Out of Control

“Out of Control” - The Ultimate Fate and Outcome of All Humanity?Self-Agency
An organism is both its own cause and its own effect, both the cause of its inherent order and organization, and the effect of its inherent order and organization.
Every “self” is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-creating.
A “system” is anything that can speak for itself.
Three stages of automatic control:
The first stage of energy control triggered by the steam engine
Precise control of matter is the second stage
Control of information itself is the third stage

The core event of the 21st century is the disruption of information.
The history of automation is a one-way channel from human control to automatic control. The result is the irreversible transfer from human self to the second type of self. And the second type of self is outside our control, it is out of control.
Machines with self-adaptive capability, evolving toward their own goals, growing without human supervision, will be the next great technological advancement. To obtain intelligent control, the only way is to give machines freedom.
Some things must be done first, and in the correct order.
Complex machines must be improved gradually, and often indirectly. Don’t expect to complete an entire working mechanical system through one magnificent assembly. You must first create a working system, then use it as a platform to develop the system you really want to complete (Profound! WeChat, Facebook also came step by step).

Sealed Bottled Life
Something that can be destroyed in a day may take years or even centuries to build.
The beginning of complexity is rooted in chaos. However, if complex systems can reach a common balance after a period of mutual accommodation, then nothing can derail them afterwards. (Is it like habits? Once you’ve established your own fixed lifestyle and thinking habits, you’ll subconsciously carry them out.)
“Closed” means isolation from flow. A truly closed system does not participate in external element flows; in other words, all its cycles are autonomous.
“System” means interconnection. Things in a system are intertwined, connected directly or indirectly to a common destiny.
“Survival” means surprise.
Static is the normal state of an ecological sphere.
Ecological spheres remain intact when scaled up. The larger the ecological sphere, the longer it takes to reach stability, and the harder it is to destroy. As long as it’s in a normal state, the collective metabolic process of a living system will take root and continue.

Eco-Technical Glass Sphere
The business of life is transforming the environment to benefit life. If you can gather life into a community, give them full freedom to create the conditions they need to thrive, this biological assembly can survive indefinitely, without needing to know how it operates.
For any complex, dangerous project, the ideal team size is 8 people. More than 8 people causes slow decision-making and delays; fewer than 8 people, and unexpected events or oversights become serious obstacles.
Details are crucial.
Any area of life is woven from countless independent loops.

Synthetic Ecosystem
Once you change an ecosystem, find the seeds suitable for sowing, and the essential climate window, change begins, and it’s irreversible. This synthetic ecosystem doesn’t require human presence to continue operating, it will persist undisturbed.
Creating a biosphere:
Microorganisms do the vast majority of the work
Soil is an organism, it’s alive. It breathes.
Create [redundant] food webs
Gradually increase diversity
If it can’t provide a physical function, simulate a similar function
The atmosphere conveys the state of the entire system
Listen to the system, see where it wants to go

All closed systems will be opened, at least leaks will occur. (That is: there are no absolutely closed systems)

Emerging Ecosystem
The human body itself is a huge complex system. What we receive from nature is incredibly generous.
Disturbance is a necessary catalyst for ecology.
How many connections can we sever while still keeping a species alive?
Fate always has an ironic twist.
Just let nature take its course.
The atmosphere is an extremely important environmental factor; the atmosphere produces life, and life can also produce atmosphere.
Don’t rush, don’t hurry the system when it’s self-organizing. The most important thing you can give it is time.
All complex co-evolutionary systems need to “emerge.”
Large systems can be reorganized by gradually increasing complexity; once a system reaches a stable level, it won’t easily tend to regress, as if the system is “attracted” by the cohesion brought by new complexity. Human organizations, such as teams and companies, also display characteristics of “emergence.”
Life is technology. Machine technology is just a temporary substitute for life technology. As we improve machines, they will become more organic, more alive, more similar to life, because life is the highest technology of living things. Someday, the difference between machines and organisms will be hard to distinguish.

Invisible Intelligence
The most profound technologies are those invisible technologies, they weave themselves into the details of daily life until they become part of life. The technology of writing came down from the elite class, constantly lowering its stance, fading from our attention.
The triumph of computers won’t make the world inhumane, but will make the environment more submissive to human wishes. We’re not creating machines, but mechanized environments that incorporate what we’ve learned and can do. We’re extending our lives into the surrounding environment.
Network culture without privacy technology cannot flourish.
Where there’s an ecosystem, there’s life proficient in local affairs.
Humans crave privacy, but in fact, our social nature outweighs independence. If machines also understand each other like we do (even some very private things), then the machine ecosystem is invincible.
Nature has no garbage problem, because everything is used.
Work like nature.
Machines are holistic systems, emphasizing system efficiency maximization. Using natural environment patterns as templates for solving environmental problems.
Treat all imaginable waste as potential raw materials. Any material that’s useless now can be eliminated from the source through design.
Even if eco-technology doesn’t bring shocking profits, it will bring certain cost benefits.
Industry will inevitably adopt biological methods
It can make better things with less material.
Nature is the master of complexity, giving us invaluable guidance in dealing with messy, counter-intuitive networks. Future artificial complex systems will inevitably have organic principles consciously injected into them to function.
Nature is unmoving, so you must adapt to it.
Nature itself – genes and various life forms – can be engineered (or patterned) just like industrial systems.
Biology is inevitable – close to mathematical inevitability, the inevitability toward which all complexity converges. It’s an Omega point. In the slow mixing of natural and artificial, organic is a dominant trait, mechanical is recessive. Ultimately, biological logic always wins.

Information Factory
A purely networked company should have these characteristics:
Distributed
Decentralized
Collaborative
Adaptable

In most cases, true wealth is gained by placing some process under centralized control. The bigger, the higher the efficiency.
If you split a task into several pieces and assign them to different companies to complete, if you want to maintain quality, the transaction costs required are higher than completing this task within one company.

Dealing with Errors
Software development follows three centralized key steps.
First design a big picture
Then implement details with code
Finally, near the end of the project, test it as an interactive whole

Errors are absolutely unavoidable, but errors can be prevented from becoming defects. The task of zero-defect design is to discover errors as early as possible and correct them as early as possible. Real improvement lies in discovering the cause of errors as early as possible and eliminating the cause of errors as early as possible. Humans make errors, systems handle errors.
When you discover an error, it means there’s another pile of errors you haven’t seen waiting for you somewhere.
The solution of new biology is to build programs with units that work normally.
A good programmer can rewrite any known, regular software, cleverly reducing code. But in the creative programming process, nothing is completely understood.

Connecting Everything
Emerging network economy has these characteristics:
Distributed core
Adaptive technology
Flexible manufacturing
Mass customization
Industrial ecology
Global accounting
Co-evolving consumers
Knowledge-based
Free bandwidth
Increasing returns
Digital currency
Implicit economy

In this era, the core behavior is connecting everything together.

Crypto-Anarchy
Trying to stop the cross-border flow of information is a hopeless endeavor.
In the information age, intelligence becomes the main wealth of enterprises.

Digital Currency
Consumption history can be used to build a precise and highly marketable profile.
True digital cash is real money, with the privacy of cash and the flexibility of electronics.
Security and privacy are two sides of a contradiction.
Where information flows, currency will surely follow. Currency is another type of information, a small control method.
True digital cash, or more accurately, the economic mechanisms needed for true digital cash, will reconstruct our economy, communications, and knowledge.