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Imagine it is 1958 and you are trying to defend the continental United States against airborne attack. To distinguish hostile aircraft, one of the things you need, besides a network of computers and early-warning radar sites, is a map of all commercial air traffic, updated in real time. The United States built such a system and named it SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment). SAGE in turn spawned Sabre, the first integrated reservation system for booking airline travel in real time. Sabre and its progeny soon became not just a map as to what seats were available but also a system that began to control, with decentralized intelligence, where airliners would fly, and when.

But isn’t there a control room somewhere, with someone at the controls? Maybe not. Say, for example, you build a system to map highway traffic in real time, simply by giving cars access to the map in exchange for reporting their own speed and location at the time. The result is a fully decentralized control system. Nowhere is there any controlling model of the system except the system itself.

Imagine it is the first decade of the 21st century and you want to track the complexity of human relationships in real time. For social life at a small college, you could construct a central database and keep it up to date, but its upkeep would become overwhelming if taken to any larger scale. Better to pass out free copies of a simple semi-autonomous code, hosted locally, and let the social network update itself. This code is executed by digital computers, but the analog computing performed by the system as a whole far exceeds the complexity of the underlying code. The resulting pulse-frequency coded model of the social graph becomes the social graph. It spreads wildly across the campus and then the world.

What if you wanted to build a machine to capture what everything known to the human species means? With Moore’s Law behind you, it doesn’t take too long to digitize all the information in the world. You scan every book ever printed, collect every email ever written, and gather forty-nine years of video every twenty-four hours, while tracking where people are and what they do, in real time. But how do you capture the meaning?

Even in the age of all things digital, this cannot be defined in any strictly logical sense, because meaning, among humans, isn’t fundamentally logical. The best you can do, once you have collected all possible answers, is to invite well-defined questions and compile a pulse-frequency weighted map of how everything connects. Before you know it, your system will not only be observing and mapping the meaning of things, it will start constructing meaning as well. In time, it will control meaning, in the same way as the traffic map starts to control the flow of traffic even though no one seems to be in control.

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There are three laws of artificial intelligence. The first, known as Ashby’s Law, after cybernetician W. Ross Ashby, author of Design for a Brain, states that any effective control system must be as complex as the system it controls.

The second law, articulated by John von Neumann, states that the defining characteristic of a complex system is that it constitutes its own simplest behavioral description. The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself. Trying to reduce the system’s behavior to any formal description makes things more complicated, not less.

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