Out of control

What Hacker News says

1. wrycoderOct 2021
   Fascinating articles. I think Bee analyzes the situation at Perimeter correctly. With Turok gone, maybe the pendulum will swing back a ways. One can hope.

   Markopoulou, 38, hooked up with Doyne Farmer, 57, and got pregnant while taking a road trip from Santa Fe to San Francisco in a 42 year old Datsun convertible. And they are still together. I've been following Farmer's progress since the '70s, but I hadn't heard that one.

   Great stuff, thanks very much!! Got me to break out my old copy of Kevin Kelly's Out of Control.

   Show morethread
2. stxMay 2020
   Another book I heard about from the Matrix behind the scenes was Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. It was pretty interesting to read especially in the context of machine learning now days. Its hard to believe that it was written in 1994. I was only in high school at the time but I could hardly put it down. I still would like to find more books that interested me that much. The reference to bees on the cover is that a simple bee has little intelligence but the a hive mind has much more.

   I read Simulacra and Simulation after hearing about it related to the Matrix. It was a bit hard to follow and I lost interest.

   Show morethread
3. brigaDec 2019
   Out of Control by former Wired editor Kevin Kelly. This book was a labor of love and it shows--every chapter explores some fascinating new topic on the intersection of biology and technology. Even though the book was written 25 years ago it feels completely fresh. I'm sure anyone who reads this site would enjoy it.

   David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. If you know him, it's probably because Deutsch did some pioneering work in Quantum computing back in the day, but this book covers everything from physics to biology to computing to art with a grand sort of theory of everything. There are few popular science books more densely packed with original ideas.

   Borges' collected fictions. There probably isn't much that needs to be said about this that hasn't already been said. Borges was a visionary.

   Proust.

   Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. Completely changed the way I think about sci-fi.

   Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. I think this is still the gold standard of speculative AI books.

   Sapiens. Like everyone else I loved this one.

   Show morethread
4. cr0shFeb 2019
   If you haven't yet, be sure to check out Hofstadter's other two works in the same mould (it's kinda a series) as GEB:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

   Also - you might enjoy Kevin Kelly's book, "Out of Control":

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Control_(Kevin_Kelly_bo...

   Oh - and in a similar vein, Marvin Minsky's book "Society of Mind":

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

   The problem with so many of these books is that there's been a lot of criticism and praise for all of them, tear downs, rebuttals, critiques, etc; not to mention various kinds of "evidence" both in support and against the various theories involved. The history of the ideas is long and convoluted, and is almost impossible to sort out today without a long and concerted effort on the part of the reader.

   I prefer to take the information as more a "tour de force" - information to inspire my thinking, and where it seems to be relevant (or has supporting evidence of efficacy), application of it to problems at hand.

   I hope that makes sense...

   Show morethread
5. rrggrrJun 2017
   Makes me think of Kevin Kelly (http://kk.org). His 1994 book Out of Control, read retrospectively, has held up better than any other prognostication I can think of concerning the nexus of business and technology. Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon is another staggering example. Asimov. Orwell. Machiavelli. Musashi. Tzu. There are the 'A' players of thought leadership, and there is everyone else.
   thread
6. dkarapetyanDec 2016
   I really don't get Kurzweil's claim to fame. I have never found any of his writing worthwhile. Kevin Kelly on the other hand writes some good stuff (Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World).
   thread