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not be predictable, but it still seems to be rushing forward with all the
utopian energies we once found in other human activities.
Ray's vision of the future is also connected with a particular notion of
technological progress. Over the last twenty years, there has been an
increasing tendency
to
shift the metaphors for how we think about the
world from mechanical metaphors to organic metaphors. For example,
the earth, once imagined as a "system"-an ecosystem, a chemical sys–
tem, a weather system, a population system-is now often spoken of as
an organism; this is the nature of the "Gaia" hypothesis that speaks of
the entire planet as if it were a living being (and this is not just meant as
a metaphor). Even the Internet, which is little more than a connected net–
work of computers all sharing certain instructions for how to send and
interpret messages, has been compared to a living organism or at least a
primal cybersoup out of which new organisms will evolve. Society, which
was once thought of as a machine in which gears properly meshed, and,
in which an adjustment in one area would require some tinkering in
another, is now a "hive" in which we are all unknowing parts of some
larger organic whole. Some ideas in economics have been recast in this
way too. One advocate of this new way of thinking (a theory that has
been called "bionomics" by its advocates) recently wrote: "A parallel
relationship exists between an ecosystem based on genetic information
and an economy derived from technical information." When we study
ecological relationships between different species, we will, in this argu–
ment, also learn something about how economics works.
And finally, in discussions of life and the essence of life-areas central
to Ray's argument-there is actually a field called "A-Life," or artificial
life, which bears the same relationship to real life as artificial intelligence
does
to
real intelligence. The aspiration is similar and so are some of the
arguments. The argument of A-Life is something like this: that if we can
take a look at how organisms propagate, evolve, and change, and can
model these complex changes properly with computers, the results will
begin
to
resemble life itself in every relevant fashion. Such computer mod–
els begin to act in apparently novel fashions, almost seeming
to
become
independent organisms. They display "emergent qualities," aspects that
are not necessarily planned for or programmed, but that emerge out of the
complex set of relationships being established. Some people think of the
brain this way-as a machine that is so complex it becomes alive, its
emergent qualities far beyond the reach of any of its parts. There are some
radical investigators into A-Life (which even has its own journal pub–
lished by MIT Press) who argue that there may ultimately be no differ–
ences between sufficiently complex models of A-Life and life itself. One of
