Predictions from the Wired crowd

Re-review of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World by Kevin Kelly

Carniolan Queen Bee in the hive by Levi Asay

Looking back to this book, which I reviewed for the Boston Globe in 1994, was fun. The author, Kevin Kelly, was a co-founder of both The Whole Earth Catalogue and Wired. His book, Out of Control, was supposed to chronicle a techno-intellectual revolution underway, in which machines were “liberating” themselves from us, a kind of merging of silicon-based computers and their software with biological systems. The task of the 21st century, he wrote, would be to relinquish our control of them "with dignity". That’s strong and dramatic, to say the least.

Celebrating technology with overtones of religious prophesy, Wired seemed to embody the exuberance and hubris of Silicon Valley. The early 1990s were heady times: computers were ubiquitous, the internet was cranking up, a tech-led economy was booming, and not least, communism had fallen and the industrial “threat” of Japan was receding. Once again, the future seemed open and it promised to be American.

Suddenly, it was hip to be a nerd, like only the computer geeks of Silicon Valley and the academics at MIT’s Media Lab understood the secrets of a new temple. Kevin Kelly was one of their would-be gurus, spouting wild predictions, awe-struck by his own erudition, and offering a lot of interesting ideas and some solid reporting in the bargain.

I was a freelance writer then, specializing in science and business. My editor at the Boston Globe approached me to review Out of Control, which she thought would be “very big”. I was to read it critically and summarize the ideas. As a born skeptic, I already thought Wired fare was absurdly overblown. Booster science fiction - and this book fit right in.

Wired’s coverage reminded me of my favorite passage in the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. José Arcadio Buendía, a patriarch in an isolated jungle city, was shown a block of ice, which he had never encountered. Worried for his reputation when asked what it was, he blurted, “it’s the world’s largest diamond.” This perfectly expresses how a genuine phenomenon (ice) could in the wrong hands become something almost entirely fantastical, more something the observer wanted to see. Wired to a T.

Many of the notions in Kelly’s book were indeed intriguing and I was open to them, even I was prepped with sarcasm. A central idea of the book, as I saw it, was the hive mind. I wrote:

When a swarm of bees searches for a new home, it behaves like a single superorganism. Expendable scouts explore potential hive sites concurrently, dancing to communicate their suitability, until, abruptly, the entire swarm flocks into its new home. The locus of decision is a "hive mind," a dispersed, shifting collection of instincts and tiny decisions that somehow transcends the actions of any individual, even the hive queen. Ant colonies behave similarly – and so do foreign currency fluctuations, the folding proteins that regulate the internal processes of life, and the predator-prey struggles that shape global ecosystems.

The hive mind is a powerful new metaphor. It's not that scientists failed to notice bee hives and ant colonies before. The difference is that novel scientific tools – chaostheory, for example, and massively parallel computers – have allowed researchers to study and perhaps harness the unpredictable worlds of highly complex, self-organizing systems such as the hive mind.

In Out of Control, Kelly examined the impact of the hive-mind model as it spread into the scientific and technological/commercial communities. With it and similar questions, Kelly informed us, scientists were beginning to explore more "holistic" problems, in which entire environments were their laboratory, with huge numbers of interacting factors. Distinctly non-linear. Based on biological systems.

Steve Packard, for example, hoped to re-create a prairie ecology in suburban Chicago, an experiment that succeeded after nearly a decade of false starts. He discovered that the order in which he introduced complementary species – grasses and the insects that disperse their seeds or the timing of a clearing fire in the aftermath of a drought – could radically alter the final shape and composition of his reconstituted prairies. The fire seemed to release dormant seeds and organisms long thought extinct. This is truly fascinating.

Although this and similar experiments, such as Biosphere 2, were competently explored by Kelly, they had already been described elsewhere. Indeed, Out of Control recapitulated a lot of things that were appearing under the rubric complexity theory, about how order can arise suddenly and unexpectedly, yet in stable form. The boiling point of water. A massive shift of a sand dune. Earthquake. Locust plague. There were all sorts of scientific models about it, such as the super-abstract game of life that resulted in complex configurations on a chess board that supposedly mirrored, or even explained, the real world.

From the get go, I had serious doubts about how Kelly was interpreting the meaning of these models. At the heart of Kelly’s argument, I felt, there were dubious, indeed fantastical, assumptions. For example, he claimed that a computer model that simulated the tightly integrated, yet decentralized motions of migrating birds – sharing the lead, preserving energy by suddenly switching positions in the formation, etc. – was the same thing as if they were alive. So, he actually argued, computer programmers were already creating “life”. What?! Could he really believe that? Isn’t life far more complex? What would happen if something unexpected threw the birds off, forcing them to adapt to higher temperatures or pollution? Those scenarios could not be in the particular computer-modeling program, yet somehow birds in real life would attempt to adapt. After all, a computer simulation is just a simulation. Shades of José Arcadio Buendía.

