Beyond the reach of our own understanding

Patrick Skene Catling

OUT OF CONTROL: THE NEW BIOLOGY OF MACHINES by Kevin Kelly Fourth Estate, £16.99, pp. 521 In bee-swarm mode, the Internet computer hackers may symbiotically achieve post-Darwinian humanised mechanical evolution by spontaneous democratic megabyte biological synthesis, and thus find the way, possibly just in time, to colonise the rest of the universe.

That's the message I have distilled from two hypnotic readings of this extraordinari- ly thoughtful, thought-provoking, futuristic `book' by Kevin Kelly, who lives (of course) at the sharp edge of fin-de-siecle civilisa- tion, in Pacifica, California. Kelly is the executive editor of Wired, a former publish- er and editor of Whole Earth Review, and, as his publisher says,

has been instrumental in helping launch a number of cultural innovations: The Hack- ers' Conference; Cyberthon, the first virtual reality jamboree; and the WELL, model way- station on the information superhighway.

Considering the past, present and most especially the possible future of this planet from the point of view of every scientific discipline, and transcending discipline, Kelly naturally poses more questions than anyone can answer — yet.

A lot of the questions may seem silly, obvi- ous, trivial, or hardly worth worrying about, even for non-scientists. Scientists in the perti- nent fields may say the same: these questions are distractions, the ravings of an amateur science-groupie, the ill-informed musing of a techno-transcendentalist.

He certainly doesn't seem ill-informed. In the three years he spent on research for Out of Control, he amassed a 24-page anno- tated bibliography, critically summarising all sorts of scholarly works on every aspect of born and made systems, from history to blue-sky speculation, from Vernon Ahmad- jian's Symbiosis: An Introduction to Biologi- cal Associations to H. Wojciech Zurek's Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of Information.

Heady stuff. The book is well worth get- ting for its bibliography alone, which has made me a science-groupie's groupie. It could keep one busy far into the next century, for it represents an attempt to comprehend the possible future evolution of . . everything — particularly the autonomous development of intelligent robots; or, as his subtitle promises, the new biology of machines'. This is the won- derful sort of subject which can quickly transform a reader's idle curiosity into an obsessional craving for more knowledge and imaginative interpretation. Kelly offers plenty of both, with hackle-raising enthusi- asm, eloquence and even that scientific rarity, a sense of humour. Kelly is encouraged by the thought that in infinite chaos there is potential immacu- late order. He devotes a chapter to consid- eration of Jorge Luis Borges' concept of an infinite, labyrinthine library which contains every book that has ever been written and every book that ever could be written meaningless jumbles of letters and the ulti- mate, all-inclusive book. Kelly quotes Borges in an interview: 'On some shelf in some hexagon there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendi- um of all the rest.'

In the extragalactic chaos which has always been my worst nightmare, Borges and Kelly have perceived an assurance of final perfection. Thus science and philoso- phy, on a good day, can lead to supernatu- ral optimism. It is clear that Kelly is a supreme optimist who enlightens the black holes of outer space with magical rose-coloured glasses. When all was said and done, cybernetics led him to virtual reality to God, or, at any rate, god. His progress seems more intuitive than logical but his inevitably rather vague, wishful conclusions I would not voluntarily disbelieve in.

Kelly begins his mind-blowing survey in the enclosed introversion of a biosphere, `a test module for living in space.' By the end, after contemplation of Pentagon computer simulations of all possible Earth wars, one wonders where to buy a ticket for the first air-conditioned capsule on the moon.

As an individual bee is incapable of the manoeuvres for survival that can be deter- mined by what he calls the communal 'Hive Mind,' so, in his opinion, a single individual person is incapable of conceiving of the advances that may be achieved by maximis- ing the pool of ideas. He contrasts the o d- established system of sequentia operations, as in a factory assembly line, with what he calls 'the swarm model,' the web model,' of thought and action, as in the telephone system and Internet.

`What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions,' he says; 'but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important.' If a sufficient complexity is engendered all at once, he suggests, we may somehow expedite discovery of that perfectly comprehensive Borgesian book. This idea may make individualists snort with indignation but it is interesting to fol- low Kelly's ingenious argument. Not since H.G. Wells has there been another popular scientist who has had the nerve to plunge into so many bold theories. He writes:

The artificial vivisystems I survey are all com- plex and grand: planetary telephone systems, computer virus incubators, robot prototypes, virtual reality worlds, synthetic animated characters, diverse artificial ecologies, and computer models of the whole Earth.

But the wildness of nature is the chief source of more insights to come. I report on new experimental work in ecosystem assem- bly, restoration biology, coral reef replicas, social insects (bees and ants), and complex closed systems such as the Biosphere 2 pro- ject in Arizona . . .

In the course of this astonishingly wide- ranging exploration, on almost every page Kelly sets forth various apercus:

Complexity must be grown from simple sys- tems that already work.

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter.

Behaviour is computerisable.

Some day Mickey Mouse will have his own agenda.

Real biologists cringe when 'inevitable' is used in the same sentence as evolution.

Exploring beyond the reach of our own understanding and refining what we have are gifts that directed, supervised, optimising evolution can bring us.

So that, folks, is where we're at, and where we are going.

One more thought: if Kevin Kelly's pre- dictions are valid, this book may be one of the last you will ever need to read. I hope not.

`That's an excellent idea, Miss Jones. Who gave it to you?'