Out of Control

    the New Biology of Machines,Social Systems and the

    Economic World

    Kevin Kelly

    Illustrated Edition

    Photos by Kevin Kelly

    Copyright ? 994 by Kevin Kelly

    Photos Copyright ? 2008 by Kevin Kellyc o n t e n t s

     The Made and The Born 6

    neo-biological civilization 6

    The triumph of the bio-logic 7

    Learning to surrender our creations 8

    2 hive Mind 9

    Bees do it: distributed governance 9

    The collective intelligence of a mob 

    asymmetrical invisible hands 3

    decentralized remembering as an act of perception 5

    More is more than more, it’s different 20

    advantages and disadvantages of swarms 2

    The network is the icon of the 2st century 25

    3 MaChines wiTh an aTTiTude 28

    entertaining machines with bodies 28

    Fast, cheap and out of control 37

    Getting smart from dumb things 4

    The virtues of nested hierarchies 44

    using the real world to communicate 46

    no intelligence without bodies 48

    Mindbody black patch psychosis 49

    4 asseMBLinG CoMPLexiTy 55

    Biology: the future of machines 55

    Restoring a prairie with fre and oozy seeds 58

    random paths to a stable ecosystem 60

    how to do everything at once 62

    The humpty dumpty challenge 65

    5 CoevoLuTion 67

    what color is a chameleon on a mirror? 67

    The unreasonable point of life 70

    Poised in the persistent state of almost falling 73

    rocks are slow life 75

    Cooperation without friendship or foresight 78

    6 The naTuraL FLux 83

    equilibrium is death 83

    What came frst, stability or diversity? 86

    ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop 89

    The origins of variation 90

    Life immortal, ineradicable 92

    negentropy 95

    The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming 977 eMerGenCe oF ConTroL 99

    In ancient Greece the frst artifcial self 99

    Maturing of mechanical selfhood 02

    The toilet: archetype of tautology 04

    self-causing agencies 08

    8 CLosed sysTeMs 2

    Bottled life, sealed with clasp 2

    Mail-order Gaia 5

    Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man 8

    The very big ecotechnic terrarium 20

    an experiment in sustained chaos 23

    another synthetic ecosystem, like California 30

    9 PoP Goes The BiosPhere 33

    Co-pilots of the 00 million dollar glass ark 33

    Migrating to urban weed 36

    The deployment of intentional seasons 38

    a cyclotron for the life sciences 43

    The ultimate technology 45

    0 indusTruaL eCoLoGy 47

    Pervasive round-the-clock plug in 47

    invisible intelligence 49

    Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms 5

    Programming a commonwealth 54

    Closed-loop manufacturing 55

    Technologies of adaptation 58

     neTworK eConoMiCs 6

    having your everything amputated 6

    instead of crunching, connecting 62

    Factories of information 65

    your job: managing error 69

    Connecting everything to everything 73

    2 e-Money 76

    Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins 76

    The fax effect and the law of increasing returns 82

    superdistribution 84

    Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a fscal charge 189

    Peer-to-peer fnance with nanobucks 195

    Fear of underwire economies 96

    3 God GaMes 98

    electronic godhood 98

    Theories with an interface 99

    a god descends into his polygonal creationTo 203

    The transmission of simulacra 208

    Memorex warfare 209 seamless distributed armies 23

    a 0,000 piece hyperreality 25

    The consensual ascii superorganism 26

    Letting go to win 29

    4 in The LiBrary oF ForM 22

    an outing to the universal library 22

    The space of all possible pictures 225

    Travels in biomorph land 228

    harnessing the mutator 23

    sex in the library 233

    Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps 236

    Tunnelling through randomness 239

    5 arTiFiCiaL evoLuTion 24

    Tom ray’s electric-powered evolution machine 24

    what you can’t engineer, evolution can 245

    Mindless acts performed in parallel 247

    Computational arms race 25

    Taming wild evolution 253

    stupid scientists evolving smart molecules 254

    death is the best teacher 258

    The algorithmic genius of ants 26

    The end of engineering’s hegemony 264

    6 The FuTure oF ConTroL 267

    Cartoon physics in toy worlds 267

    Birthing a synthespian 269

    robots without hard bodies 272

    The agents of ethnological architecture 275

    imposing destiny upon free will 276

    Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering donald 278

    searching for co-control 28

    7 an oPen universe 283

    To enlarge the space of being 283

    Primitives of visual possibilities 284

    how to program happy accidents 285

    all survive by hacking the rules 288

    The handy-dandy tool of evolution 290

    hang-gliding into the game of life 292

    Life verbs 294

    homesteading hyperlife territory 296

    8 The sTruCTure oF orGanized ChanGe 300

    The revolution of daily evolution 300

    Bypassing the central dogma 302

    The difference, if any, between learning and evololution 304

    The evolution of evolution 307

    The explanation of everything 3099 PosTdarwinisM 30

    The incompleteness of darwinian theory 30

    natural selection is not enough 32

    intersecting lines on the tree of life 34

    The premise of non-random mutations 35

    even monsters follow rules 38

    when the abstract is embodied 320

    The essential clustering of life 32

    dna can’t code for everything 322

    an uncertain density of biological search space 324

    Mathematics of natural selection 325

    20 The BuTTerFLy sLeePs 32 The BuTTerFLy sLeePs 328

    order for free 328

    net math: a counter-intuitive style of math 329

    Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets 33

    a question worth asking 333

    self-tuning vivisystems 337

    2 risinG FLow 340

    a 4 billion year ponzi scheme 340

    what evolution wants 343

    seven trends of hyper-evolution 346

    Coyote trickster self-evolver 350

    22 PrediCTion MaChinery 352

    Brains that catch baseballs 352

    The fip side of chaos 355

    Positive myopia 357

    Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability 358

    varieties of prediction 366

    Change in the service of non-change 369

    Telling the future is what the systems are for 370

    The many problems with global models 370

    we are all steering 375

    23 whoLes, hoLes, and sPaCes 377

    what ever happened to cybernetics? 377

    The holes in the web of scientifc knowledge 380

    To be astonished by the trivial 382

    hypertext: the end of authority 385

    a new thinking space 389

    24 The nine Laws oF God 392

    how to make something from nothing 392

    annoTaTed BiBLioGraPhy 3986

    1

    The Made and the Born

    Neo-biological civilization

    I am sealed in a cottage of glass that is completely airtight. inside i breathe my exha-

    lations. yet the air is fresh, blown by fans. My urine and excrement are recycled by a

    system of ducts, pipes, wires, plants, and marsh-microbes, and redeemed into water and

    food which i can eat. Tasty food. Good water.

