Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World (ISBN 978-0201483406) is a 1992 book by Kevin Kelly.

Major themes in Out of Control are cybernetics, emergence, self-organization, complex systems, negentropy and chaos theory and it can be seen as a work of techno-utopianism.

[citation needed] The central theme of the book is that several fields of contemporary science and philosophy point in the same direction: intelligence is not organized in a centralized structure but much more like a bee-hive of small simple components.

[1] Kelly applies this view to bureaucratic organizations, intelligent computers as well as to the human brain.

[3] Reviewers have called this book a "mind-expanding exploration" (Publishers Weekly)[4] and "the best of an important new genre" (Forbes ASAP).