Out of Control is a summary of what we know about self-sustaining systems, both livin …… [ 展开全部 ]
g ones such as a tropical wetland, or an artificial one, such as a computer simulation of our planet. The last chapter of the book, "The Nine Laws of God," is a distillation of the nine common principles that all life-like systems share. The major themes of the book are:
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. [ 收起 ]
Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN
Neo-biological civilization
The triumph of the bio-logic
Learning to surrender our creations
Chapter 2: HIVE MIND
Bees do it: distributed governance
The collective intelligence of a mob
Asymmetrical invisible hands
Decentralized remembering as an act of perception
More is more than more, it's different
Advantages and disadvantages of swarms
The network is the icon of the 21st century
Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE
Entertaining machines with bodies
Fast, cheap and out of control
Getting smart from dumb things
The virtues of nested hierarchies
Using the real world to communicate
No intelligence without bodies
Mind/body black patch psychosis
Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY
Biology: the future of machines
Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds
Random paths to a stable ecosystem
How to do everything at once
The Humpty Dumpty challenge
Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION
What color is a chameleon on a mirror?
The unreasonable point of life
Poised in the persistent state of almost falling
Rocks are slow life
Cooperation without friendship or foresight
Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX
Equilibrium is death
What came first, stability or diversity?
Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop
The origins of variation
Life immortal, ineradicable
Negentropy
The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming
Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL
In ancient Greece the first artificial self
Maturing of mechanical selfhood
The toilet: archetype of tautology
Self-causing agencies
Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS
Bottled life, sealed with clasp
Mail-order Gaia
Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man
The very big ecotechnic terrarium
An experiment in sustained chaos
Another synthetic ecosystem, like California
Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE
Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark
Migrating to urban weed
The deployment of intentional seasons
A cyclotron for the life sciences
The ultimate technology
Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY
Pervasive round-the-clock plug in
Invisible intelligence
Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms
Programming a commonwealth
Closed-loop manufacturing
Technologies of adaptation
Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS
Having your everything amputated
Instead of crunching, connecting
Factories of information
Your job: managing error
Connecting everything to everything
Chapter 12: E-MONEY
Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins
The fax effect and the law of increasing returns
Superdistribution
Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a fiscal charge
Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks
Fear of underwire economies
Chapter 13: GOD GAMES
Electronic godhood
Theories with an interface
A god descends into his polygonal creation
The transmission of simulacra
Memorex warfare
Seamless distributed armies
A 10,000 piece hyperreality
The consensual ascii superorganism
Letting go to win
Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM
An outing to the universal library
The space of all possible pictures
Travels in biomorph land
Harnessing the mutator
Sex in the library
Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps
Tunnelling through randomness
Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION
Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine
What you can't engineer, evolution can
Mindless acts performed in parallel
Computational arms race
Taming wild evolution
Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules
Death is the best teacher
The algorithmic genius of ants
The end of engineering's hegemony
Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL
Cartoon physics in toy worlds
Birthing a synthespian
Robots without hard bodies
The agents of ethnological architecture
Imposing destiny upon free will
Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald
Searching for co-control
Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE
To enlarge the space of being
Primitives of visual possibilities
How to program happy accidents
All survive by hacking the rules
The handy-dandy tool of evolution
Hang-gliding into the game of life
Life verbs
Homesteading hyperlife territory
Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE
The revolution of daily evolution
Bypassing the central dogma
The difference, if any, between learning and evololution
The evolution of evolution
The explanation of everything
Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM
The incompleteness of Darwinian theory
Natural selection is not enough
Intersecting lines on the tree of life
The premise of non-random mutations
Even monsters follow rules
When the abstract is embodied
The essential clustering of life
DNA can't code for everything
An uncertain density of biological search space
Mathematics of natural selection
Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS
Order for free
Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math
Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets
A question worth asking
Self-tuning vivisystems
Chapter 21: RISING FLOW
A 4 billion year ponzi scheme
What evolution wants
Seven trends of hyper-evolution
Coyote trickster self-evolver
Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY
Brains that catch baseballs
The flip side of chaos
Positive myopia
Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability
Operation Internal Look, Ahead
Varieties of prediction
Change in the service of non-change
Telling the future is what the systems are for
The many problems with global models
We are all steering
Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES
What ever happened to cybernetics?
The holes in the web of scientific knowledge
To be astonished by the trivial
Hypertext: the end of authority
A new thinking space
Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD
How to make something from nothing
Hijacking the universe
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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