Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Kevin has produced what I regard as one of the top five books of this decade. A very tough read but worth the effort. I had not understood the entire theory of co-evolution developed by Stewart Brand and represented in the Co-Evolution Quarterly and The Whole Earth until I read this book. Kevin introduces the concept of the "hive mind", addresses how biological systems handle complexity, moves over into industrial ecology and network economics, and concludes with many inspiring reflections on the convergence of biological and technical systems. He was easily a decade if not two ahead of his time.

Love this book. A great introduction to a world of ideas and concepts about evolution and technologies that are already shaping our (near) future. Horizon-expanding ideas--indeed, the chapter on Borges Library literally had my brain "buzzing" with activity and a restless night of wild dreams on the subject. As the author states himself, he does not write or develop anything new, rather, he creates exposure to the fascinating work of others. Though it is not difficult or dry, the entire book is concepts--not for someone looking for a light novel.

This book was groundbreaking in 1994; its insights have been improved upon by more recent writing on the same subjects. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend considering Steven Johnson's EMERGENCE before you buy this book; Johnson discussions some of Kelly's ideas, but offers are more up-to-date analysis of the phenomenon of non-hierarchical/centralized models of organization. Otherwise, this book is valuable for its historical positioning--how things seemed and were seen almost a decade ago.

This book is a fascinating roller-coaster ride through a host of emerging technologies which will no doubt have an influence on all our futures. Kevin Kelly demonstrates quite convincingly how the technological is becoming more biological. Artificial intelligence, robotics and our knowledge of ants and bees has produced insect-like robots capable of smart collective behaviour. Genetics, evolutionary theory and massively parallel connectionist machines (the fastest computers on the planet) are yielding emerging fields like evolutionary software design where the computer code is "bred" rather than being written. Open, closed, complex, self-organising, centrally controlled and distributed systems are all examined and contrasted, including everything from Borgian libraries to zero-sum games. Kelly tells us of his personal experience in Biosphere II, and contrasts the paradigmatic differences between the made and the born. What is made by us tends to be minimal, mechanical, predictable and maintenance intensive (even in our "autonomous" systems). By contrast, when we consider the different magnitudes of information in a blueprint compared with a DNA strand, we see that the born is vastly more complex, organic, unpredictable and constantly adapting to environmental changes.

The book on the whole is accessible and a real technological page turner. It will be of particular interest to anyone with some background in computing, artificial intelligence, biology, information theory or cognitive science.

Good points: very readable and thought provoking. Bad points: terrible use of sources and a shallow examination of the book's premises and implications.

Kelley interviewed and quoted scientists on fuzzy subjects outside their expertise, and then quoted marketing and PR folks about the scientists' work. It's as if he interviewed people until someone said what he wanted to hear, and then he used that quote regardless of the speaker's credentials.

Kelley suggests that we'd really like homes filled with "biological" appliances, but never explores the practical implications of having to house train a "biological" washing machine or teach your toaster what "done" means. Perhaps he has never dealt with pets or children. Kelley also loses sight of the difference between the real world and cyberspace: this may be a fashionable literary trick but it's not especially practical when one is cold or hungry. I did my disseration work in robotics and I found his expectations of biological machines to be shallow and downright silly

The ideas in this book may be thought by some to be radical or far-fetched, but to those readers familiar with the behavior of complex dynamical systems, they seem quite natural. The book emphasizes the theoretical aspects of complex systems, but some natural examples of them are discussed. The author, in spite of his choice of title for the book, is not threatened by the consequences of artifically creating these systems. After all, we live and have evolved in a universe that is even more complex than the author describes. The fact that we humans can now speed up the process of creation of these systems should be a source of wonder instead of fear.

What makes this book valuable reading is that the author emphasizes the collective behavior of dynamical systems. Too often the reductionist trend in Western science obscures how the system works together, how its many parts collectively induce an emergent behavior not at all apparent in the systems "equations of motion".

Since the book is written for a popular audience, the approach is qualitative and allegorical. This purely descriptive approach does however allow a more general overview of complex dynamical systems im many different areas. The author gives a fascinating discussion of swarm systems and their advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages according to the author is that they are "nonunderstandable"; but here he is mistaken, for complex systems can be understood, although such an understanding takes some effort anc computational horsepower. Also, in his discussion of network behavior the author asserts that it is "counterintuitive" and quotes "Braess's paradox" as proof of this. Dietrich Braess discovered that adding routes to an already congested network will slow it down. There are examples of this, but it is not a hard-and-fast rule, as network engineers who employ load balancing can attest to. Adding time-dependent paths can work to reduce congestion, this time-dependence not addressed in Braess's formulation of the paradox.

Some more interesting discussions in the book are allegorical, but they serve to encourage "thinking out of the box":1. The effects of isolation and boredom on the human mind: the need for the physical body to temper unruly constructions of the mind. 2. The chameleon riddle: what color will a chameleon take on if put in front of a mirror? 3.The Prisoner's dilemna. This has got to be the most widely used tool for encouraging cooperation, in spite of its simplicity and impracticality. Computer simulation of the Prisoner's dilemna with 1000 players has revealed phenomena familiar in evolutionary studies, such as parasitism, spontaneously emerging symbiosis, and long-term stable coexistence between species. 4. Physical systems as computational processes; this is the most radical of the ideas in the book, but the author does not expound upon it in any great detail though. 5. The Biosphere experiment; I only read brief news reports of this while it was going on, so it was interesting to read here a detailed account of it. 6. The need for industry to adopt "biological" methodologies: complexity is more efficient, less wasteful, and more robust. 7. Network economics: The "network company" of the 21st century will be distributed (no single location), decentralized, collaborative (outsourcing to competitors!), and adaptive. This chapter is the most practical of all those in the book. 8. The role of encryption in a digital economy, particularly "encryption-metering" and digital cash. 9. The importance of simulation in defense and industry in the 21st century: simulate before you build, simulate before you buy, and simulate before you fight. 10. The evolution machine and its resultant creation of sex; the consequent discussion of genetic/evolutionary programming. The differences between 'Lamarckian' and 'Darwinian" evolutionary programs. 11. Postdarwinism: why have no new species been detected naturally or even in computer simulations? The central thesis of Neodarwinism is that only the environment can select mutations, but not induce or direct them.

Since this book was published in 1994, there have been many advances in the areas that the author discusses. Evolutionary programming has taken off, with many applications in finance, biology, network engineering, and large-scale circuit design. Swarm robots are currently under development, with deployment just years away. Computational/intelligent agents are now managing networks, with autonomous agents just around the corner.Encryption and smart-card technologies have mushroomed along with intelligent computer virus detection. Simulation is now thought of as a "must-do" in every phase of business and industry, and simulations are now thought of as sophisticated enough to model real-world situations without any experimental "validation". Indeed, technological advancement and its application is moving forward at a dizzying rate, and seemingly...out of control?

This is a fascinating, well-written account of the popular notion that physics is dead and that the model for the future is biology. The problem with this is vagueness: there are no known mathematical laws of 'biology'. Even in genetics, then only mathematical laws arise from the physics of the genes. The idea of short-circuiting physics is charming but dead wrong. As Wigner pointed out, the discovery of laws of (time-evolution of) nature is impossible without underlying invariance principles, and there are no known laws of invariance for socio-economic behavior. Enjoy the book-it's the best and clearest 'cheerrleading' account savailable of the Santa Fe Institute philosophy, but take it with two or three grains of salt (and don't neglect to sign up for physics while you're at it). An excellent book that explains how mathematical laws of nature were discovered is J. Barbour's "Absolute or Relative motion".