A major theme of the book ‘Bootstrapping Complexity‘ by Kevin Kelly is that we should learn from nature’s evolutionary mechanism when trying to understand the dynamics of the modern complexity of the net.
“Nature does this every day: Bootstrapping systems that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves. How do you make something from nothing ? Although nature knows this trick, we haven’t learned much just by watching her”
“The new cyberneticians are extracting the logical principle of both life and machines , and applying each to the task of building extremely complex systems , thus conjuring up contraptions that are at once both made and alive. In these efforts to create complex mechanical things , again and again they return to nature for directions. They have learned more by their failures in creating complexity and by combining these lessons with small successes in imitating and understanding natural systems than the original cybernetic group could have hoped for. And in doing so , they are fulfilling the notion first presented in the Whole Earth Catalog , itself inspired by the original cybernetics group : “We are as gods and might as well get good at it“”
Thus nature, a self-evolving system that creates more and more complexity as it evolves, should maybe be studied a bit closer when it comes to understanding how our current setup evolves increasingly towards more complexity, for example with the emergence of Artificial Intelligence from dumber machines and networks.
