Out of Control summary

One common trait in current technologies and machines is that they all demand intense control and supervision by humans. But as we begin to merge the artificial and the biological, we will come to find that we humans must begin to relinquish our control.

Why?

Have you ever seen a swarm of bees? If you have, you were no doubt amazed at how it moved uniformly, as if it were a single organism and of a single mind.

In fact, we humans can learn a lot from swarm systems: they already exhibit many of characteristics we hope to attain by merging nature and technology.

Imagine a world where there are no big corporations or organizations, but instead everyone runs their own one-person company. Sound crazy? Well, if network thinking were applied to the economy, that’s what the result would look like: a network economy.

Today, if you want to buy a chair, typically a single company would control every stage of the production and delivery process, from designing the chair to shipping it to your home.

As you have seen, network thinking can provide many benefits. But networks also raise some concerns for their members. Foremost is privacy.

Concern for privacy arises from the fact that being part of a network would require individuals to share a lot of information with others so that the network can function efficiently. But of course no individual would want all their information to be released to just anybody, so it is important that networks have a way to protect the privacy of individual nodes.

In the 1930s, a famous ecologist called Aldo Leopold set his sights on a very ambitious task: he wanted to create his own ecosystem on an old farm purchased by the University of Wisconsin. Specifically, he introduced certain species into particular climatological and environmental conditions in order to create a prairie ecosystem similar to the large grasslands of the United States.

Yet despite having the right climate and introducing the right plant and animal species to the farm, Leopold found that a true prairie ecosystem didn’t emerge: non-prairie plants and animals kept thriving.

As you know, life has evolved on earth as dictated by Darwin’s natural selection and certain conditions like the availability of oxygen, water and sunlight. This process has resulted in our human intelligence.

But in fact, if you think about it, if we were to design an “evolutionary” computer program with certain rules and conditions governing it like those applied in the evolution of life, artificial intelligence could well evolve from it.

The artificial evolution explained in the previous blink is a tantalizing prospect not only because it could result in artificial intelligence, but also because it could teach us a lot about how our own evolution happened.

For example, when we define the right parameters for artificial evolution in a computer program, we can watch and study how natural selection works. Even better, it is also conceivable that we could alter the conditions of the program so that the evolution would be driven by a mechanism other than natural selection.

What do the stock market and an unknotted balloon zipping around a room erratically have in common?

They both seem at first glance completely chaotic processes, but are on closer inspection somewhat predictable.

The key message in this book:

As technology advances, the natural and the artificial will intermingle and merge into networks and systems that will greatly affect the fate of society and humanity. It is crucial that humans learn to relinquish control in these developments.