Out of Control LO4606

Willard Jule (75272.3452@compuserve.com)
04 Jan 96 20:51:02 EST

Greetings and Happy New Year everyone. I have just started reading one of
my Christmas presents, "Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines,
Social Systems, and the Economic World," by Kevin Kelly the Executive
Editor of WIRED. Without giving a book report, I gotta say that this book
is messing up a bunch of my paradigms and unfortunately I am unable to use
my mental prowess to dismiss them willy-nilly. I s'pose that is good news
for me as a dose of humility every now and then is very healthy and this
is like a mega dose that may be sufficient for years to come.

I'm hoping I don't get indigestion because I think there are some powerful
concepts in this book re: top/down vs. bottom/up control and the power of
having distributed processing with no central process control. It
highlights the value of having many "dumb" processors interacting
independently making mistakes and producing great results. When you read
the book, you'll get the sense that this is exactly how the free market
works and how organizations ultimately operate even though there maybe an
appearance of central control. Hmmmmmmmmm! I really don't know what I'm
writing about but the stuff sure is intriguing.

Later.

--
Willard Jule
75272.3452@compuserve.com