"We are in a new era, one in which we are building systems that can't be grasped in their totality or held in the mind of a single person." George Hotz has a gift for bending complex technologies in the direction of his own desire. As a teenage nobody, Hotz earned notoriety for being the first hacker to unlock Apple's iPhone -- much to the annoyance of AT&T, who had exclusive-ish networking rights at the time. Several years later, he became the focus of a Sony lawsuit for releasing hacked Playstation 3 software to the world. And last December, he discussed his latest project with Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance -- a patched together home-made driverless car. When asked what compels him to crack open these complicated technologies Hotz said, "I want power.

Head chef robot "Andrew" flips Japanese pancakes during the "Kingdom of Robot" press preview at the Huis Ten Bosch amusement park on July 12 in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan. In the last 400 years or so, since the time of the scientific revolution, we have come to find it natural to suppose that the world is comprehensible. Nature and its laws, operating in things most small as well as in the cosmos as a whole, are understandable. And, yet, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, quoted in Samuel Arbesman's intriguing new book coming out next week, Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension, has written: "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but it is queerer than we can suppose." It isn't just the world of physics that has come to seem so exceedingly strange -- at the level of the quantum and also that of the multiverse -- but consciousness itself.