Out of Control: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Matters
Out of Control: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Matters
Out of Control: Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, and Other Matters
One special skill of bestselling writers of technology and popular science books is turning a thin idea into a thick book—and that is also how they calculate their pay. A fact that could be explained in a single sentence gets stretched into thirty or fifty pages; something that could fit on one page can, with enough digression, be padded into a whole volume. Even a major figure like Kevin Kelly is no exception. The core argument of Out of Control is not particularly complicated: biological systems, because of their own characteristics—being distributed, bottom-up, and so on—undergo continual spontaneous evolution, and technology, along with the world as a whole, does the same. Technology is becoming more and more like an organism in the way it evolves and develops, but at the same time it is also becoming increasingly difficult to control or predict.
Kevin Kelly spends an entire thick volume elaborating on this point in Out of Control. The book is sprawling, tangled, and prone to digression, touching on biology, cybernetics, information science, environmental science, and many other disciplines. As a work of popular science, it clearly shows the breadth of the author’s interests, but on most topics he only skims the surface, with an understanding that often feels partial and uncertain. Under those conditions, his retelling may leave readers even more confused. Speaking only of the cybernetics sections (my own field), Kelly’s explanations do not make the theory more accessible or easier to understand; instead, they make it even hazier. Without the relevant academic background, the material may actually be harder to grasp. If this were a scholarly scientific work, then systematically digesting and understanding each topic would help the reader appreciate the argument. But in this book, most of the many side branches are not especially closely connected to the central theme. Rather than serving to prove the author’s point—which is itself vague and diffuse—they often feel more like display for display’s sake. That certainly makes the book appear grand in scope, but in essence it is disorderly and lacking in coherence.
And yet, for any book, no matter how many shortcomings it has, a single epoch-making strength is enough to make it truly outstanding. Out of Control was published in the 1990s, but its ideas turned out to align remarkably well with the development of technology—especially information technology—over the following two decades. At the time, artificial intelligence was still constrained by computer performance and stuck in a long bottleneck. But after the publication of Out of Control, network technology, large-scale distributed computing, and GPU-based computation all advanced by leaps and bounds. Computer science, much like the swarm described in Out of Control, flew uncontrollably toward artificial intelligence—especially deep learning. On this point alone, Out of Control deserves to be regarded as a landmark work.
If one lacks background knowledge in cybernetics, artificial intelligence, or related fields, reading Out of Control can still be helpful for better understanding the development of AI technology. The nine principles of evolving systems that Kevin Kelly describes are still very much at work in AI systems today. Computer science is increasingly becoming a self-consistent system, while the human role is more and more limited to setting conditions from the outside and observing the results, with less and less understanding of the system’s internal structure.
In recent years, Kevin Kelly’s comments on artificial intelligence have been repeatedly quoted. He says: AI is electricity. Just as the invention of electricity brought about the Third Industrial Revolution and transformed the structure of human society on a massive scale, artificial intelligence is the driving force behind the next industrial revolution. At present, both the mobile internet and the traditional internet are approaching saturation. For the internet, the development of AI may well be its only lifeline.
Caught in the vortex of our era, no one can see the whole world clearly. But if we do not even try to see it more clearly, it is all too easy to be swept by that vortex into unknown territory. And to see the world more clearly, borrowing the light from another person’s eyes can be immensely helpful. Out of Control is such a book: a work that helps people see the world—in particular information technology and artificial intelligence—with greater clarity. It is worth reading carefully for anyone who pays attention to technological progress and cares about their own place in it.
Finally, I skimmed the original English edition, and comparatively speaking it reads much more smoothly. The confusion in language and logic may owe more to flaws in the Chinese translation. Translators often find it difficult to possess both broad scientific literacy across multiple disciplines and strong linguistic ability at the same time, and that may be why the quality of the Chinese edition drops off so sharply.
