Kevin Kelly wrote Out of Control in 1994, a sprawling study of emergence, hive minds, and bottom-up systems that arrived before the web and got mostly ignored in the US.
Thirty-two years later he reread it, and in a new essay he argues it holds up — partly because its ideas went mainstream, partly because the science barely moved. "Weirdly, there have been no major breakthroughs, or hugely disruptive ideas, in these departments in the last many decades," he writes.
The exception is deep learning, which "worked much better than anyone predicted." Kelly reads today's LLMs as proof of his thesis: "neural nets are the prime example of bottom-up, distributed, decentralized, emergent systems."
His one real regret is the title, which he says carries "a negative vibe" and never fit a book about gaining a new kind of power, not losing it.
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