Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World [Paperback]

Kevin Kelly (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 1995

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In many ways, the 20th century has been the Age of Physics. Out of Control is an accessible and entertaining explanation of why the coming years will probably be the Age of Biology -- particularly evolution and ethology -- and what this will mean to most every aspect of our society. Kelly is an enthusiastic and well-informed guide who explains the promises and implications of this rapidly evolving revolution very well.

From Publishers Weekly

In this mind-expanding exploration of the synergistic intersection of computer science, biology, systems theory, cybernetics and artificial intelligence, Kelly investigates what he calls "vivisystems"--lifelike, complex, engineered systems capable of growing in complexity. Among the objects and ideas that he scrutinizes are computer models that simulate ecosystems; the "group mind" of bee hives and ant colonies; virtual-reality worlds; robot prototypes; and Arizona's Biosphere 2. Former publisher and editor of Whole Earth Review , now executive editor of Wired , Kelly distills the unifying principles governing self-improving systems, which he labels "the nine laws of god." Leaping from Antonio Gaudi's futuristic buildings in Barcelona to computerized "smart" houses to computer simulations that challenge Darwinian evolutionary theory, this sprawling odyssey will provoke and reward readers across many disciplines.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 14, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201483408
• ISBN-13: 978-0201483406
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #177,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #45 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Future of Computing

More About the Author

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 1999. He has just completed a book for Viking/Penguin publishers called "What Technology Wants," due out in the Fall 2010. He is also editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets half a million unique visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Painful but thought provoking evaluation of complex systems, February 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World (Paperback)

This is the best badly written book I have read lately. Kelly's book provides an enthusiastic reflection on the evolution of complex systems, full of vivid images and provocative metaphors, yet one can't avoid the impression he wrote it down as he thought of it. Kelly is a magazine editor (Wired) and his book comes across like a 475-page magazine article -- whenever he decides to change directions mid-chapter, he simply inserts a rosette and moves on. This book and its readers would have been well served by passing the text through the hands of a demanding book editor -- the result would have been a text about 150 pages shorter and much clearer. It also would have been helpful to have had the text proofread -- I nearly tore up the book reading over and over his confused expression "hone in on", an illiterate cross between "hone" and "home in on." I don't know Kelly's educational background. Reading his book I get the impression that his formal credentials are minimal but that he's very good at finding smart people and following them around. The result is a book that chronicles the development of this field while communicating his fascination with complex concepts he just barely understands, and his dilletante's infatuation with the jargon that describes it. The ideas in this book, and particularly the juxtapositions of ideas that Kelly assembles, are well worth reading about. But a better approach might be to skim the book, noting authors and titles, and then go straight to the source material listed at length in the back.

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the most important book of the 90s, August 23, 2006

By 

Chris Anderson (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World (Paperback)

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.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars this is booster science fiction, not reporting, May 21, 2001

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World (Paperback)

When a swarm of bees searches for a new home, it behaves like a single superorganism. Expendable scouts explore potential hive sites concurrently, dancing to communicate their suitability, until, abruptly, the entire swarm flocks into its new home. The locus of decision is a "hive mind," a dispersed, shifting collection of instincts and tiny decisions that somehow transcends the actions of any individual, even the hive queen. Ant colonies be have similarly - and so do foreign currency fluctuations, the folding proteins that regulate the internal processes of life, and the predator prey struggles that shape global ecosystems.

The hive mind is a powerful new metaphor. It's not that scientists failed to notice bee hives and ant colonies before. The difference is that novel scientific tools - chaos" theory, for example, and massively parallel computers - have allowed researchers to study and perhaps harness the unpredictable worlds of highly complex, sell-organizing systems such as the hive mind.

In "Out of Control," Kevin Kelly examines the impact of the hive- mind model as it spreads into the scientific and technological communities. Scientists, he says, are beginning to explore more "holistic" problems, in which entire environments are their laboratory, with huge numbers of interacting factors. Steve Packard, fur example, hoped to re-create a prairie ecology in suburban Chicago, an experiment that succeeded over nearly a decade of false starts. He discovered that the order in which he introduced complementary species - grasses and the insects that disperse their seeds - or the timing of a clearing fire in the aftermath of a drought could radically alter the final shape of his reconstituted prairies. Although this and similar experiments, such as Biosphere 2, are competently explored by Kelly, they have already been described elsewhere numerous times). It is in the realm of technology that Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, has something to add. In dozens of interviews with academics and corporate researchers, tinkerer- artists in industrial lofts and even beekeepers, Kelly has uncovered a growing subculture that is systematically exploiting the complex forces of the hive mind, evolution and other self-organizing 8ystems. According to Kelly, their robots and smart computer programs will grow and evolve into useful forms, rendering obsolete all "dumb" manufactured goods, such as today's refrigerators, which cannot adapt themselves to ever-changing human demands. Take the smart office." an artificial superorganism" envisioned by researchers in the Xerox lab in California. By embedding computer chips in every office system, from books that remember where you left off to lamps and chairs that anticipate your approach, they hope to create a sensory net that would adjust itself t~ your needs and habits. It could, Kelly reports, function as the opposite of virtual reality: Instead of bringing a viewer into a computer-generated world, the intelligence of the computer would extend into the room itself. But the user would have to surrender some control to a machine mind. If you entered the office of a hearing-impaired person, for example, the higher volume might puncture your eardrum before the room would "adapt" to you.

These practical innovations are interesting and might revolutionize our lives. But beyond these relatively simple applications, Kelly's predictions begin to go badly overboard. These machines, he claims, would blur the distinction between man-made and living beings and give rise to a "neo-biological" civilization; as they take over their own reproduction and maintenance, he speculates, they will slip from our control. The task of the 21st century, he writes, is to relinquish this control "with dignity." This is a frightening scenario, but the reasoning behind it appears lame to me. Despite its lofty goals, artificial intelligence has continually hit dead ends. The snag is that complex calculations take longer -the smarter you make computers, the slower they become. It is simply a copout to say that genetic algorithms or massively parallel computers will somehow allow a fundamental new forms of self-organizing intelligence to "emerge" in some unforeseen and unimaginable way. I do not believe, for example that the realistic computer animation in "Jurassic Park" will eventually lead to the "emergence" of living cartoon characters, like "real" Roget Rabbits as Kelly insists. Nor do I believe, as Kelly posits, that the new wired society will inevitably become more democratic; darker scenarios are equally also possible. Unfortunately, in his highly combustible enthusiasm, Kelly spews countless similar Panglossian predictions that are rather silly.

In the end, "Out of Control" is a mixed bag. At its best, it is a gallery of intellectual and technological pioneers striving to infuse the hive mind into our machines. They just might succeed. But at its worst, it reads like a random tour of the Internet, where solid information is punctuated by the musings of isolated nerds.

REcommended only with extreme caution.