Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

Well, here's what you can do, and that's about it.

Our society lacks a feedback loop for controlling technology: a way to gauge intended effects from actual effects later on

It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.

We're just at the beginning of the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking, nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20 years.'

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.