    Last night it snowed outside. inside this experimental capsule it is warm, humid,and cozy. This morning the thick interior windows drip with heavy condensation. Plants

    crowd my space. i am surrounded by large banana leaves—huge splashes of heart-

    warming yellow-green color—and stringy vines of green beans entwining every vertical

    surface. about half the plants in this hut are food plants, and from these i harvested my

    dinner.

    i am in a test module for living in space. My atmosphere is fully recycled by the

    plants and the soil they are rooted in, and by the labyrinth of noisy ductwork and pipes

    strung through the foliage. neither the green plants alone nor the heavy machines alone

    are suffcient to keep me alive. Rather it is the union of sun-fed life and oil-fed machinery

    that keeps me going. Within this shed the living and the manufactured have been unifed

    into one robust system, whose purpose is to nurture further complexities—at the mo-

    ment, me.

    what is clearly hap-

    pening inside this glass

    capsule is happening less

    clearly at a great scale on

    earth in the closing years

    of this millennium. The

    realm of the born—all that

    is nature—and the realm

    of the made—all that is

    humanly constructed—are

    becoming one. Machines

    are becoming biologi-

    cal and the biological is

    becoming engineered.

    That’s banking on

    some ancient metaphors.

    images of a machine as or-

    ganism and an organism as machine are as old as the frst machine itself. But now those

    enduring metaphors are no longer poetry. They are becoming real—proftably real.

    This book is about the marriage of the born and the made. By extracting the logical

    principle of both life and machines, and applying each to the task of building extremely

    complex systems, technicians are conjuring up contraptions that are at once both made

    The author in the sealed test capsule.7

    and alive. This marriage between life and machines is one of convenience, because, in

    part, it has been forced by our current technical limitations. For the world of our own

    making has become so complicated that we must turn to the world of the born to under-

    stand how to manage it. That is, the more mechanical we make our fabricated environ-

    ment, the more biological it will eventually have to be if it is to work at all. our future is

    technological; but it will not be a world of gray steel. rather our technological future is

    headed toward a neo-biological civilization.

    The triumph of the bio-logic

    Nature has all aloNg yielded her fesh to humans. First, we took nature’s materials as

    food, fbers, and shelter. Then we learned to extract raw materials from her biosphere to

    create our own new synthetic materials. now Bios is yielding us her mind—we are taking

    her logic.

    Clockwork logic—the logic of the machines—will only build simple contraptions.

    Truly complex systems such as a cell, a meadow, an economy, or a brain (natural or arti-

    fcial) require a rigorous nontechnological logic. We now see that no logic except bio-logic

    can assemble a thinking device, or even a workable system of any magnitude.

    it is an astounding discovery that one can extract the logic of Bios out of biology

    and have something useful. although many philosophers in the past have suspected one

    could abstract the laws of life and apply them elsewhere, it wasn’t until the complexity

    of computers and human-made systems became as complicated as living things, that it

    was possible to prove this. it’s eerie how much of life can be transferred. so far, some of

    the traits of the living that have successfully been transported to mechanical systems are:

    self-replication, self-governance, limited self-repair, mild evolution, and partial learning.

    we have reason to believe yet more can be synthesized and made into something new.

    yet at the same time that the logic of Bios is being imported into machines, the logic

    of Technos is being imported into life.

    The root of bioengineering is the desire to control the organic long enough to im-

    prove it. domesticated plants and animals are examples of technos-logic applied to life.

    The wild aromatic root of the Queen Anne’s lace weed has been fne-tuned over genera-

    tions by selective herb gatherers until it has evolved into a sweet carrot of the garden; the

    udders of wild bovines have been selectively enlarged in a “unnatural” way to satisfy humans

    rather than calves. Milk cows and carrots, therefore, are human inventions as much as

    steam engines and gunpowder are. But milk cows and carrots are more indicative of the

    kind of inventions humans will make in the future: products that are grown rather than

    manufactured.

    Genetic engineering is precisely what cattle breeders do when they select better

    strains of holsteins, only bioengineers employ more precise and powerful control. while

    carrot and milk cow breeders had to rely on diffuse organic evolution, modern genetic

    engineers can use directed artifcial evolution—purposeful design—which greatly ac-

    celerates improvements.

    The overlap of the mechanical and the lifelike increases year by year. Part of this

    bionic convergence is a matter of words. The meanings of “mechanical” and “life”

    are both stretching until all complicated things can be perceived as machines, and all

    self-sustaining machines can be perceived as alive. yet beyond semantics, two concrete

    trends are happening: (1) Human-made things are behaving more lifelike, and (2) Life is 8

    becoming more engineered. The apparent veil between the organic and the manufac-

    tured has crumpled to reveal that the two really are, and have always been, of one being.

    what should we call that common soul between the organic communities we know of as

    organisms and ecologies, and their manufactured counterparts of robots, corporations,economies, and computer circuits? i call those examples, both made and born, “vivisys-

    tems” for the lifelikeness each kind of system holds.

    In the following chapters I survey this unifed bionic frontier. Many of the vivisys-

    tems I report on are “artifcial”—artifces of human making—but in almost every case

    they are also real—experimentally implemented rather than mere theory. The artifcial

    vivisystems i survey are all complex and grand: planetary telephone systems, computer

    virus incubators, robot prototypes, virtual reality worlds, synthetic animated characters,diverse artifcial ecologies, and computer models of the whole Earth.

    But the wildness of nature is the chief source for clarifying insights into vivisystems,and probably the paramount source of more insights to come. i report on new experi-

    mental work in ecosystem assembly, restoration biology, coral reef replicas, social insects

    (bees and ants), and complex closed systems such as the Biosphere 2 project in Arizona,from wherein i write this prologue.

    The vivisystems i examine in this book are nearly bottomless complications, vast

    in range, and gigantic in nuance. From these particular big systems i have appropriated

    unifying principles for all large vivisystems; i call them the laws of god, and they are the

    fundamentals shared by all self-sustaining, self-improving systems.

    as we look at human efforts to create complex mechanical things, again and again

    we return to nature for directions. nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harbor-

    ing undiscovered herbal cures for future diseases—although it is certainly this. nature is

    also a “meme bank,” an idea factory. vital, postindustrial paradigms are hidden in every

    jungly ant hill. The billion-footed beast of living bugs and weeds, and the aboriginal hu-

    man cultures which have extracted meaning from this life, are worth protecting, if for no

    other reason than for the postmodern metaphors they still have not revealed. destroying

    a prairie destroys not only a reservoir of genes but also a treasure of future metaphors,insight, and models for a neo-biological civilization.

