What the Book Is About

What It’s All About

Some readers have told us that it’s hard to get a sense of the whole book as they arrive right in the middle. Here’s what the author has to say about it:

When I began working on this book I didn’t expect it to take up eight years of my life. I also didn’t see where the work would eventually lead me. My original concept was for a scouting report on the promise of biologically inspired design—on new developments ranging from the smallest (nano) to the largest (government, global economics). But when I combined that research with the latest insights from fields like genetics, emergence, complexity, and ecology, the evidence added up to something much larger.

This book does survey the “new biology”–human systems and machines that work like living things—which is now transforming pretty much every field of human activity. So throughout the book there’s no shortage of next wave technologies like emotional computers and ships that swim like fish; or of innovative efforts to model large-scale human systems on ecological dynamics—as in farms that grow like prairies, or schemes linking global money flows to the energy flows in nature.

But more than that, because the new biology is transforming so many different fields at once, I think the world is entering a major sea change–one poised to have as great an impact now as the machine age did on the feudal world that it replaced. This is where the insights from emergence and complexity come in. Seen through them, what looks like a third great phase of human cultural evolution appears to be taking shape.

The first of those phase shifts came when hunter-gatherers made the transition to agriculture, which created large settlements and eventually cities. Then the intellectual remix of cities gave rise to the industrial revolution–to the machine age with all its blessings and dilemmas. That was actually an early try at modeling technology on nature, and many of its problems are just byproducts of an incomplete understanding. Today’s new surge of advances comes out of dramatic gains on that front. And computers are the key to those gains, as well as to their adaptation into new designs, and to the rapid spread of those designs through culture.

All this turns accepted wisdom on its head. It means not only the end of the machine age as we’ve known it for so long. It means that instead of civilization reshaping nature, nature has begun to reshape civilization.

One of the benefits this shift promises is an end to the war between technology and the living world. Now the latest advances in technology, as well as the leading edge of the environmental movement, are heading for common ground—as both look to living process as their first, best model. With that they’re merging in a way that looks a lot like organic synthesis.

In the eight years that I worked on this project, I found myself walking down many paths that were first explored by others. The book’s introduction lists 18 previous titles on this subject, and alludes to more. My aim has been to bring together, update, and expand on them to create the broadest and most current overview possible.

I should mention that the examples in this book were also chosen with a second aim in mind. They serve as parables to illustrate deeper themes—in this case the basic operating principles of life. So at that level the book becomes a primer. Finally, it contributes new insights into how ecological systems work, especially on the key importance of feedback loops—how they guide the core dynamics of natural systems to sustain their vitality, and how that translates into lessons for our culture. All this may be why one reviewer has called Pulse “the new bible of the church of ecology.”

That’s the kind of thing any writer likes to hear, a welcome reward for all the hard work. And I take it as recognition that this book goes beyond offering a few examples with a cursory summation. Instead, by casting my net so wide, I’ve tried to show how thoroughly ingrained this new movement has become–to make its importance not just arguable but irrefutable.

So Pulse is a serious book but, its author hastens to add, without being a dry or academic book. It’s written for lay readers, in clear, straightforward language. Also, there’s real drama in the clash of two great ideas—the machine age view of nature and the newer ecological view—that is playing out right now in every field the book covers. And it offers the most comprehensive evidence around for the radical notion that, with the coming of computers, technology can start evolving our culture back toward the natural world, instead of away from it.

The book’s form is innovative, as this site attests. You can read Pulse in a number of ways: it’s available on paper, or as a “networked book” on this blog, by RSS feed, or by email.

What may be less obvious is that its structure is singular too. After an opening chapter of background it proceeds via elevating degrees of scale, beginning with the smallest—atoms, molecules, and nanotech—then rising by increments to show how the new biology is transforming each area of human activity. So the chapters of this book unfold in a way that mirrors the emergence of life, escalating gradually from lone atoms to in the end encompass vast, highly advanced global networks.

Along the way Pulse ranges through in-depth looks at nanotech; molecular directed evolution; increasingly lifelike robots; artificial brains that look to real brains; the role of complexity in spawning cellular automata, artificial life, and avatars; the role of complexity in spawning natural ecosystems; nature-based agriculture (and how we got to a place where that odd notion could be necessary), virtual and real green communities; industrial ecology; bio-economics and thermodynamic money; how the cultural feedbacks in a healthy democracy echo the natural feedbacks of ecology–with some very pointed references to our current political situation; and how computers are crucial to and accelerating all these.

Can we blow it, miss our chance and end up like so many other overconfident cultures in the dustbin of history? Sure we can. But the door to a new era now clearly stands open before us, and it offers an optimistic view of where we’re headed and what we can become. As today’s world morphs into one linked seamlessly with nature, that has the potential to bring not only systems and machines inspired by living things, but a human culture that evolves.

And in that it seems to me we’re turning toward something both very new and very old, a technologically advanced mirror of the agrarian simplicity we left behind so long ago. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” We may yet find that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.

For those who’d like a quick taste of this book, here’s a list of links to some of the subjects found inside (each link becomes active only after the relevant section has been released on the RSS feed):