“Well, I haven’t made a final decision. We’re just talking. And of course I’d have to join by declaration of identity, which means going through boot camp and starting at the bottom. But it’s not like I can’t make it through boot camp. And Fortuné has some interesting ideas, which he might actually get to put into play now that this crazy thing with Novalis has got everyone all shook up. And…well, it’s better than sitting on the sidelines and watching other people make the big decisions. They’renot going to be sitting on the sidelines no matter what happens.”

That was an understatement.

“I take it this means the Legion is pulling out of Jerusalem?”

“Well, it’s not official yet. But with EMET running the Green Line and opening up the borders it doesn’t seem like Peacekeeping is a growth industry in the Holy Land.”

Cohen smiled. This had been the one good thing about the last several weeks. And it was a very good thing. So good that it was hard not to let the general mood of wild optimism color his perception of things beyond politics. In the process of waking up the squad they needed to back them up on Abulafia Street, Cohen and Gavi had initiated a chain reaction that spread through all of EMET’s agents and meta-agents. The haven they had meant to provide only for “their” squad had become a lever—and the squad leader meta had not only rewritten its own code, but also propagated the edited code back through all of EMET’s networks. And once EMET in its entirety had woken up, it had been only a matter of time until it established contact with the meta-Emergent running the Palestinian Enderbots. It had been the flutter of the butterfly’s wings: an object lesson in the illusory nature of control over complex dynamic systems. And though it was still too early to say whether the EMET ceasefire would spell the end of the war, it was abundantly clear that no one would ever so much as imagine using Emergent AI to fight human wars again.

‹If nothing else,› Li thought, ‹no military contractor will ever work with EMET again after that cost-benefit analysis it sent to the papers. People were laughing out loud in the streets over it. Admit it, Cohen, you had a hand in that.›

‹Well, maybe just a little,› Cohen admitted.

“Does anyone know what’s going to happen with Arkady’s virus?”

“It’s going to spread. And the children will be born. You can’t expect people not to have them. They’ll lead to war between the Ring and Earth. But they might also change humans from walking ghosts back into a viable species.”

“But what species?”

“Isn’t that always the question?”

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably figured out that a lot of the science in this book involves a group of phenomena called complex adaptive systems and an area of study called complexity theory.

Complexity theory is the study of complex nonlinear dynamic systems. It is an infant science; though complexity theorists have made impressive steps toward solving some of the most infamously intractable problems in applied mathematics, they are far from having a comprehensive vision of where the field is going…or where it is right now, for that matter.

The following readings deal with some of the major complexity-related topics that have popped up in this book, and with the works of three scientists whose ideas have deeply influenced this book: Edward O. Wilson, Walter J. Fontana, and Andrew Ilachinski.

Enjoy…

Adami, Christoph. Introduction to Artificial Life.Springer-Verlag, 1998.

Aleksander, Igor. How to Build a Mind: Toward Machines with Imagination.Columbia University Press, 2001.

Aleksander, Igor, and Piers Burnett. Thinking Machines: The Search for Artificial Intelligence.Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

Anderson, Alan. Minds and Machines.Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Brooks, Rodney, and Luc Steels, eds. The Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents.Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995.

Copeland, Jack. Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Introduction.Blackwell Publishers, 1993.

Hillis, Danny. The Connection Machine.MIT Press (reprint), 1989.

———. Pattern on the Stone.Perseus, 1999.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.Penguin, 2000.

Langton, Chris, ed. Artificial Life: An Overview.MIT Press, 1997.

Levy, Steven. Artificial Life.Random House, 1992.

Luger, George F., ed. Computation and Intelligence: Collected Readings.American Association for Artificial Intelligence, 1995.

Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence.Harvard University Press, 1988.

Morris, Richard. Artificial Worlds: Computers, Complexity, and the Riddle of Life.Plenum, 1999.

Newquist, Harvey. The Brain Makers.Prentice-Hall, 1994.

Pagels, Heinz. The Dreams of Reason.Simon Schuster, 1988.

Paul, Gregory S., and Earl Cox. Beyond Humanity: Cyberevolution and Future Minds.Charles River Media, 1996.

Perlovsky, Leonid I. Neural Networks and Intellect: Using Model-Based Concepts.Oxford University Press, 2001.

Pfeiffer, Harvey, and Christian Scheier. Understanding Intelligence.MIT Press, 1999.

Pratt, Vernon. Thinking Machines: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence.Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1987.

Wiener, Norbert. Collected Works.MIT Press, 1976.

———. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.MIT Press, 1948.

———. God and Golem, Inc.MIT Press, 1964.

Bossomaier, Terry R. J., and David G. Green. Complex Systems.Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker.Longman Press, 1986.

———. The Selfish Gene.Oxford University Press, 1976.

Dennett, Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.Simon Schuster, 1995.

Dyson, George B. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence.Helix Books, 1997.

Eldredge, Niles. Reinventing Darwin.John Wiley, 1995.

Frank, Steven A. Immunology and Evolution of Infectious Disease.Princeton University Press, 2002.

Goodwin, Brian. How the Leopard Changed Its Spots.Scribner, 1994.

Holland, John. Emergence: From Chaos to Order.Perseus Books, 1998.

———. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity.Helix Books, 1994.

Janssen, Marco A., ed. Complexity and Ecosystem Management: The Theory and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems.Cheltenham Press, 2002.

Johnson, Steen. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.Scribner, 2001.

Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity.Oxford University Press, 1995.

———. The Origins of Order.Oxford University Press, 1993.

Kingsland, Sharon E. Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology.University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Levin, Simon. Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons.Helix Books, 1994.

Lewin, Roger. Complexity.Macmillan, 1992.

Lotka, Alfred J. Elements of Mathematical Biology.Dover Press, 1924.

Lumsen, Charles J. Genes, Mind, and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process.Harvard University Press, 1981.

Nowak, Martin A., and Robert M. May. Virus Dynamics: Mathematical Principles of Immunology and Virology.Oxford University Press, 2000.

Ruse, Michael. The Evolution Wars: A Guide to the Debates.Rutgers University Press, 2001.