Seeing the Swarm

Chapter 1. Seeds of the Future: Food
o Autocatalytic Runaway
o Changing Phase
o Eat Your Heart Out
o Factory Embryos
o Food Machines
o Future Tense

Chapter 2. Rebooting Reality: Labor
o Network Reactions
o Birth of a Notion
o Prime Movers
o A Synergetic Machine
o Rebirth
o In the Grip of a Metal Hand

Chapter 3. Dynamo: Resources
o The King’s Stigmergic Argument
o Amalthea’s Recursive Horn
o Trigger Effect
o The Cheapskate Way
o Some Assembly Required
o Spirits from the Vasty Deep

Chapter 4. Sweat of the Sun God: Wealth
o Ecogenetic Wolves
o See. Want. Take.
o Weaving the Web
o Bright Lights, Big Cities
o The Non-Linear Elephant in the Living Room
o The Price of Life

Chapter 5. Economic War: Poverty
o Insoluble Closure
o The Properties of Property
o Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night
o Swimming with Autopoietic Barracuda
o Utopia Dead Ahead

Chapter 6. Connect the Dots: Thought
o The Very Pulse of the Machine
o Organon
o A Microscope Made of Numbers
o Whirlpool of Conjecture
o Accepting the Unacceptable
o Wiring the World

Chapter 7. The How and the Why: Life
o Sparks of Life
o Diversity and Density
o Entelechy Shmentelechy
o Frothy Bubbles
o Swarm
o Is It Life, Jim, Just Not As We Know It?

Chapter 8. Faster than Life: The Future?
o Foretelling
o Brain and Brain, What Is Brain?
o Crisis? What Crisis?
o Curses! Foiled Again
o In a Dark Night with Anxious Love Inflamed

Glossary
Thanks
Notes