Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things
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Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things
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Overview
Pulse is not about dance music, not about heart rates—and not about electromagnetic fields. What it does describe is a sea change in human affairs, a vast and fundamental shift that is about to transform every aspect of our lives. Written in lively prose for lay readers, Pulse shows how ideas that have shaped Western science, industry, and culture for centuries are being displaced by the rapid and dramatic rise of a "new biology"—by human systems and machines that work like living things.
In Pulse, Robert Frenay details the coming world of
• emotional computers
• ships that swim like fish
• hard, soft, and wet artificial life
• money that mimics the energy flows in nature
• evolution at warp speed
And these are not blue-sky dreams. By using hundreds of vivid and concrete examples of cutting-edge work, Frenay showcases the brilliant innovations and often colorful personalities now giving birth to a radical new future. Along the way, he also offers thoughtful conclusions on the promises—and dangers—of our transformation to the next great phase of "human cultural evolution."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429934909 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2006 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 576 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Robert Frenay is a freelance writer and former contributing editor to Audubon magazine. Pulse is his first book. He divides his time between New York City and upstate New York.
Read an Excerpt
Pulse
The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things
By Robert Frenay
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Robert FrenayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3490-9
CHAPTER 1
the new biology
It started with a tendency, something like desire. Random elements drifting together formed bonds, and then a jumble of connections. Nearly four billion years ago that union came alive. First there was the cell, the basic form. For a very long time that was all — just countless cells floating and reproducing in the ooze of ancient seas, using energy from the sun to draw materials from air and water.
Eventually came cells that released oxygen to the sky, seeding change in the world around them. Then a microbe with a novel skill took shelter in a larger cell. The guest provided energetic molecules its host could use for fuel, which made ambitious larger life forms possible. Cells soon joined together into vast mats of underwater plants, the beginnings of modern grass, trees, and flowers. They also formed animals that propelled themselves around and had a clever new feature called brains. That innovation powered the intelligent hunt for food. And more food meant more energy, to fuel larger and more complex brains.
Now, long after animals crawled out of the sea and began their walk on land, modern humans have added (varying degrees of) consciousness to the mix. We've existed in our present form for something like one hundred thousand years. Even so, it's just ten thousand since we worked out how to get more food energy by grouping plants into farms. Farming made possible the cultural and intellectual hubs known as cities, which in turn gave rise to industry. And with each step — the rise of farming, the growth of cities, the industrial revolution — a radically different culture emerged. Now we're entering another great transition.
The new biology is humanity's future. But few know that because it's not the future we've been led to expect. For instance, the new biology is not biotech: it's not genetic engineering, at least not as it's typically practiced today, and it isn't cloning either. Most biotech treats nature as if it worked like a machine. The new biology makes machines that work like living things.
More than that, it brings organic principles to all of human design. This wasn't possible before. We didn't know enough about how the old biology works. But in recent years, as fundamental breakthroughs have transformed life science, experts from other fields have watched and learned. Now insights once the province of ecologists, zoologists, and cell biologists are laying a new foundation for everything from materials science and medicine to farming, from robotics and artificial intelligence to community planning, from industrial design to the global economy.
The twenty-first century will mark a sea change in human affairs, one unlike any that has gone before. Soon to come are computers with emotions, ships that learn from fish, and "soft jets" that flex and twist like swooping birds. Fabricated arteries will pulse and contract just as they do in life. Industries will reabsorb waste, like fallen leaves fading into the earth, while a new kind of money looks to energy cascades in nature. These are not blue-sky dreams. Work on them is well advanced.
Pulse
A pulse is a sign of life. All living systems answer to a beat. In the future, in ways we've only begun to see, our culture and technology will take up that beat — and with it the energy cascades, feedback cycles, and other dynamics that drive evolution.
A pulse is also a seedhead, carrier of the design for a new generation. For two centuries in the industrial West, culture has carried to each new human generation a message of faith in machines, and in the narrow cause-and-effect logic they represent. We've even learned to think in mechanical terms. But just as plants can evolve and release seeds better adapted to their settings, the seeds of a more advanced culture are today being sown. Using lessons drawn from nature, a new generation of designers, scientists, engineers, academics, farmers, philosophers, city planners, business leaders, and public officials from every continent is quietly, and with no common plan, creating a global revolution.
The culture that now surrounds us and shapes us was itself shaped by the machine age. Its success is without precedent, but it's becoming clear that machines as we know them are just a subset of biology, and a primitive one at that. The great leap in knowledge that created them, and that spread them across the planet, was no more than a halting first step out of the murk of history.
