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本書《Out of Control》討論的是自我維持的系統，既包括像熱帶溼地這樣的生物系統，也包括像地球的計算機仿真這樣的人工系統。末章“上帝的九條法則”提煉出所有具備生命類特徵的系統共同遵循的九個基本原則。 - 當我們讓機器和制度變得越來越複雜時，管理它們就需要融入更多生物學思維與治理原則，以便更有效地應對挑戰。 - 技術領域最具決定性的發展力量將來自人工進化。如今我們已經在讓軟件和藥物自己進化，而非完全以傳統工程方式去設計。 - 有機生命是終極的技術，未來的所有技術都將向生物化方向發展。 - 計算機最重要的用途之一，是構建微型世界來嘗試回答“重大問題”。網絡社區通過搭建並調整一個可運行的民主制度來探問“民主到底是什麼、需要哪些條件？”若不奏效就重新連線；虛擬現實通過合成來追問“現實究竟是什麼？”計算機還為我們提供了一個探索“生命是什麼”的虛擬宇宙，讓人們創造越來越複雜的計算機病毒和人工生物。過去在學術機構裡探問這些“大問題”的哲學家，如今更多由在虛擬世界中進行實驗的人來提出挑戰。 - 隨著我們塑造技術，技術也在塑造我們。全球互聯互通讓整個文化正在向“網絡文化”和新型網絡經濟遷移。 - 為了充分發揮有機機器的潛力，我們必須給它們設定規範和自治能力，並在適度範圍內放權，放棄對它們的全部控制。

Chapter 1: THE MADE AND THE BORN
Neo-biological civilization
The triumph of the bio-logic
Learning to surrender our creations
Chapter 2: HIVE MIND
Bees do it: distributed governance
The collective intelligence of a mob
Asymmetrical invisible hands
Decentralized remembering as an act of perception
More is more than more, it's different
Advantages and disadvantages of swarms
The network is the icon of the 21st century
Chapter 3: MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE
Entertaining machines with bodies
Fast, cheap and out of control
Getting smart from dumb things
The virtues of nested hierarchies
Using the real world to communicate
No intelligence without bodies
Mind/body black patch psychosis
Chapter 4: ASSEMBLING COMPLEXITY
Biology: the future of machines
Restoring a prairie with fire and oozy seeds
Random paths to a stable ecosystem
How to do everything at once
The Humpty Dumpty challenge
Chapter 5: COEVOLUTION
What color is a chameleon on a mirror?
The unreasonable point of life
Poised in the persistent state of almost falling
Rocks are slow life
Cooperation without friendship or foresight
Chapter 6: THE NATURAL FLUX
Equilibrium is death
What came first, stability or diversity?
Ecosystems: between a superorganism and an identity workshop
The origins of variation
Life immortal, ineradicable
Negentropy
The fourth discontinuity: the circle of becoming
Chapter 7: EMERGENCE OF CONTROL
In ancient Greece the first artificial self
Maturing of mechanical selfhood
The toilet: archetype of tautology
Self-causing agencies
Chapter 8: CLOSED SYSTEMS
Bottled life, sealed with clasp
Mail-order Gaia
Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man
The very big ecotechnic terrarium
An experiment in sustained chaos
Another synthetic ecosystem, like California
Chapter 9: POP GOES THE BIOSPHERE
Co-pilots of the 100 million dollar glass ark
Migrating to urban weed
The deployment of intentional seasons
A cyclotron for the life sciences
The ultimate technology
Chapter 10: INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY
Pervasive round-the-clock plug in
Invisible intelligence
Bad-dog rooms vs. nice-dog rooms
Programming a commonwealth
Closed-loop manufacturing
Technologies of adaptation
Chapter 11: NETWORK ECONOMICS
Having your everything amputated
Instead of crunching, connecting
Factories of information
Your job: managing error
Connecting everything to everything
Chapter 12: E-MONEY
Crypto-anarchy: encryption always wins
The fax effect and the law of increasing returns
Superdistribution
Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a fiscal charge
Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks
Fear of underwire economies
Chapter 13: GOD GAMES
Electronic godhood
Theories with an interface
A god descends into his polygonal creation
The transmission of simulacra
Memorex warfare
Seamless distributed armies
A 10,000 piece hyperreality
The consensual ascii superorganism
Letting go to win
Chapter 14: IN THE LIBRARY OF FORM
An outing to the universal library
The space of all possible pictures
Travels in biomorph land
Harnessing the mutator
Sex in the library
Breeding art masterpieces in three easy steps
Tunnelling through randomness
Chapter 15: ARTIFICIAL EVOLUTION
Tom Ray's electric-powered evolution machine
What you can't engineer, evolution can
Mindless acts performed in parallel
Computational arms race
Taming wild evolution
Stupid scientists evolving smart molecules
Death is the best teacher
The algorithmic genius of ants
The end of engineering's hegemony
Chapter 16: THE FUTURE OF CONTROL
Cartoon physics in toy worlds
Birthing a synthespian
Robots without hard bodies
The agents of ethnological architecture
Imposing destiny upon free will
Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald
Searching for co-control
Chapter 17: AN OPEN UNIVERSE
To enlarge the space of being
Primitives of visual possibilities
How to program happy accidents
All survive by hacking the rules
The handy-dandy tool of evolution
Hang-gliding into the game of life
Life verbs
Homesteading hyperlife territory
Chapter 18: THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE
The revolution of daily evolution
Bypassing the central dogma
The difference, if any, between learning and evololution
The evolution of evolution
The explanation of everything
Chapter 19: POSTDARWINISM
The incompleteness of Darwinian theory
Natural selection is not enough
Intersecting lines on the tree of life
The premise of non-random mutations
Even monsters follow rules
When the abstract is embodied
The essential clustering of life
DNA can't code for everything
An uncertain density of biological search space
Mathematics of natural selection
Chapter 20: THE BUTTERFLY SLEEPS
Order for free
Net math: a counter-intuitive style of math
Lap games, jets, and auto-catalytic sets
A question worth asking
Self-tuning vivisystems
Chapter 21: RISING FLOW
A 4 billion year ponzi scheme
What evolution wants
Seven trends of hyper-evolution
Coyote trickster self-evolver
Chapter 22: PREDICTION MACHINERY
Brains that catch baseballs
The flip side of chaos
Positive myopia
Making a fortune from the pockets of predictability
Operation Internal Look, Ahead
Varieties of prediction
Change in the service of non-change
Telling the future is what the systems are for
The many problems with global models
We are all steering
Chapter 23: WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES
What ever happened to cybernetics?
The holes in the web of scientific knowledge
To be astonished by the trivial
Hypertext: the end of authority
A new thinking space
Chapter 24: THE NINE LAWS OF GOD
How to make something from nothing
Hijacking the universe
ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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