Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World
Author: Kevin Kelly
List Price: $22.50
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201483408
Publisher: Perseus Publishing (May, 1995)
Sales Rank: 16,239
Average Customer Rating: 4.24 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 4 out of 5
Painful but thought provoking evaluation of complex systems
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.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the future.
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.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Nature Creates New Things Out of Nothing Every Day
This book must have been as much fun for Kevin Kelly to write as it is to read. It's a little long but very easy to understand. It'll make you think and you are sure to enjoy thinking about the ideas and examples in here.A more correct title might be "Out of Centralized Control." Kelly's point is that Nature is not a command and control monolith, but instead, a network of relatives, friends, neighbors, and sometimes predators. Nature does not control the Universe so much as it encourages cooperation within the Universe. The examples Kelly gives in the first few pages set the tone of the rest of the book. One is the flock of geese, which somehow knows its migration path from hemisphere to hemisphere even though none of the geese in the flock have ever flown it before.
As Kelly shows us, there are plenty of surprises in Nature. Uncertainty is built in. That's life ! Some readers might find it hard to believe that Nature is not particularly concerned about efficiency. It doesn't mind duplication, redundancy, and a little waste. It fact, it wants these things because they lead us to flexibility. Kelly's point in all this seems to be that Nature does not play by the numbers.
It might be even harder for some readers to believe, at first, that Nature creates new things out of nothing every day. But, Kelly will win you over on that point and many more. His "Nine Laws of God" which sum up the book in the last chapter made me want to read it a second time.
One nice companion to this book would be "Morphic Resonance and the The Presence of the Past: The Habits of Nature" by Ruppert Sheldrake. That book presents a theory that is considered radical by many, yet the critics usually concede that it's well reasoned and fills many of the gaps in our knowledge of Nature.
If you'd like to think about the theological implications of Kelly's ideas, try a few books about process theology, particularly these: "A Basic Introduction to Process Theology" by Robert Mesle, "What is Process Theology?" by Robert Mellert, and "Ominipotence and Other Theological Mistakes" by Charles Hartshorne.
Book Index