the New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World

Speaking on the relationship between tech and nature, and how that could progress or has so fat

Misc Quotes

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.

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.

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

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 finest creations.

i am a god of my creations

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 filled 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 finally plunged my hand into the mess of comb. Hot! Ninety-five degrees at least. Overcrowded with 100,000 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

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.

could link this to our brain and nature, describes the oomph of creativety you get when a flux is tryign to leave your brains

(“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 scientific 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 flux

or process.”

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

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.

LINK TO THE MIND IS THE MATTER

If a nation were a machine, here’s how you could build it using subsumption archi- tecture: You start with towns. You get a town’s logistics ironed out: basic stuff like streets, plumbing, lights, and law. Once you have a bunch of towns working reliably, you make a county. You keep the towns going while adding a layer of complexity that will take care of courts, jails, and schools in a whole district of towns. If the county apparatus were to disappear, the towns would still continue. Take a bunch of counties and add the layer of states. States collect taxes and subsume many of the responsibilities of governing from the county. Without states, the towns would continue, although perhaps not as effectively or as complexly. Once you have a bunch of states, you can add a federal government. The federal layer subsumes some of the activities of the states, by setting their limits, and organizing work above the state level. If the feds went away the thousands of local towns would still continue to do their local jobs—streets, plumbing and lights. But the work of towns subsumed by states and finally subsumed by a nation is made more powerful. That is, towns organized by this subsumption architecture can build, educate, rule, and pros- per far more than they could individually. The federal structure of the U.S. government is therefore a subsumption architecture

If a nation were a machine, here’s how you could build it using subsumption archi- tecture: You start with towns. You get a town’s logistics ironed out: basic stuff like streets, plumbing, lights, and law. Once you have a bunch of towns working reliably, you make a county. You keep the towns going while adding a layer of complexity that will take care of courts, jails, and schools in a whole district of towns. If the county apparatus were to disappear, the towns would still continue. Take a bunch of counties and add the layer of states. States collect taxes and subsume many of the responsibilities of governing from the county. Without states, the towns would continue, although perhaps not as effectively or as complexly. Once you have a bunch of states, you can add a federal government. The federal layer subsumes some of the activities of the states, by setting their limits, and organizing work above the state level. If the feds went away the thousands of local towns would still continue to do their local jobs—streets, plumbing and lights. But the work of towns subsumed by states and finally subsumed by a nation is made more powerful. That is, towns organized by this subsumption architecture can build, educate, rule, and pros- per far more than they could individually. The federal structure of the U.S. government is therefore a subsumption architecture

Inside every solitary living creature is a swarm of non-creature things. Inside every solitary machine one day will be a swarm of non-mechanical things. Both types of swarms have an emergent being and their own agenda.