The machine age is about to meet a superior challenge. This doesn't mean the end of technology. There will be more of it now than ever. But our best innovations will no longer be like those that sparked the industrial revolution. In the future they will increasingly be like living things. Not life in the traditional sense, but a biology that has been consciously crafted by humans — a new biology.
The New Biology
Just as there is no clear definition of life, there can be no precise definition of the new biology. But how important it is can be seen in how many different fields it's affecting at once. They range from microscopic realms to vast global systems. At the deepest levels, for instance, biocentric methods are guiding the assembly of molecules into a range of materials and structures, including synthetic human chromosomes and artificial muscles and bone. The military has developed battle armor based on insect carapaces, and "bioskins" are being "grown" to filter biological-warfare agents and as self-repairing surfaces for space probes.
In robotics, swimming robofish teach ships the natural tricks of propulsion, roboflies carry communications gear, and designers have adapted bird wingtips to planes and penguin contours to racing bikes. There are now tiny, primitive robots that can reproduce. Meanwhile, life-size robotic legs will soon walk like real legs, computerized eyes have already helped the blind to see, and there are important new developments in haptics — remote touching.
Computers, the pivotal tool in the shift to a new biology, are getting smarter as scientists learn to model them on the brain's neural patterns and structures. They now enliven robots that teach themselves how to navigate the world. The effort to develop emotional computers has birthed a series of biotoys, like dolls that interact with people in increasingly lifelike ways.
Artificial intelligence has opened the way to new fields of research — with names like "emergence," "self-organization," "complexity." They center on the growth of virtual life forms that compete, reproduce, and evolve inside computers and on the Web. With "virtual worlds" a new interactive realm has also established itself there, a stable and enduring 3-D electronic reality in which the sole inhabitants are "avatars," prosthetic extensions of human operators. Online Web conferences like the annual Biota now promote the birth and release of artificial life forms.
The complexity and interactivity that give rise to Web-based worlds are a central element in all complex systems, living ones, too. Our failure to understand ecological connections in nature has led to many of the problems facing us today. By challenging a global agriculture modeled on machine age logic, the new biology enters the outside world in force. Can grazing increase productivity of the land? Can farmers learn from prairies? Can forests save their nurse logs?
In all these fields there is a movement toward organic ways and means. The same is true for where and how we live. Urban ecology reintegrates communities and nests them more skillfully into natural systems, to mend the fracturing that came with modern subdivisions. State-of-the-art computer programs create virtual-reality urban models that twenty-first-century planners will use to track the flow of energy and materials through real cities. Materials will cycle and recycle through products designed for disassembly In industrial ecosystems the waste products from one factory serve as raw material for another, just as in nature waste from one organism is food for another. A global effort now aims to convert the industrial world to hydrogen power, a key fuel in living cells and fuel cells.
Some of these changes may look expensive compared with our current system. That's a false comparison. Our current system uses unrealistic pricing; it's based on a machine age model that externalizes much of the real cost incurred. Today we call such externalized costs pollution. To new biologists they're a form of inefficiency. Cutting-edge schools of economic thought now show how an economy is not a big machine, as our present model holds. It's more like an ecosystem, with myriad interlocking feedback loops and a rough metabolism within limits. Powerful new computers now make it possible to model those dynamics, and to create money that mimics natural energy flows.
Democracies mirror the feedbacks in a natural system via their many cultural feedbacks, which serve to maintain a healthy society. By looking to nature we see the importance of keeping those feedbacks clear and accurate. The corporate distortions of media feedback that have come with consolidation and deception, voter feedback by corrupt campaign financing, and scientific feedback via the funding of biased research, all impede the vitality of culture. Restoring the credibility of those feedbacks is a key to cultural evolution.
The new biology heralds fundamental change. But that just makes it equal to the machine age. Its superiority lies in how, even as it brings great change, it integrates smoothly and at every level with nature. Human culture first emerged from hunting into farming, which then gave rise to cities, which in turn produced our industrial world. The new biology marks the start of yet another phase. In virtually every field of human endeavor — from materials science to robotics, from artificial intelligence to artificial life, and from Web-based worlds to farming, community planning to industry, and economic theory to democratic processes — the logic of ecology is morphing into social forms.
As with any major shift, all this can breed resistance. The machine age has enormous vested interests; much of the world's economic infrastructure today is based on it. Beyond that, over time we've also taught ourselves to think like machines. This means narrow, linear logic and a mechanistic mind-set often guide how we appraise new options. And because the new biology is so fundamental, there are dangers, too, dangers we'd be wise to keep in mind. Still, doing things as nature does them can mean real progress, not only for humans and the society we depend on, but for the natural systems that our society depends on.
