I thought this was interesting...

accelerating.org/articles/...arity.html

In line with the new paradigm of evolutionary development of complex systems, we are learning that tomorrow's most successful technological systems must be organic in nature. Self-organization emerges only through a process of cyclic development with limited evolution/variation within each cycle, a self-replicating development that becomes incrementally tuned for progressively greater self-assembly, self-repair, and self-reorganization, particularly at the lowest component levels. At the same time, progressive self-awareness (self-modeling) and general intelligence (environmental modeling) are emergent features of such systems.

Most of today's technological systems are a long way from having these capacities. They are rigidly modular, and do not adapt to or interdepend with each other or their environment. They engage not in self-assembly, but are mostly externally constructed. In discussing proteins, Michael Denton reminds us of how far our technological systems have to go toward this ideal. Living molecular systems engage extensively in the features listed above. A protein's three dimensional shape is a result of a network of local and non-local physical interdependences (e.g., covalent, electrostatic, electrodynamic, steric, and solvent interactions). Both its assembly and its final form are a developmentally computed emergent feature of that interdependent network. A protein taken out of its interdependent milieu soon becomes nonfunctional, as its features are a convergent property of the interdependent system.

Today's artificial neural networks, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary programs are promising examples of systems that demonstrate an already surprising degree of self-replication, self-assembly, self-repair, and self-reorganization, even at the component level. Implementing a hardware description language genotype, which in turn specifies a hardware-deployed neural net phenotype, and allowing this genotype-phenotype system to tune for ever more complex, modular, and interdependent neural net emergence is one future path likely to take us a lot further toward technological autonomy. At the same time, as Kurzweil has argued, advances in human brain scanning will allow us to instantiate ever more interdependent computational architectures directly into the technological substrate, architectures that the human mind will have less and less ability to model as we engage in the construction process. In this latter example, human beings are again acting as a decreasingly central part of the replication and variation loop for the continually improving technological substrate.

Collective or "swarm" computation is also a critical element of evolutionary development of complexity, and thus facilitating the emergence of systems we only partially understand, but collectively utilize (agents, distributed computation, biologically inspired computation), will be very important to achieving the emergences we desire. Linking physically-based self-replicating systems (SRS's) to the emerging biologically inspired computational systems (neural networks, genetic algorithms, evolutionary systems) which are their current predecessors will be another important bottom up method, as first envisioned by John Von Neumann in the 1950's.