, but Mr. Kelly gives you a pretty good run for your money at 500 pages. There's only a couple of people even close to Kevin Kelly in the futuristic field, Ray Kurzweil, Howard Bloom, and Thomas L. Friedman. Alvin Toffler may have pioneered in a field that H.G. Wells started, but the new mavens like Robert D. Kaplan, Mike Davis, and Kevin Kelly, achieve levels of literacy as beautiful as a Dali. There are about ten must-read human futures, "Out of Control" is one of them.
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4: Review for Out of Control
Kevin Kelly was the executive editor at Wired, and his own magazine had a negative review. It describes distributed computing systems and concommitant communication problems in a new light, vastly expanding the scope of otherwise mundane academic articles on the topic. Kelly defines the rules of complex system behavior that simultaneously apply to traditional distributed computing, to markets, to a flock of birds or a bee hive. This book is tedious but worth a read.
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5: Original thinking the value of which I really do not have the tools to judge
This is Kevin Kelly's own summary of his bottom- line conclusions.
" As we make our machines and institutions more complex, we have to make them more biological in order to manage them.
The most potent force in technology will be artificial evolution. We are already evolving software and drugs instead of engineering them.
Organic life is the ultimate technology, and all technology will improve towards biology.
The main thing computers are good for is creating little worlds so that we can try out the Great Questions. Online communities let us ask the question "what is a democracy; what do you need for it?" by trying to wire a democracy up, and re-wire it if it doesn't work. Virtual reality lets us ask "what is reality?" by trying to synthesize it. And computers give us room to ask "what is life?" by providing a universe in which to create computer viruses and artificial creatures of increasing complexity. Philosophers sitting in academies used to ask the Great Questions; now they are asked by experimentalists creating worlds.
As we shape technology, it shapes us. We are connecting everything to everything, and so our entire culture is migrating to a "network culture" and a new network economics.
In order to harvest the power of organic machines, we have to instill in them guidelines and self-governance, and relinquish some of our total control."
This is the kind of book I find extremely difficult to know how to read. I just do not have the proper scientific- technical background to evaluate the kinds of claims which are being made here. And this when I am naturally skeptical about books which claim to have a sure general understanding of the shape of the human future.
My skepticism also relates to the meaning of this kind of 'evolution' for the lives of individual human beings, and for society as a whole. Is the suggestion that we are on the verge of some vast transcending or de- humanizing of humanity, some creation of an 'organic collective mechanical consciousness' which will somehow 'direct' or guides society as a whole.?
If so , once again, what does this say about our own individual freedom and identity?
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