Coming at the end of a turbulent century, and at the dawn of a millennium, the rise of nature into culture is real news. The quality of the minds the new biology attracts, the rapid growth and excitement it generates, its broad influence as a unifying concept, and its potential for reshaping culture all suggest we're at the brink of a historic transformation.
The Machine Metaphor
Drastic change is a rule of thumb in history. But it can be hard to see coming — or to accept when it arrives — because every culture has unquestioned ways of doing things, a set of intellectual blinders that shape how people think about the world. That cultural philosophy becomes a guide for what's right and natural in much of what we do.
The logic of the machine age is ours. During the course of two centuries of industrial revolution we've enshrined the mechanistic thinking that made our world possible, converting industrial-era logic into an all-purpose metaphor. As a result of that machine metaphor, our popular speech is littered with terms like "gear up," "fine-tune," and "on track" which reinforce the view that people and our affairs can run as smoothly and predictably as machines. That view took hold some three centuries ago with the scientific revolution, which was spurred by the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes.
Among those ideas he championed that still shape our thought is a dualistic view of humans. For Descartes, the world outside of us was just a vast and intricate machine. But, he held, in each of our minds there is a kind of inner sanctum, a conscious awareness disconnected from that mechanistic outside world. He believed that inner realm houses the human soul, which makes conscious reason and free will possible. There were implications in that for other creatures, too. Because they lacked our consciousness and free will, Descartes said, animals were just bundles of reflexes, responding automatically to whatever stimuli the world presented. As he put it, they were nothing more than complex watchworks (and if a watchwork dog can be considered alive, say today's heirs of that view, why not computers and robots?).
During the centuries since then, as the concept of "world as mechanism" increasingly shaped how people thought, it shaped the culture they created. That's also true of "reductionism," another potent concept put forward by Descartes. Aided and abetted by the writer, philosopher, and statesman Francis Bacon, he pushed the view that nature's so-called watchworks can best be understood by breaking them down into parts.
Isaac Newton built on this outlook (now referred to as Cartesian) to lay the foundations of classical physics. He showed that important properties of the physical world can be discovered through reductionism, and by a linear, 1+2 = 3 analysis of direct causes and effects. He then went on to show how reliable mechanical systems could be designed with that approach.
After centuries of medieval mysticism, all this came as a revelation. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Newton's successors had explored hydrodynamics, electricity, and the smelting of iron, and developed standardization and interchangeable parts. With the invention of the steam engine, the industrial revolution was on its way. As mathematician Alfred North Whitehead later observed, it was around this time, too, that "the mechanical explanation of ... nature finally hardened into a dogma of science."
The story of that time and of the machine age that followed is actually a great many stories — of rapid advances in science and industry, of the coming of public education and democracy, of destructive world wars and the rise of a global economy. But beneath all that another drama was unfolding, one now poised to have an even larger impact on our world. This was the rise of a complex view of nature, one recognizing that life is more than a big machine.
Just as with the new biology now, the machine age in its own time was an effort to use lessons learned from nature as a guide for human design. And over the course of two centuries its growing power made clear just how solid and well-founded the mechanical view of life is. For the new biology to subsume that, it has to show how the machine age view is incomplete, to demonstrate that a fuller understanding of nature is possible. This is a fundamental contest, one that's been developing for centuries. Throughout that time, as machine age methods spread across the globe, the alternate view of nature posed a rising challenge. The ongoing twists and turns of that debate help illustrate the ideas behind the new biology, and to reveal its deep roots. They also make a good story — one of brilliant, sometimes headstrong personalities and the rough-and-tumble clash of two great ideas.
Metamorphosis
The criticism began soon after the start of the machine age. Faith in mechanism and reduction had gained the high ground in science, but doubts were being raised in philosophy and the arts. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was notable among the skeptics. So was William Wordsworth, who wrote:
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
We murder to dissect.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant added his voice to the dissenters, pointing out what he saw as a disconnect between mechanical explanations and how living things really work. In both systems, he said, the parts interact; but in organisms the parts also create one another. Which means that a life form, as he put it in his Critique of Judgment, is "both an organized and self-organizing being." This is arguably the first appearance of the term "self-organizing" in a description of living systems, a term now prominent in the most advanced speculations on the subject.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Pulse by Robert Frenay. Copyright © 2006 Robert Frenay. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction,
1. The New Biology,
part one: look and feel,
2. Building Blocks,
3. Figure and Ground,
4. Thinking,
5. Interacting Parts,
part two: natural connections,
6. Ecology,
7. Growing Problems,
8. The Even Greener Revolution,
9. Town and Country,
part three: global designs,
10. Industrial Ecology,
11. The Real Conservatives,
12. Feedback Culture,
Notes,
Index,