Out Of Control

The story of automation is the story of a one-way shift from human control to automatic control.

Life is the strange loop of a snake releasing itself from its own grip, unmouthing an ever fattening tail tapering up to an ever increasingly large mouth, birthing an ever larger tail, filling the universe with this strangeness.

The genes harbor their own wisdom and their own inertia.

An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux.

No one has been more wrong about computerization than George Orwell in 1984. So far, nearly everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning.

What little time left is in this century is rehearsal time for the chief psychological chore of the 21st century: letting go, with dignity.

Urbanization is the advent of edge species.

The quickest route to describing a seed's output is to sprout it.

Dying creatively is the hallmark of vivisystems.

Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created.

The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.

When everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command.

As life evolves it unbinds from the inorganic and interacts more with the organic.

Life is in the business of making its environment agreeable for life.

If machines knew as much about each other as we know about each other (even in our privacy), the ecology of machines would be indomitable.

Evolution is a technological, mathematical, informational, and biological process rolled into one. It could almost be said to be a law of physics, a principle that reigns over all created multitudes, whether they have genes or not.

The capacity to evolve must be evolved itself. Evolution has been, and will keep on, exploring the space of possible evolutions. Organisms, memes, the whole ball of wax are only evolution's way to keep evolving.

Life is a verb not a noun.

In turbulence is the preservation of the world.

Life is a transforming flood that fills up empty containers and then spills out of them on its way to fill up more. The shape and number of vessels submerged by the flood doesn't make a bit of difference.

Hereditary information does not exist independently of its embodiment.

The hardest lesson for humans to learn: that organic complexity will entail organic time.

We are all steering.

The great secret which life has kept from us is that once born, life is immortal. Once launched, it cannot be eradicated.

Memory is a reenactment of perception, indistinguishable from the original act of knowing.

We should not be surprised that life, having subjugated the bulk of inert matter on Earth, would go on to subjugate technology, and bring it also under its reign of constant evolution.

Inconsistency is an inevitable trait of any self-sustaining system built up out of consistent parts.

Telling the future is what organisms are for.

We cannot import evolution and learning without exporting control.

The apparent veil between the organic and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.

An event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes spreading horizontally, like creeping tide.

It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater depths of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.

Complexity must be grown from simple systems that already work.

The future of machines is biology.

The world of our own making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to understand how to manage it.

A mind cannot possibly consider anything beyond what it can measure or calculate; without a body it can only consider itself. Without the interruptions of hellos from the eye, ear, tongue, nose, and finger, the evolving mind huddles in the corner picking its navel.

Biology always wins in any blending of organic and machine.

Life never falls, but never gets out of falling. It is poised in a persistent state of almost-fell.

"Correct" is a property of small systems.

Any highly evolved form is beautiful.

A system is anything that talks to itself.

A network nurtures small failures in order that large failures don't happen as often.

"It works, why worry?" is life's deepest philosophy.

The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find a hive.

There's nothing more addictive than being a god.

We want a machine that is constantly remaking itself.

What humans can't engineer, evolution can.

The nature of life is to delight in all possible loopholes. Every creature is in some way hacking a living by reinterpreting the rules.

We don't have a word for learning and teaching at the same time, but our schooling would improve if we did.

Artificial complex systems will be deliberately infused with organic principles simply to keep them going.

Animals are robots that work. Toons are simply robots without hard bodies.

The "I" of a vivisystem is a ghost. Like the transient form of a whirlpool held upright by a million spinning atoms of water, it can be scattered with a fingertip.

The only organization capable of unprejudiced growth, or unguided learning, is a network.

A company cannot be a learning company without also being a teaching company.

In network economics, more brings more.

One can imagine the future shape of companies by stretching them until they are pure network. It will be hard at times to tell who is working for whom.

The central act of the coming era is to connect everything to everything.

To err is human; to manage error is system.

We can only get smart things from stupid things.

Life-as-it-could-be is a territory we can only study by first creating it.

Anything that can hold an electronic charge can hold a fiscal charge.