''Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World'' () is a 1992 book by Kevin Kelly. Major themes in ''Out of Control'' are cybernetics,

emergence In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. Emergen ...

self-organization Self-organization, also called spontaneous order in the social sciences, is a process where some form of overall order arises from local interactions between parts of an initially disordered system. The process can be spontaneous when suffic ...

, complex systems,

negentropy In information theory and statistics, negentropy is used as a measure of distance to normality. The concept and phrase "negative entropy" was introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 popular-science book '' What is Life?'' Later, Léon Bril ...

and

chaos theory Chaos theory is an interdisciplinary area of scientific study and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, and were once thought to have ...

and it can be seen as a work of

techno-utopianism Technological utopianism (often called techno-utopianism or technoutopianism) is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ...

Summary

The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components. Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organizations, intelligent computers as well as to the human brain.

Reception

The book was not widely reviewed when first released in 1992, but got visibly reviewed and extensively cited during the next several years. Reviews often discussed Kelly's hive-mind analogy as a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

for the

New Economy The New Economy refers to the ongoing development of the American economic system. It evolved from the notions of the classical economy via the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, and has been driven by ...

. Reviewers have called this book a "mind-expanding exploration" (''Publishers Weekly'') and "the best of an important new genre" (''Forbes ASAP''). Critics of the book have contended that its position leaves us without a critical approach to politics and social power.

Summary

Reception

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Further reading