ISBN ? (US hbk),,, 1-85702-019-7 (UK hbk)

"The most complex system we know of is nature. But humans are now beginning to build machines and systems that rival nature's complexity. Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the adaptability and autonomy of living organisms become the model for human-made systems and machines, everything from telecommunications to manufacturing processes, drug design and the global economy.

"Out of Control is about the new biology of everything from computers to government. Only by extracting the logical principles of life and installing them into machines can we hope to manage our increasingly complex world. Our future is technological, but it will not be a world of cold grey steel. It will be a world in which products are grown rather than manufactured -- more like the natural world of cows and wine.

"Out of Control shows how the complexity of beehives, meadows and evolving viruses all reveal the same animating principles, and how our technological future will use these principles to create household ecologies of interactive appliances; virtual reality worlds of artificial sex, life and death; and 'fast, cheap and out of control' business strategies for a global economy built on networks.

"The old world of mechanistic, top-down control is fading fast. The same historical moment that has seen the collapse of the command economy of the former Soviet Union has also seen the rise of the spontaneous, unsupervised and uncontrolled birth of Internet, the infrastructure of the 'electronic information superhighway'. Control is out, out-of-control is in." [jacket blurb, UK hbk, 1994]

"Want a conceptual toolkit for creating creation? Here it is. In Out of Control , Kevin Kelly does more than explain lucidly the mind-boggling new science and technology of emergent phenomena: by the end of his book he has distilled 'The Nine Laws of God'. The book changed everything that I thought I knew about the meaning of evolution and life. Kelly maps an emerging, radically different new world of 'out of control' businesses, robots, social systems, economies, and computer programs, accelerated by a very real science and technology of 'controlled evolution', a potent new method of harnessing the power of evolution itself. Biospherics, nanotechnology, hive-minds, the fate of the universe, are all part of the much larger idea-scape revealed. Kelly provides a stunning reply, twenty five years later, to Stewart Brand's challenge in the first Whole Earth Catalog: 'We are as gods and might as well get good at it'." --Howard Rheingold.

"Lots of food for thought." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , 1995).

Recommended.