Surfing on Entropy

Brian Eno: People tend to think that it's total control or no control. But the interesting place is in the middle of that.

Kevin Kelly: Right. We have no word for that state of in-between control. We have some words like "management," or "herding," or "husbandry." All these are words for co-control.

Brian Eno: I call it “surfing.” When you surf, there is a powerful complicated system, but you’re riding on it, you’re going somewhere on it, and you can make some choices about it.

Kevin Kelly: I think I know what you mean. Artificial life researchers talk about surfing the wave of increasing complexity. A very complex system gets close to a certain edge between rigid control and utter chaos - that’s when the whole thing can surf to the next level of complexity. They see this in evolutionary systems. Some go as far as to say that’s what life does: surf on entropy.

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