It was in the realm of technology that Kelly had something to add. In dozens of interviews with academics and corporate researchers, tinkerer-artists in industrial lofts and even beekeepers, Kelly had uncovered a growing subculture that was systematically attempting to exploit the complex forces of the hive mind, evolution and other self-organizing biological systems. Kelly argued that their robots and smart computer programs would grow and evolve into useful forms, rendering obsolete all "dumb" manufactured goods, such as refrigerators, which could only poorly adapt themselves to ever-changing human demands. Today, connected to the internet, smart refrigerators do better. In other words, some of what Kelly predicted here came true.

Take the smart office, "an artificial superorganism" envisioned by researchers in the Xerox lab in California. By embedding computer chips in every office system, from books that remember where you left off to lamps and chairs that anticipate your approach, they hoped to create a sensory net that would adjust itself to your needs and habits. It could, Kelly reports, function as the opposite of virtual reality: instead of bringing a viewer into a computer-generated world, the intelligence of the computer would extend into the room itself. There is no question that this kind of application continues to advance today. If you walk in a warehouse, the lights often turn off in areas you pass through, saving energy. I even have a friend whose vaper connects to the internet, both to monitor his supply of cannabis and to communicate his habits to suppliers.

These practical innovations might revolutionize our lives, even if many of them remain rather banal or their usefulness questionable. A beeping electronic calendar that knows your flight schedule is nice, but is it really necessary? Beyond these relatively simple applications, Kelly's predictions began to go overboard.

The user, Kelly posits, would have to surrender some control to a “machine mind” (which he didn’t really define). If you entered the office of a hearing-impaired person, for example, the higher volume might puncture your eardrum before the room could "adapt" to you. But Kelly goes much further in his claims: with incremental advances and self-maintenance, these machines eventually would blur the distinction between man-made and living beings and give rise to a neo-biological civilization. They would, he predicted, take control over their own reproduction and repair, decisively slipping from our control and going off on their own – to evolve in their own ways. I did not detect a jot of skepticism or critical assessment on Kelly’s part, just a desire to ratchet up the hyperbole.

He advances a frightening (and currently relevant) scenario. With the recent advent of ChatGPT and other neural-net AI, it is in the news big time: we are told we soon won’t understand how AI thinks (actually we already don’t understand how neural nets function), that it will take our jobs, that it will become “self-aware”, that it may cause our redundancy or even our extinction.

Then as now, the reasoning behind this appears lame to me or at a minimum, premature. Despite its lofty goals, artificial intelligence (also never clearly defined by Kelly in the book) has continually hit dead ends or limits. At this point, it can mimic many human creations, but it still doesn’t understand them on their own terms. I think this is a crucial distinction, Kelly apparently did not. ChatGPT can spin out prose, but it is lackluster in style and humor and at least for the moment, incorporates inaccuracies (“hallucinations”) because it cannot distinguish factual from fake on the internet.

In other words, in practical rather than visionary terms, what Kelly was predicting remains a huge, perhaps unimaginable jump. Still, I must admit: the jury remains out on this one and only the future will tell. We should, Kelly argued, suspend our disbelief when we contemplate the neo-biological future. Then again, visionary indulgence like this is part and parcel of any utopic (or dystopic) science fiction: you can’t prove it will never happen, so boosters act as if it inevitably will. Kelly is a booster.

Out of Control offered little concrete in the way of explanations regarding how Kelly’s claims would be realized. He would argue it’s too early to do so. In my reading, it is simply a copout to assert that genetic algorithms or massively parallel computers will somehow allow fundamental new forms of self-organizing intelligence to "emerge" in some unforeseen and unimaginable way. I do not believe, for example that the realistic computer animation in "Jurassic Park" will eventually lead to the birth of living cartoon characters, kind of like "real" Roger Rabbits, as Kelly insisted. Nor do I believe, as Kelly posited, that the new wired society will inevitably become more democratic. Indeed, we see how social media has been twisted into a tool for demagogues peddling lies and inflaming largely unfounded fears. Unfortunately, in his highly combustible enthusiasm, Kelly spewed countless Panglossian scenarios that I found rather silly and that now appear pathetically quaint.

I thought much of this was ridiculous back then and said so in print. Hoping in the back of my mind that he might want to hire me to write as “the natural skeptic”, I sent Kelly a copy of my review. The audacity of the freelancer. To put it mildly, he wasn’t pleased. Then, he dared me to make a public bet on his predictions. We entered a fun exchange: before I put my money down, I demanded he define what he meant by “life” and how it should be measured. He quickly dropped the idea.

I know it’s hard to be held to account for one’s predictions from 30 years ago, particularly when they are about a specific scenario. In the end, Out of Control was a mixed bag. At its best, it was a gallery of intellectual and technological pioneers striving to infuse the hive mind and other biological systems into our machines. They just might succeed. But at its worst, it still reads like a random tour of the Internet, where solid information is punctuated by the musings of isolated nerds. (My original conclusion in 1994.)