Out of Control

KEVIN KELLY

Reviewed by Todd

The continuing development of human civilization has been predicated on our ability to control nature. The development of agriculture and domestication of animals typify the early grasp we gained over plants and animals. Mendel’s cross-pollination of peas in 1866 shows even greater control, the first step toward the bioengineering of today. Kevin Kelly, in his 1994 book Out of Control, challenges the very notion of control and argues that the biggest advances in science, economics, and social systems will come through letting go.

Now that is not to say that control doesn’t lead to progress, just that we need to change our perception of it. Kelly believes step-function changes have come with advances in automatic controls. For example, the steam engine converted superheated water into mechanical power, but it wasn’t until James Watt added a centrifugal governor that the machinery could regulate itself. The control of energy was followed by the control of materials. The feedback mechanisms available to fabricators make possible the creation of almost anything. Kelly imagines, “Cameras the size of molecules? Sure, why not? Crystals the size of buildings? As you wish. . . . Matter—in whatever shape we want—is no longer a barrier. Matter is almost ‘free.’” The new regime of automatic control is that of information, a paradigm we are only beginning to understand but one that Kelly believes will usher in an era of self-evolving machines capable of making their own decisions.

In 1990, graduate students at Carnegie Mellon designed a six-legged robot named Ambler. The designers of Ambler labored to create a machine that could act autonomously with capabilities needed for a fictional trip to Mars. But the two-ton creation could barely navigate the test area. The flaw was Ambler’s centralized brain and its need to consider every choice before even the smallest movement. At MIT, Rodney Brooks approached the problem differently, inspired by the construction of insects. His robot Genghis had a tiny microprocessor to run each of its six legs, mimicking the neurons ants and cockroaches have in their legs. Each leg looked at what the other legs were doing and acted accordingly, and with a little fiddling by Rodney, Genghis was scampering across the floor. Brooks slowly taught the machine how to climb and navigate over more complex environments, one simple routine built upon another.

“Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work,” Kelly writes. With the recent discovery of neurons on the heart and taste buds in the stomach, we are coming to realize that human life too is actually quite decentralized, more akin to the chaotic, swarming fields of individual agents, each playing their own small part in the manifestation of a greater whole. We seem to accept this functionality from a beehive or an ant colony, but shudder at the thought that life may be nothing more than subroutines built upon subroutines. Control resembles multifaceted reflex rather than some highly structured consciousness.

“The song goes: No one is in charge. We can’t predict the future. Now hear the flip side of the album: We’re all steering. And we can learn to anticipate what is immediately ahead. To learn is to live.”

And machines, whether mechanical or biological, only begin to scratch the surface of complexity. Consider the scale of many human organizations and how individuals are now acting as the smaller subroutines. Financial markets, with their multitudes of traders, each acting independently, signal economic meaning through price while computers ironically curb their erratic behavior. The Internet is showing the first signs of intelligence as participants provide Amazon reviews, del.icio.us links, and Digg votes that filter and illuminate greater meaning to the cacophony of random bits and bytes.

I cannot come close in this review to covering everything that Kelley does in 472 pages. The author’s survey is wide and deep, drawing on history to build readers’ appreciation and on science fiction to feed their imagination. Though written in 1994, Out of Control still possesses a prescient quality, because we still struggle to accept and internalize a world that is complex and out of our control by design. Kelly writes, “What little time left in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity.” TS

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Basic Books, Paperback 1994, ISBN 9780201483406

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