    Learning to surrender our creations

    The wholesale transfer of bio-logic into machines should fll us with awe. When

    the union of the born and the made is complete, our fabrications will learn, adapt, heal

    themselves, and evolve. This is a power we have hardly dreamt of yet. The aggregate

    capacity of millions of biological machines may someday match our own skill of innova-

    tion. Ours may always be a fashy type of creativity, but there is something to be said for

    a slow, wide creativity of many dim parts working ceaselessly.

    yet as we unleash living forces into our created machines, we lose control of them.

    They acquire wildness and some of the surprises that the wild entails. This, then, is the

    dilemma all gods must accept: that they can no longer be completely sovereign over their

    fnest creations.

    The world of the made will soon be like the world of the born: autonomous, adapt-

    able, and creative but, consequently, out of our control. i think that’s a great bargain.9

    2

    Hive Mind

    Bees do it: distributed governance

    The beehive beneath my offce window quietly exhales legions of busybodies and then

    inhales them. on summer afternoons, when the sun seeps under the trees to backlight

    the hive, the approaching sunlit bees zoom into their tiny dark opening like curving

    tracer bullets. I watch them now as they haul in the last gleanings of nectar from the f-

    nal manzanita blooms of the year. soon the rains will come and the bees will hide. i will

    still gaze out the window as i write; they will still toil, but now in their dark home. only

    on the balmiest day will i be blessed by the sight of their thousands in the sun.

    over years of beekeeping, i’ve tried my hand at relocating bee colonies out of

    buildings and trees as a quick and cheap way of starting new hives at home. one fall i

    gutted a bee tree that a neighbor felled. i took a chain saw and ripped into this toppled

    old tupelo. The poor tree was cancerous with bee comb. The further i cut into the belly

    of the tree, the more bees I found. The insects flled a cavity as large as I was. It was a

    gray, cool autumn day and all the bees were home, now agitated by the surgery. I fnally

    plunged my hand into the mess of comb. Hot! Ninety-fve degrees at least. Overcrowded

    with 00,000 cold-blooded bees, the hive had become a warm-blooded organism. The

    heated honey ran like thin, warm blood. My gut felt like i had reached my hand into a

    dying animal.

    The idea of the collective hive as an animal was an idea late in coming. The Greeks

    and romans were famous beekeepers who harvested respectable yields of honey from

    homemade hives, yet these ancients got almost every fact about bees wrong. Blame it on

    the lightless conspiracy of bee life, a secret guarded by ten thousand fanatically loyal,armed soldiers. democritus thought bees spawned from the same source as maggots.

    Xenophon fgured out the queen bee but erroneously assigned her supervisory respon-

    sibilities she doesn’t have. aristotle gets good marks for getting a lot right, including the

    semiaccurate observation that “ruler bees” put larva in the honeycomb cells. (They actu-

    ally start out as eggs, but at least he corrects democritus’s misguided direction of maggot

    origins.) Not until the Renaissance was the female gender of the queen bee proved, or

    beeswax shown to be secreted from the undersides of bees. no one had a clue until mod-

    ern genetics that a hive is a radical matriarchy and sisterhood: all bees, except the few

    good-for-nothing drones, are female and sisters. The hive was a mystery as unfathomable

    as an eclipse.

    i’ve seen eclipses and i’ve seen bee swarms. eclipses are spectacles i watch halfheart-

    edly, mostly out of duty, i think, to their rarity and tradition, much as i might attend a

    Fourth of July parade. Bee swarms, on the other hand, evoke another sort of awe. i’ve

    seen more than a few hives throwing off a swarm, and never has one failed to transfx

    me utterly, or to dumbfound everyone else within sight of it.

    a hive about to swarm is a hive possessed. it becomes visibly agitated around the

    mouth of its entrance. The colony whines in a centerless loud drone that vibrates the

    neighborhood. it begins to spit out masses of bees, as if it were emptying not only its 0

    guts but its soul. a poltergeist-like storm of tiny wills materializes over the hive box. it

    grows to be a small dark cloud of purpose, opaque with life. Boosted by a tremendous

    buzzing racket, the ghost slowly rises into the sky, leaving behind the empty box and

    quiet baffement. The German theosophist Rudolf Steiner writes lucidly in his otherwise

    kooky Nine Lectures on Bees: “Just as the human soul takes leave of the body...one can truly

    see in the fying swarm an image of the departing human soul.”

    For many years Mark Thompson, a beekeeper local to my area, had the bizarre

    urge to build a Live-in hive—an active bee home you could visit by inserting your head

    into it. he was working in a yard once when a beehive spewed a swarm of bees “like a

    fow of black lava, dissolving, then taking wing.” The black cloud coalesced into a 20-

    foot-round black halo of 30,000 bees that hovered, uFo-like, six feet off the ground,exactly at eye level. The fickering insect halo began to drift slowly away, keeping a con-

    stant six feet above the earth. it was a Live-in hive dream come true.

    Mark didn’t waver. dropping his tools he slipped into the swarm, his bare head

    now in the eye of a bee hurricane. he trotted in sync across the yard as the swarm eased

    away. wearing a bee halo, Mark hopped over one fence, then another. he was now

    running to keep up with the thundering animal in whose belly his head foated. They all

    crossed the road and hurried down an open feld, and then he jumped another fence.

    he was tiring. The bees weren’t; they picked up speed. The swarm-bearing man glided

    down a hill into a marsh. The two of them now resembled a superstitious swamp devil,humming, hovering, and plowing through the miasma. Mark churned wildly through

    the muck trying to keep up. Then, on some signal, the bees accelerated. They unhaloed

    Mark and left him standing there wet, “in panting, joyful amazement.” Maintaining an

    eye-level altitude, the swarm foated across the landscape until it vanished, like a spirit

    unleashed, into a somber pine woods across the highway.

    “where is ‘this spirit of the hive’...where does it reside?” asks the author Maurice

    Maeterlinck as early as 90. “what is it that governs here, that issues orders, foresees

    the future…?” we are certain now it is not the queen bee. when a swarm pours it-

    self out through the front slot of the hive, the queen bee can only follow. The queen’s

    daughters manage the election of where and when the swarm should settle. a half-dozen

    anonymous workers scout ahead to check possible hive locations in hollow trees or wall

    cavities. They report back to the resting swarm by dancing on its contracting surface.

    during the report, the more theatrically a scout dances, the better the site she is cham-

    pioning. deputy bees then check out the competing sites according to the intensity of

    the dances, and will concur with the scout by joining in the scout’s twirling. That induces

    more followers to check out the lead prospects and join the ruckus when they return by

    leaping into the performance of their choice.

    it’s a rare bee, except for the scouts, who has inspected more than one site. The bees

    see a message, “Go there, it’s a nice place.” They go and return to dancesay, “yeah, it’s

    really nice.” By compounding emphasis, the favorite sites get more visitors, thus increas-

    ing further visitors. as per the law of increasing returns, them that has get more votes,the have-nots get less. Gradually, one large, snowballing fnale will dominate the dance-

    off. The biggest crowd wins.

    it’s an election hall of idiots, for idiots, and by idiots, and it works marvelously. This

    is the true nature of democracy and of all distributed governance. at the close of the

    curtain, by the choice of the citizens, the swarm takes the queen and thunders off in the

    direction indicated by mob vote. The queen who follows, does so humbly. if she could

    think, she would remember that she is but a mere peasant girl, blood sister of the very

    nurse bee instructed (by whom?) to select her larva, an ordinary larva, and raise it on a

    diet of royal jelly, transforming Cinderella into the queen. By what karma is the larva for 

    a princess chosen? and who chooses the chooser?

    “The hive chooses,” is the disarming answer of william Morton wheeler, a natural

    philosopher and entomologist of the old school, who founded the feld of social insects.

    writing in a bombshell of an essay in 9 (“The ant Colony as an organism” in the

    Journal of Morphology), wheeler claimed that an insect colony was not merely the analog

    of an organism, it is indeed an organism, in every important and scientifc sense of the

    word. he wrote: “Like a cell or the person, it behaves as a unitary whole, maintaining its

    identity in space, resisting dissolution...neither a thing nor a concept, but a continual fux

    or process.”

    it was a mob of 20,000 united into oneness.

    The collective intelligence of a mob

    iN a darkeNed Las vegas conference room, a cheering audience waves cardboard wands

    in the air. each wand is red on one side, green on the other. Far in back of the huge au-

    ditorium, a camera scans the frantic attendees. The video camera links the color spots of

    the wands to a nest of computers set up by graphics wizard Loren Carpenter. Carpen-

    ter’s custom software locates each red and each green wand in the auditorium. Tonight

    there are just shy of 5,000 wandwavers. The computer displays the precise location of

    each wand (and its color) onto an immense, detailed video map of the auditorium hung

    on the front stage, which all can see. More importantly, the computer counts the total red

    or green wands and uses that value to control software. as the audience wave the wands,the display screen shows a sea of lights dancing crazily in the dark, like a candlelight pa-

    rade gone punk. The viewers see themselves on the map; they are either a red or green

    pixel. By fipping their own wands, they can change the color of their projected pixels

    instantly.

    Loren Carpenter boots up the ancient video game of Pong onto the immense

    screen. Pong was the frst commercial video game to reach pop consciousness. It’s a

    minimalist arrangement: a white dot bounces inside a square; two movable rectangles on

    each side act as virtual paddles. in short, electronic ping-pong. in this version, displaying

    the red side of your wand moves the paddle up. Green moves it down. More precisely,the Pong paddle moves as the average number of red wands in the auditorium increases

    or decreases. your wand is just one vote.

    Carpenter doesn’t need to explain very much. every attendee at this 99 confer-

    ence of computer graphic experts was probably once hooked on Pong. His amplifed

    voice booms in the hall, “okay guys. Folks on the left side of the auditorium control the

    left paddle. Folks on the right side control the right paddle. if you think you are on the

    left, then you really are. okay? Go!”

    The audience roars in delight. without a moment’s hesitation, 5,000 people are

    playing a reasonably good game of Pong. each move of the paddle is the average of

    several thousand players’ intentions. The sensation is unnerving. The paddle usually does

    what you intend, but not always. When it doesn’t, you fnd yourself spending as much

    attention trying to anticipate the paddle as the incoming ball. One is defnitely aware of

    another intelligence online: it’s this hollering mob.

    The group mind plays Pong so well that Carpenter decides to up the ante. without

    warning the ball bounces faster. The participants squeal in unison. in a second or two,the mob has adjusted to the quicker pace and is playing better than before. Carpenter 2

    speeds up the game further; the mob learns instantly.

    “Let’s try something else,” Carpenter suggests. a map of seats in the auditorium ap-

    pears on the screen. he draws a wide circle in white around the center. “Can you make a

    green ‘5’ in the circle?” he asks the audience. The audience stares at the rows of red pix-

    els. The game is similar to that of holding a placard up in a stadium to make a picture,but now there are no preset orders, just a virtual mirror. almost immediately wiggles of

    green pixels appear and grow haphazardly, as those who think their seat is in the path of

    the “5” fip their wands to green. A vague fgure is materializing. The audience collec-

    tively begins to discern a “5” in the noise. once discerned, the “5” quickly precipitates

    out into stark clarity. The wand-wavers on the fuzzy edge of the fgure decide what side

    they “should” be on, and the emerging “5” sharpens up. The number assembles itself.

    “now make a four!” the voice booms. within moments a “4” emerges. “Three.”

    and in a blink a “3” appears. Then in rapid succession, “Two... one...zero.” The emer-

    gent thing is on a roll.

    Loren Carpenter launches an airplane fight simulator on the screen. His instruc-

    tions are terse: “you guys on the left are controlling roll; you on the right, pitch. if you

    point the plane at anything interesting, I’ll fre a rocket at it.” The plane is airborne. The

    pilot is...5,000 novices. For once the auditorium is completely silent. everyone studies the

    navigation instruments as the scene outside the windshield sinks in. The plane is headed

    for a landing in a pink valley among pink hills. The runway looks very tiny.

    There is something both delicious and ludicrous about the notion of having the pas-

    sengers of a plane collectively fy it. The brute democratic sense of it all is very appeal-

    ing. as a passenger you get to vote for everything; not only where the group is headed,but when to trim the faps.

    But group mind seems to be a liability in the decisive moments of touchdown,where there is no room for averages. as the 5,000 conference participants begin to take

    down their plane for landing, the hush in the hall is ended by abrupt shouts and ur-

    gent commands. The auditorium becomes a gigantic cockpit in crisis. “Green, green,green!” one faction shouts. “More red!” a moment later from the crowd. “red, red!

    reeeeed!” The plane is pitching to the left in a sickening way. it is obvious that it will

    miss the landing strip and arrive wing frst. Unlike Pong, the fight simulator entails long

    delays in feedback from lever to effect, from the moment you tap the aileron to the mo-

    ment it banks. The latent signals confuse the group mind. it is caught in oscillations of

    overcompensation. The plane is lurching wildly. yet the mob somehow aborts the land-

    ing and pulls the plane up sensibly. They turn the plane around to try again.

    how did they turn around? nobody decided whether to turn left or right, or even

    to turn at all. nobody was in charge. But as if of one mind, the plane banks and turns

    wide. it tries landing again. again it approaches cockeyed. The mob decides in unison,without lateral communication, like a fock of birds taking off, to pull up once more. On

    the way up the plane rolls a bit. and then rolls a bit more. at some magical moment, the

    same strong thought simultaneously infects fve thousand minds: “I wonder if we can do

    a 360?”

    without speaking a word, the collective keeps tilting the plane. There’s no undoing

    it. As the horizon spins dizzily, 5,000 amateur pilots roll a jet on their frst solo fight. It

    was actually quite graceful. They give themselves a standing ovation.

