The Sciences of the Artificial

We might be more optimistic if we recognized that we do not have to solve all of these problems. Our essential task—a big enough one to be sure—is simply to keep open the options for the future or perhaps even to broaden them a bit by creating new variety and new niches.

Finally, there has been substantial progress in devising feedback devices that “tame” chaos by restricting chaotic systems, moving within their strange attractors, to small neighborhoods having desired properties, so that the chaos becomes merely tolerable noise. Such devices provide an example, consonant with the discussion in earlier chapters, of

In such situations, although the future is not predictable in any detail, it is manageable as an aggregate phenomenon.

Thus, biological organisms are nearly-decomposable: the interactions within units at any level are rapid and intense in comparison with the interactions between units at the same level.

Social planning without fixed goals has much in common with the processes of biological evolution.

It can be endless, as can be the process of design and the evolution of human society, because there is no limit on diversity in the world.

The organism must develop correlations between goals in the sensed world and actions in the world of process. When they are made conscious and verbalized, these correlations correspond to what we usually call means-ends analysis.

human problem solving, from the most blundering to the most insightful, involves nothing more than varying mixtures of trial and error and selectivity. The selectivity derives from various rules of thumb, or heuristics, that suggest which paths should be tried first and which leads are promising.

Whether there is a long-run direction in evolution, and whether that direction is to be considered progress are of course two different questions.