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Out of Control: Stimuli for a swarm-being |
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| Text + translation: Dagfinn Fjelddalen / Image: Ingwill M. Gjelsvik | |
For the first time in history, Man has created systems more complicated than we ourselves can fathom, and which needs to evolve themselves by biological principles, uncontrollably. In 1994, "Wired" executive editor Kevin Kelly published his book "Out of Control, The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization". He takes a (long) look at how complex systems in many areas all tend to use bio-logic rather than techno-logic strategies of evolution and concludes: biology wins. This poses at least two questions. On the one hand, is human society destined to regress into primitive capitalism and survival of the fittest, and on the other, how will fundamentally human qualities, such as morals, ethics, and free will, impact the "swarm-being" of the connected society? Born or made The sum of fifty thousand bees is a being whose intelligence cannot be inferred by studying the individual insect. The swarm is a distributed organism whose existence in both space and time outreaches the individual member, and which can find new solutions to new problems. The individual has no awareness of the swarm as a whole.The global computer network that we at this time call the Internet behaves like this swarm. The Net has no beginning and no end. To the single user, any other node is equidistant. How long is the Internet? It’s just as long. Whether I get my data from Japan or next door makes no difference. The Internet consists of millions of stupid, little computers manned by slightly more intelligent humans. And as the hive of bees, the Net becomes a single organism, growing and evolving accord to its environment. In his book "Out of Control, The Rise of Neo-biological Civilization" (1994), writer and executive editor of Wired Magazine, Kevin Kelly, describes the nature of human-made complex distributed systems take on biological logic. The agenda of Wired magazine concerns itself largely with the idea of the new, "connected" world: The Internet as breeding ground for a new, digital society developing along its own rules, independent of national borders and government intervention. – Human made systems are in the process of reaching the same level of complexity as organic systems around us, Kelly says. We are starting to reach the limits of our own control. These enormously complex systems can only be made to work by allowing technology to evolve using biological principles. Messy Complex distributed systems aquire an unpredictable, "messy" aspect uncannily like living organisms. The act unexpectedly, aquiring abilities that are more than the sum of the components. A school of fish, a swarm of bees or a flock of birds are not one large versjon of the individual, but an emergent being, with its own agenda.If this model can be used on human beings connected in digital networks, what stimuli would influence the network and its citizens? – Network Man sees the world in a new light, says Kelly. Completely decentralised, every member both a producer and consumer, with no central government and no official ideology, just millions of ideas pushed forward by their respective proponents. Every single participant is responsible for finding the many-faceted truth that emerges from a cacophony of opinions and facts, ideas and arguments, paradox and irony. How will the individual members on the net experience "New Stimuli"? According to Kevin Kelly, every individual acts according to its own interests, and that the grand total of successes minus failures will make up the swarm’s evolution. For a large, distributed system to be able to react to new stimuli, to change beyond a narrow area, takes a swarm – a hive mind, says Kelly. Very complex systems are organic by nature, not linearly-technological. In a linear process, every section has its defined task that is critical for the process. In a swarm system, the many parallel lines of communication make innovation possible, innovation that can grow very rapidly and to surprisingly large proportions. The consequence is that such a complex system has to be allowed to evolve without central guidance. Any "artificial interference" will yield results inferior to free adaptation to the surroundings. As individuals communicate and adapt without thought for the whole of the organism, the organism emerges out of their individual wills and needs. Skeletons in the closet Collective systems rely on many interchangeable processes working in parallel, with no regard for the individual. This is way errors as well as innovation can be tolerated. In a distributed system, large errors that would bring the sequential system to a halt, are kept in check because they turn into minor errors on the next level of the hierarchy. Although parts of it die off or react to new stimuli, the swarm will survive.No wonder the digital utopians are criticised for being Social Darwinists, wanting to let the strong survive and the weak die off. It is only too easy to overestimate the importance of brave new technology, and so tempting to disregard the fact that the cool computer logic is useless without its human operator. It would be unnatural for humans to succumb to a computerised logic dating from when 5 computers were considered the world market. Bear in mind that no technology has conquered the world and rebuilt it in its own picture until messy Man found a use that was not intended. There’s no reason we should start behaving rationally now. No more lonely nights Biology used on ethics is a dangerous thing. Swarm theory has one particular shortcoming: Man is not an atomistic, economical unit, lacking in concern for anything but himself. Unlike bees, whose brain capacity is so small as to be incomprehensible, humans are moral, thinking beings, and, according to most of us, we have a free will.Man is able to have at least a limited understanding of being part of a
larger entity. We are able to realise that our presence on the Net as extending our own
body, that it may even go beyond the time in which we are actually alive. The stimuli that
are fundamental to our existence and networked beings must be different, and so much more
interesting than those of the insect swarm. – In the shared mind of the Net, the same vision re-emerges again and again, in fleeting glimpses in the minds of nearly everyone, of artificial intelligences connected in one single, planetary soul. The growing techno-spiritualism is even more remarkable because it is so unexpected.– The citizens of a very fragmented society can not be ruled by one central ideology. They are forced into a modern, existensial darkness to create their own cultures, convictions, markets and identities, out of a sticky mass of mutually dependent parts. Headless, distributed and emergent wholeness becomes the social norm. Sign me up for the New Flesh. |
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| In the coming neo-biological era, all that we both rely on and fear will be more born than made. We now have computer viruses, neural networks, Biosphere 2, gene therapy, and smart cards-all humanly constructed artifacts that bind mechanical and biological processes. Future bionic hybrids will be more confusing, more pervasive, and more powerful. I imagine there might be a world of mutating buildings, living silicon polymers, software programs evolving offline, adaptable cars, rooms stuffed with coevolutionary furniture, gnatbots for cleaning, manufactured biological viruses that cure your illnesses, neural jacks, cyborgian body parts, designer food crops, simulated personalities, and a vast ecology of computing devices in constant flux. -Kevin Kelly
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