    The conferees did what birds do: they focked. But they focked self- consciously.

    They responded to an overview of themselves as they co-formed a “5” or steered the jet.

    A bird on the fy, however, has no overarching concept of the shape of its fock. “Flock-

    ness” emerges from creatures completely oblivious of their collective shape, size, or

    alignment. A focking bird is blind to the grace and cohesiveness of a fock in fight.3

    At dawn, on a weedy Michigan lake, ten thousand mallards fdget. In the soft pink

    glow of morning, the ducks jabber, shake out their wings, and dunk for breakfast. ducks

    are spread everywhere. suddenly, cued by some imperceptible signal, a thousand birds

    rise as one thing. They lift themselves into the air in a great thunder. as they take off

    they pull up a thousand more birds from the surface of the lake with them, as if they

    were all but part of a reclining giant now rising. The monstrous beast hovers in the air,swerves to the east sun, and then, in a blink, reverses direction, turning itself inside out.

    a second later, the entire swarm veers west and away, as if steered by a single mind. in

    the 17th century, an anonymous poet wrote: “...and the thousands of fshes moved as a

    huge beast, piercing the water. They appeared united, inexorably bound to a common

    fate. how comes this unity?”

    A fock is not a big bird. Writes the science reporter James Gleick, “Nothing in the

    motion of an individual bird or fsh, no matter how fuid, can prepare us for the sight of

    a skyful of starlings pivoting over a cornfeld, or a million minnows snapping into a tight,polarized array....High-speed flm [of focks turning to avoid predators] reveals that the

    turning motion travels through the fock as a wave, passing from bird to bird in the space

    of about one-seventieth of a second. That is far less than the bird’s reaction time.” The

    fock is more than the sum of the birds.

    In the flm Batman Returns a horde of large black bats swarmed through fooded

    tunnels into downtown Gotham. The bats were computer generated. a single bat was

    created and given leeway to automatically fap its wings. The one bat was copied by the

    dozens until the animators had a mob. Then each bat was instructed to move about on

    its own on the screen following only a few simple rules encoded into an algorithm: don’t

    bump into another bat, keep up with your neighbors, and don’t stray too far away. when

    the algorithmic bats were run, they focked like real bats.

    The focking rules were discovered by Craig Reynolds, a computer scientist work-

    ing at symbolics, a graphics hardware manufacturer. By tuning the various forces in his

    simple equation—a little more cohesion, a little less lag time—reynolds could shape the

    fock to behave like living bats, sparrows, or fsh. Even the marching mob of penguins in

    Batman Returns were focked by Reynolds’s algorithms. Like the bats, the computer-mod-

    eled 3-d penguins were cloned en masse and then set loose into the scene aimed in a

    certain direction. Their crowdlike jostling as they marched down the snowy street simply

    emerged, out of anyone’s control.

    So realistic is the focking of Reynolds’s simple algorithms that biologists have gone

    back to their hi-speed flms and concluded that the focking behavior of real birds and

    fsh must emerge from a similar set of simple rules. A fock was once thought to be a

    decisive sign of life, some noble formation only life could achieve. via reynolds’s algo-

    rithm it is now seen as an adaptive trick suitable for any distributed vivisystem, organic

    or made.

    Asymmetrical invisible hands

    Wheeler, the ant pioneer, started calling the bustling cooperation of an insect colony a

    “superorganism” to clearly distinguish it from the metaphorical use of “organism.” he

    was infuenced by a philosophical strain at the turn of the century that saw holistic pat-

    terns overlaying the individual behavior of smaller parts. The enterprise of science was

    on its frst steps of a headlong rush into the minute details of physics, biology, and all

    natural sciences. This pell-mell to reduce wholes to their constituents, seen as the most 4

    pragmatic path to understanding the wholes, would continue for the rest of the century

    and is still the dominant mode of scientifc inquiry. Wheeler and colleagues were an

    essential part of this reductionist perspective, as the 50 Wheeler monographs on specifc

    esoteric ant behaviors testify. But at the same time, wheeler saw “emergent properties”

    within the superorganism superseding the resident properties of the collective ants.

    wheeler said the superorganism of the hive “emerges” from the mass of ordinary insect

    organisms. and he meant emergence as science—a technical, rational explanation—not

    mysticism or alchemy.

    wheeler held that this view of emergence was a way to reconcile the reduce-it-to-

    its parts approach with the see-it-as-a-whole approach. The duality of bodymind or

    wholepart simply evaporated when holistic behavior lawfully emerged from the limited

    behaviors of the parts. The specifcs of how superstuff emerged from baser parts was

    very vague in everyone’s mind. and still is.

    what was clear to wheeler’s group was that emergence was a common natural phe-

    nomena. it was related to the ordinary kind of causation in everyday life, the kind where

    A causes B which causes C, or 2 + 2 = 4. ordinary causality was invoked by chemists

    to cover the observation that sulfur atoms plus iron atoms equal iron sulfde molecules.

    according to fellow philosopher C. Lloyd Morgan, the concept of emergence signaled

    a different variety of causation. here 2 + 2 does not equal 4; it does not even surprise

    with 5. in the logic of emergence, 2 + 2 = apples. “The emergent step, though it may

    seem more or less saltatory [a leap], is best regarded as a qualitative change of direction,or critical turning-point, in the course of events,” writes Morgan in Emergent Evolution, a

    bold book in 1923. Morgan goes on to quote a verse of Browning poetry which confrms

    how music emerges from chords:

    and i know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man

    That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.

    we would argue now that it is the complexity of our brains that extracts music from

    notes, since we presume oak trees can’t hear Bach. yet “Bachness”—all that invades

    us when we hear Bach—is an appropriately poetic image of how a meaningful pattern

    emerges from musical notes and generic information.

