Reviews for Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World

The average rating for Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-24 00:00:00 Eric Fix The ideas and concepts compressed in this work could be used for several academic careers and it´s focused on one of the most underrepresented, and tragically at the same time most important, topic of interdisciplinarity and cooperation. It´s economical logic that no company is interested in fruitless research about what would be possible in collaborations with other fields of science one has no made investments in and so it simply isn´t done. The state could stand in by subsidizing much more research that isn´t focused on marketable products, but on what synergies could emerge when the advantages are mixed together. Kelly is big in nostredameian style of predicting many developments that are already there and will come, and looking back at 1995, 25 years ago, it seems even more amazing that he managed to extrapolate developments that were deemed fringe science, impossible, not profitable, or were simply disliked by the leading scientists of some fields because they preferred their own yada thesis. He predicted nanotech, internet, computers, he talks about so many interconnected topics, making the work a mixture of technology, biology, many social sciences, and philosophy, giving so many inspirations one could bath in for months. A bit too much techno optimism lead to some forecasts that were just unrealistic, but especially the comparison of natural and human made systems is ingenious, as it doesn´t only embrace the importance of nature conservation, but leads to more focus on interdisciplinarity and learning from models that are functioning for eons. The idea of this book should be reinterpreted with all the modern science and extrapolated to different distances of the future in a mixture of Michio Kaku and John Brockmans´ Edge question books, just a bit more coherent than in this case, where the chapters stand isolated from each other without much metacontext. Quite an irony for a book about that everything is connected. Many mainstream thinkers will, even today, definitively find the ideas impossible to implement for laughable reasons, looking at you, economics and political sciences, but keep on playing around with stupid ideas, it´s so cute. A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:

Review # 2 was written on 2009-08-09 00:00:00 Pat McCaffrey This is a fascinating book full of fascinating ideas reaching across the board from artificial intelligence, evolution, biology, ecology, robotics and more to explore complexity, cybernetics and self-organising systems in an accessible and engaging way. But despite the fascinating topic matter, "Out of Control" has a number of frustrating flaws: - It is way too long-winded. - It is full of weird conjecture and meta-philosophising, which may have inspired the creators of the Matrix trilogy, but which I find unconvincing. - It almost completely void of meta-text to help the reader understand what Kelly is trying to do with his book (having read the book, I'm still wondering). Indeed, reading the book I got the feeling that Kelly was trying to combine several different books into one: There is a fascinating study of self-sustaining systems. But there is also a sort of business-book take on network economy. And an extended meditation on evolution and postdarwinism. I'm sure that to Kelly, all of these things are tightly interconnected. But he doesn't explain that very well to the reader. His central argument is that as technology becomes ever more complex, it becomes more akin to biological systems (eco-systems, vivisystems, interdependent and co-evolving organisms). But because the individual chapters are set up as essays on their own, there is often little to tie these wildly different ideas together. I would have preferred a much shorter book, more narrowly focused on the idea of self-organising systems. A good editor would have helped produce that. UPDATE: I took upon my self to attempt to edit the book into the version that I would have preferred to read: