Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website

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My guest today is Kevin Kelly. Kevin's books include Out of Control, the new biology of

machines, social systems, and the economic world, and new rules for the new economy, ten

radical strategies for a connected world. He was the executive editor of Wired Magazine

from its first issue in 1993 through 1999, and he's on the board of the Long Now Foundation

and Chairman of the Board of the All Species Foundation. Kevin, welcome to Econ Talk.

I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Your book Out of Control is one of my favorites. It's about what is sometimes called emergence

or complexity or self-organizing behavior or the economy as ecosystem, a subject that's

near and dear to my heart and mind. In the beginning of the book, you write, the realm

of the born, all that is nature, and the realm of the made, all that is humanly constructed

are becoming one. Machines are becoming biological, and the biological is becoming engineered.

You publish those words in 1994, which is about an eternity ago. Is that trend still

happening? What's changed since then? What stayed the same?

I would say the trend is definitely still happening, if not accelerating. The primary thing

that has changed is that that insight has become conventional, almost cliched. At the time,

when I was first reporting this in the late 80s, it was still a kind of a metaphor. It was

political. It was something that seemed a fantasy, but maybe a useful fantasy. While I was

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