    The organization of a tiny honeybee yields a pattern for its tinier one-tenth of a gram of

    wing cells, tissue, and chitin. The organism of a hive yields integration for its community

    of worker bees, drones, pollen and brood. The whole 50-pound hive organ emerges with

    its own identity from the tiny bee parts. The hive possesses much that none of its parts

    possesses. one speck of a honeybee brain operates with a memory of six days; the hive

    as a whole operates with a memory of three months, twice as long as the average bee

    lives.

    ants, too, have hive mind. a colony of ants on the move from one nest site to

    another exhibits the Kafkaesque underside of emergent control. as hordes of ants break

    camp and head west, hauling eggs, larva, pupae—the crown jewels—in their beaks,other ants of the same colony, patriotic workers, are hauling the trove east again just as

    fast, while still other workers, perhaps acknowledging conficting messages, are running

    one direction and back again completely empty-handed. A typical day at the offce. Yet,the ant colony moves. without any visible decision making at a higher level, it chooses a

    new nest site, signals workers to begin building, and governs itself.

    The marvel of “hive mind” is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand

    governs, a hand that emerges from very dumb members. The marvel is that more is dif-

    ferent. To generate a colony organism from a bug organism requires only that the bugs

    be multiplied so that there are many, many more of them, and that they communicate

    with each other. at some stage the level of complexity reaches a point where new cat-5

    egories like “colony” can emerge from simple categories of “bug.” Colony is inherent in

    bugness, implies this marvel. Thus, 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 fuoro-

    scope, and you will never fnd the hive.

    This is a universal law of vivisystems: higher-level complexities cannot be inferred

    by lower-level existences. nothing—no computer or mind, no means of mathematics,physics, or philosophy—can unravel the emergent pattern dissolved in the parts without

    actually playing it out. only playing out a hive will tell you if a colony is immixed in a

    bee. The theorists put it this way: running a system is the quickest, shortest, and only

    sure method to discern emergent structures latent in it. There are no shortcuts to actu-

    ally “expressing” a convoluted, nonlinear equation to discover what it does. Too much of

    its behavior is packed away.

    That leads us to wonder what else is packed into the bee that we haven’t seen yet?

    or what else is packed into the hive that has not yet appeared because there haven’t

    been enough honeybee hives in a row all at once? and for that matter, what is contained

    in a human that will not emerge until we are all interconnected by wires and politics?

    The most unexpected things will brew in this bionic hivelike supermind.

    Decentralized remembering as an act of perception

    the most iNexplicable things will brew in any mind.

    Because the body is plainly a collection of specialist organs—heart for pumping,kidneys for cleaning—no one was too surprised to discover that the mind delegates cog-

    nitive matters to different regions of the brain.

    in the late 800s, physicians noted correlations in recently deceased patients be-

    tween damaged areas of the brain and obvious impairments in their mental abilities just

    before death. The connection was more than academic: might insanity be biological in

    origin? at the west riding Lunatic asylum, London, in 873, a young physician who

    suspected so surgically removed small portions of the brain from two living monkeys. in

    one, his incision caused paralysis of the right limbs; in the other he caused deafness. But

    in all other respects, both monkeys were normal. The message was clear: the brain must

    be compartmentalized. one part could fail without sinking the whole vessel.

    if the brain was in departments, in what section were recollections stored? in what

    way did the complex mind divvy up its chores? in a most unexpected way.

    In 1888, a man who spoke fuently and whose memory was sharp found himself in

    the offces of one Dr. Landolt, frightened because he could no longer name any letters

    of the alphabet. The perplexed man could write fawlessly when dictated a message.

    However, he could not reread what he had written nor fnd a mistake if he had made

    one. Dr. Landolt recorded, “Asked to read an eye chart, [he] is unable to name any letter.

    however he claims to see them perfectly....he compares the A to an easel, the Z to a

    serpent, and the P to a buckle.”

    The man’s word-blindness degenerated to a complete aphasia of both speech and

    writing by the time of his death four years later. of course, in the autopsy, there were

    two lesions: an old one near the occipital (visual) lobe and a newer one probably near the

    speech center.

    here was remarkable evidence of the bureaucratization of the brain. in a meta-

    phorical sense, different functions of the brain take place in different rooms. This room 6

    handles letters, if spoken; that room, letters, if read. To speak a letter (outgoing), you

    need to apply to yet another room. numbers are handled by a different department alto-

    gether, in the next building. and if you want curses, as the Monty Python Flying Circus

    skit reminds us, you’ll need to go down the hall.

    an early investigator of the brain, John hughlings-Jackson, recounts a story about

    a woman patient of his who lived completely without speech. when some debris, which

    had been dumped across the street from the ward where she lived, ignited into fames,the patient uttered the frst and only word Hughlings-Jackson had ever heard her say:

    “Fire!”

    How can it be, he asked somewhat incredulous, that “fre” is the only word her word

    department remembers? Does the brain have its own “fre” department, so to speak?

    as investigators probed the brain further, the riddle of the mind revealed itself to

    be deeply specifc. The literature on memory features people ordinary in their ability to

    distinguish concrete nouns—tell them “elbow” and they will point to their elbow—but

    extraordinary in their inability to distinguish abstract nouns—ask them about “liberty”

    or “aptitude” and they stare blankly and shrug. Contrarily, the minds of other apparent-

    ly normal individuals have lost the ability to retain concrete nouns, while perfectly able

    to identify abstract things. in his wonderful and overlooked book The Invention of Memory,Israel Rosenfeld writes:

    One patient, when asked to defne hay, responded, “i’ve forgotten”; and when asked to

    defne poster, said, “no idea.” yet given the word supplication, he said, “making a serious

    request for help,” and pact drew “friendly agreement.”

    Memory is a palace, say the ancient philosophers, where every room parks a

    thought. yet with every clinical discovery of yet another form of specialized forget-

    fulness, the rooms of memory exploded in number. down this road there is no end.

    Memory, already divided into a castle of chambers, balkanizes into a terrifying labyrinth

    of tiny closets.

    one study pointed to four patients who could discern inanimate objects (umbrella,towel), but garbled living things, including foods! One of these patients could converse

    about nonliving objects without suspicion, but a spider to him was defned as “a person

    looking for things, he was a spider for a nation.” There are records of aphasias that

    interfere with the use of the past tense. i’ve heard of another report (one that i cannot

    confrm, but one that I don’t doubt) of an ailment that allows a person to discern all

    foods except vegetables.

    The absurd capriciousness underlying such a memory system is best represented by

    the categorization scheme of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium

    of Benevolent Knowledge, as interpreted by the South American fction master J. L. Borges.

    On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to

    the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mer-

    maids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classifcation, (i)

    those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very

    fne camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a fower vase, (n) those

    that resemble fies from a distance.

    as farfetched as the Celestial Emporium system is, any classifcation process has its logi-

    cal problems. Unless there is a different location for every memory to be fled in, there

    will need to be confusing overlaps, say for instance, of a talking naughty pig, that may be

    fled under three different categories above. Filing the thought under all three slots would

    be highly ineffcient, although possible.

    The system by which knowledge is sequestered in our brain became more than just

    an academic question as computer scientists tried to build an artifcial intelligence. What 7

    is the architecture of memory in a hive mind?

    in the past most researchers leaned toward the method humans intuitively use for

    their own manufactured memory stashes: a single location for each archived item, with

    multiple cross-referencing, such as in libraries. The strong case for a single location in the

    brain for each memory was capped by a series of famously elegant experiments made by

    Wilder Penfeld, a Canadian neurosurgeon working in the 1930s. In daring open-brain

    surgery, Penfeld probed the living cerebellum of conscious patients with an electrical

    stimulant, and asked them to report what they experienced. Patients reported remark-

    ably vivid memories. The smallest shift of the stimulant would generate distinctly sepa-

    rate thoughts. Penfeld mapped the brain location of each memory while he scanned the

    surface with his probe.

    His frst surprise was that these recollections appeared repeatable, in what years

    later would be taken as a model of a tape recorder—as in: “hit replay.” Penfeld uses the

    term “fash-back” in his account of a 26-year-old woman’s postepileptic hallucination:

    “She had the same fash-back several times. These had to do with her cousin’s house or

    the trip there—a trip she has not made for ten to ffteen years but used to make often as

    a child.”

    The result of Penfeld’s explorations into the unexplored living brain produced the

    tenacious image of the hemispheres as fabulous recording devices, ones that seemed

    to rival the fantastic recall of the newly popular phonograph. each of our memories

    was delicately etched into its own plate, catalogued and fled faithfully by the temperate

    brain, and barring violence, could be retrieved like a jukebox song by pushing the right

    buttons.

    Yet, a close scrutiny of Penfeld’s raw transcripts of his probing experiments shows

    memory to be a less mechanical process. as one example, here are some of the responses

    of a 29-year-old woman to Penfeld’s pricks in her left temporal lobe: “Something com-

    ing to me from somewhere. a dream.” Four minutes later, in exactly the same spot: “The

    scenery seemed to be different from the one just before...” in a nearby spot: “wait a

    minute, something fashed over me, something I dreamt.” In a third spot: further inside

    the brain, “i keep having dreams.” The stimulation is repeated in the same spot: “i keep

    seeing things—i keep dreaming of things.”

    These scripts tell of dreamlike glimpses, rather than disorienting reruns dredged

    up from the basement cubbyholes of the mind’s archives. The owners of these experi-

    ences recognize them as fragmentary semimemories. They ramble with that awkward

    “assembled” favor that dreams grow by—unfocused tales of bits and pieces of the past

    reworked into a collage of a dream. The emotional charge of a déjà vu was absent. no

    overwhelming sense of “it was exactly like this was then” pushed against the present.

    The replays should have fooled nobody.

    human memories do crash. They crash in peculiar ways, by forgetting vegetables

    on a list of things to buy at the grocery or by forgetting vegetables in general. Memories

    often bruise in tandem with a physical bruise of the brain, so we must expect that some

    memory is bound in time and space to some degree, since being bound to time and

    space is one defnition of being real.

    But the current view of cognitive science leans more toward a new image: memories

    are like emergent events summed out of many discrete, unmemory-like fragments stored

    in the brain. These pieces of half-thoughts have no fxed home; they abide throughout

    the brain. Their manner of storage differs substantially from thought to thought—learn-

    ing to shuffe cards is organized differently than learning the capital of Bolivia—and the

    manner differs subtly from person to person, and equally subtly from time to time.

    There are more possible ideasexperiences than there are ways to combine neurons 8

    in the brain. Memory, then, must organize itself in some way to accommodate more pos-

    sible thoughts than it has room to store. it cannot have a shelf for every thought of the

    past, nor a place reserved for every potential thought of the future.

    i remember a night in Taiwan twenty years ago. i was in the back of an open truck

    on a dirt road in the mountains. i had my jacket on; the hill air was cold. i was hitching

    a ride to arrive at a mountain peak by dawn. The truck was grinding up the steep, dark

    road while i looked up to the stars in the clear alpine air. it was so clear that i could see

    tiny stars near the horizon. suddenly a meteor zipped across low, and because of my

    angle in the mountains, i could see it skip across the atmosphere. skip, skip, skip, like a

    stone.

    as i just now remembered this, the skipping meteor was not a memory tape i

    replayed, despite its ready vividness. The skipping meteor image doesn’t exist anywhere

    in particular in my mind. when i resurrected my experience, i assembled it anew. and

    i assemble it anew each time i remember it. The parts are tiny bits of evidence scat-

    tered sparsely through the hive of my brain: a record of cold shivering, of a bumpy

    ride somewhere, of many sightings of stars, of hitchhiking. The records are even fner

    grained than that: cold, bump, points of light, waiting. They are the same raw impres-

    sions our minds receive from our senses and with which it assembles our perceptions of

    the present.

    our consciousness creates the present, just as it creates the past, from many dis-

    tributed clues scattered in our mind. standing before an object in a museum, my mind

    associates its parallel straight lines with the notion of a “chair,” even though the thing

    has only three legs. My mind has never before seen such a chair, but it compiles all the

    associations—upright, level seat, stable, legs—and creates the visual image. very fast.

    in fact, i will be aware of the general “chairness” of the chair before i can perceive its

    unique details.

    Our memories (and our hive minds) are created in the same indistinct, haphazard

    way. To fnd the skipping meteor, my consciousness grabbed a thread with streaks of

    light and gathered a bunch of feelings associated with stars, cold, bumps. what i created

    depended on what else i had thrown into my mind recently, including what other thing i

    was doingfeeling last time i tried to assemble the skipping meteor memory. That’s why

    the story is slightly different each time i remember it, because each time it is, in a real

    sense, a completely different experience. The act of perceiving and the act of remember-

    ing are the same. Both assemble an emergent whole from many distributed pieces.

    “Memory,” says cognitive scientist douglas hofstadter, “is highly reconstructive. re-

    trieval from memory involves selecting out of a vast feld of things what’s important and

    what is not important, emphasizing the important stuff, downplaying the unimportant.”

    That selection process is perception. “i am a very big believer,” hofstadter told me, “that

    the core processes of cognition are very, very tightly related to perception.”

    in the last two decades, a few cognitive scientists have contemplated ways to create

    a distributed memory. Psychologist david Marr proposed a novel model of the human

    cerebellum in the early 970s by which memory was stored randomly throughout a web

    of neurons. in 974, Pentti Kanerva, a computer scientist, worked out the mathematics

    of a similar web by which long strings of data could be stored randomly in a computer

    memory. Kanerva’s algorithm was an elegant method to store a fnite number of data

    points in a very immense potential memory space. in other words, Kanerva showed a

    way to ft any perception a mind could have into a fnite memory mechanism. Since

    there are more ideas possible in the universe than there are atoms or minutes, the actual

    ideas or perceptions that a human mind can ever get to are relatively sparse within the

    total possibilities; therefore Kanerva called his technique a “sparse distributed memory” 9

    algorithm.

    in a sparse distributed network, memory is a type of perception. The act of remem-

    bering and the act of perceiving both detect a pattern in a very large choice of possible

    patterns. when we remember, we re-create the act of the original perception; that is,we relocate the pattern by a process similar to the one we used to perceive the pattern

    originally.

    Kanerva’s algorithm was so mathematically clean and crisp that it could be roughly

    implemented by a hacker into a computer one afternoon. at the nasa ames research

    Center, Kanerva and colleagues fne-tuned his scheme for a sparse distributed memory

    in the mid-980s by designing a very robust practical version in a computer. Kanerva’s

    memory algorithm could do several marvelous things that parallel what our own minds

    can do. The researchers primed the sparse memory with several degraded images of

    numerals (1 to 9) drawn on a 20-by-20 grid. The memory stored these. Then they gave

    the memory another image of a numeral more degraded than the frst samples to see if

    it could “recall” what the digit was. The memory could. it honed in on the prototypical

    shape that was behind all the degraded images. in essence it remembered a shape it had

    never seen before!

    The breakthrough was not just being able to fnd or replay something from the past,but to fnd something in a vast hive of possibilities when only the vaguest clues are given.

    it is not enough to retrieve your grandmother’s face; a memory must identify it when you

    see her profle in a wholly different light and from a different angle.

    a hive mind is a distributed memory that both perceives and remembers. it is pos-

    sible that a human mind may be chiefy distributed, yet, it is in artifcial minds where

    distributed mind will certainly prevail. The more computer scientists thought about

    distributing problems into a hive mind, the more reasonable it seemed. They fgured

    that most personal computers are not in actual use most of the time they are turned

    on! while composing a letter on a computer you may interrupt the computer’s rest

    with a short burst of key pounding and then let it return to idleness as you compose the

    next sentence. Taken as a whole, the turned-on computers in an offce are idle a large

    percentage of the day. The managers of information systems in large corporations look

    at the millions of dollars of personal computer equipment sitting idle on workers’ desks

    at night and wonder if all that computing power might not be harnessed. all they would

    need is a way to coordinate work and memory in a very distributed system.

    But merely combating idleness is not what makes distributing computing worth do-

    ing. distributed being and hive minds have their own rewards, such as greater immunity

    to disruption. at digital equipment Corporation’s research lab in Palo alto, California,an engineer demonstrated this advantage of distributed computation by opening the

    door of the closet that held the company’s own computer network and dramatically

    yanking a cable out of its guts. The network instantly routed around the breach and

    didn’t falter a bit.

    There will still be crashes in any hive mind, of course. But because of the nonlin-

    ear nature of a network, when it does fail we can expect glitches like an aphasia that

    remembers all foods except vegetables. a broken networked intelligence may be able to

    calculate pi to the billionth digit but not forward e-mail to a new address. it may be able

    to retrieve obscure texts on, say, the classifcation procedures for African zebra variants,but be incapable of producing anything sensible about animals in general. Forgetting

    vegetables in general, then, is less likely a failure of a local memory storage place than it

    is a systemwide failure that has, as one of its symptoms, the failure of a particular type

    of vegetable association—just as two separate but conficting programs on your com-

    puter hard disk may produce a “bug” that prevents you from printing words in italic. The 20

    place where the italic font is stored is not broken; but the system’s process of rendering

    italic is broken.

    some of the hurdles that stand in the way of fabricating a distributed computer

    mind are being overcome by building the network of computers inside one box. This

    deliberately compressed distributed computing is also known as parallel computing,because the thousands of computers working inside the supercomputer are running in

    parallel. Parallel supercomputers don’t solve the idle-computer-on-the-desk problem, nor

    do they aggregate widespread computing power; it’s just that working in parallel is an

    advantage in and of itself, and worth building a million-dollar stand-alone contraption

    to do it.

    Parallel distributed computing excels in perception, visualization, and simulation.

    Parallelism handles complexity better than traditional supercomputers made of one

    huge, incredibly fast serial computer. But in a parallel supercomputer with a sparse,distributed memory, the distinction between memory and processing fades. Memory be-

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

    Both are a pattern that emerges from a jumble of interconnected parts.

    More is more than more, it’s different

    a siNk brims with water. you pull the plug. The water stirs. a vortex materializes. it

    blooms into a tiny whirlpool, growing as if it were alive. in a minute the whirl extends

    from surface to drain, animating the whole basin. an ever changing cascade of water

    molecules swirls through the tornado, transmuting the whirlpool’s being from moment

    to moment. yet the whirlpool persists, essentially unchanged, dancing on the edge of

    collapse. “we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves,” wrote

    norbert wiener.

    As the sink empties, all of its water passes through the spiral. When fnally the basin

    of water has sunk from the bowl to the cistern pipes, where does the form of the whirl-

    pool go? For that matter, where did it come from?

    The whirlpool appears reliably whenever we pull the plug. it is an emergent thing,like a fock, whose power and structure are not contained in the power and structure of

    a single water molecule. no matter how intimately you know the chemical character of

    h2o, it does not prepare you for the character of a whirlpool. Like all emergent entities,the essence of a vortex emanates from a messy collection of other entities; in this case,a pool of water molecules. one drop of water is not enough for a whirlpool to appear

    in, just as one pinch of sand is not enough to hatch an avalanche. emergence requires a

    population of entities, a multitude, a collective, a mob, more.

    More is different. one grain of sand cannot avalanche, but pile up enough grains of

    sand and you get a dune that can trigger avalanches. Certain physical attributes such as

    temperature depend on collective behavior. A single molecule foating in space does not

    really have a temperature. Temperature is more correctly thought of as a group charac-

    teristic that a population of molecules has. Though temperature is an emergent property,it can be measured precisely, confdently, and predictably. It is real.

    it has long been appreciated by science that large numbers behave differently than

    small numbers. Mobs breed a requisite measure of complexity for emergent entities.

    The total number ......