After Thought: The Computer Challenge To Human Intelligence [Paperback]

James Bailey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 16, 1997

Through the first fifty years of the computer revolution, scientists have been trying to program electronic circuits to process information the same way humans do. Doing so has reassured us all that underlying every new computer capability, no matter how miraculously fast or complex, are human thought processes and logic. But cutting-edge computer scientists are coming to see that electronic circuits really are alien, that the difference between the human mind and computer capability is not merely one of degree (how fast), but of kind(how). The author suggests that computers “think” best when their “thoughts” are allowed to emerge from the interplay of millions of tiny operations all interacting with each other in parallel. Why then, if computers bring to the table such very different strengths and weaknesses, are we still trying to program them to think like humans? A work that ranges widely over the history of ideas from Galileo to Newton to Darwin yet is just as comfortable in the cutting-edge world of parallel processing that is at this very moment yielding a new form of intelligence, After Thought describes why the real computer age is just beginning.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Can the habits of thought we've developed over centuries and the computers we've built to automate our thought processes help us in a world choking on data? In this sweeping examination of the history of scientific thought, James Bailey argues that our current approach to computing is crippled by our need to create computers in our own intellectual image. The solution, a parallel approach to computation, where the nature of electronic circuits rather than human nature determines the design, will produce self-modifying machines that are profoundly alien, yet have the power to extract meaning from the flow of data that surrounds us.

The author's interpretation of the history of Western science from Greek antiquity to the present is a highly personal and fits his theory almost too smoothly. But his central thesis, that our understanding of reality is strait-jacketed by the tools we've developed to describe it, is profound and well worth pondering. The book is filled with interesting historical examples based on the author's wide reading and many of his observations are pithy and thought provoking. After Thought requires a dose of corrective skepticism on the reader's part (after all, the author was an executive at Thinking Machines Corp., a manufacturer of parallel processing supercomputers), but given that caveat, it's a fascinating read. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The true electronic revolution has not yet happened, proclaims Bailey. A new breed of computers is emerging, using parallel processing and new mathematics ("intermaths") with exotic names like cellular automata, genetic algorithms and artificial life, which enable computers to continually change their own programs as they compute. Instead of the traditional mathematical vocabulary of numbers, symbols and equations, these computers emphasize emergent patterns, enabling scientists to investigate a world of perpetual novelty. The new computers are being used to analyze the behavior of bird flocks and consumers, to study the human immune system, to make financial decisions and to contour the molecular structure of effective drugs. Freelancer Bailey, a former executive at Thinking Machines Corp., predicts that the new computers will create their own versions of scientific theories and help us fathom biological and cultural evolution as well as the workings of the mind. This is a thoughtful, exciting preview of the dawning age of computing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (May 16, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465007821
• ISBN-13: 978-0465007820
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #745,300 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #61 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Computer Mathematics

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars the muddled analysis demonstrates nothing, January 18, 1999

By 

Jay Scott - See all my reviews

This review is from: After Thought: The Computer Challenge To Human Intelligence (Paperback)

I'm an artificial intelligence person, and I bought this book to keep up-to-date with what popularizers are saying about my field. Now I wish I hadn't--it's too depressing. James Bailey got caught up in the promise of the wave of trendy data-driven learning algorithms like neural networks and genetic algorithms, and the purpose of the book is to gush about them. There's no attempt to place these methods in the broader context of artificial intelligence as a whole, and no recognition of their weaknesses. The book randomly names these methods the "new intermaths" and analyzes them historically as a radical breakthrough from the traditional sequential, numeric, data-poor human reasoning into the brave new world of parallel, non-numeric, data-rich silicon reckoning. He's partly right about that, but I think it's a coincidence; the book's argument is so muddled that it doesn't reach any convincing conclusion.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Before Thought: The Primacy of Human Intellect over Computer, June 27, 2001

By 

Wilson Engel (San Diego, California USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: After Thought: The Computer Challenge To Human Intelligence (Paperback)

Bailey's ruminations bear rereading now that five years have passed since their first appearance. We have survived the advent of the new Millennium, and we have found once again that, after the divine afflatus, human intellect reigns supreme in the cosmos.

This is not to say that Bailey's postulations have no merit. The advances of the computer age, particularly in the still-infant and arcane discipline of artificial intelligence, continue to fascinate us and to challenge us. Yet even with the burgeoning networks and the increasingly powerful integration of humanity and its machines, the surprises offered by the observations of the young and young-in-spirit still outdo those of scientific teams. I suspect that pattern, as old as civilization, will prevail.

The chapter in this book that most demands reflection-and rereading-is Chapter 17, where Henry David Thoreau is pitted against the myriad forces of the information age. As early as 1978 I was criticized by my literary colleagues for teaching the metaphysician of Walden Pond. At the time, I was working with Dr. Louis Uhle of USC on patterns of word usage in Renaissance English (primarily dramatic) texts as a scientific measure of authorship attribution. Yet Thoreau offered my students access not to data, but to genius, and that, not data, intrigued them.

Another colleague from the life sciences took his students to the college lawns to look as if for the first time at the patterns of dandelion blossoms, evoking the kinds of questions that not much later spawned Chaos Theory. My maths colleagues, intrigued with what I was doing with language, proceeded to AI, and my psychology colleagues drifted off to work some of the same ideas in formulating new network designs at Bell Labs.

Bailey's own accounts of elementary school children discerning the grounds for identifying a species that had remained unperceived by the "experts" reminds me of those halcyon days-before I also drifted into "line and circle" problem solving of the probabilistic kind. We had no idea we were participating in a revolution of thought, and perhaps that was just as well.

A metaphor Bailey uses in After Thought, particularly in Chapter 17, is that of understanding the behavior of rivers, and I think he was trying to suggest something about the elusive construct of Nature, which, if we should only drop our preconceptions and listen, would always surprise us. The Mississippi, like the Nile (or the Yangtze, for that matter), remains a keen scientific concern, but offers no easy understanding.

Yes, we have the potential to engage in collaborative enterprises involving computers and networks around the globe-the greatest parallel processing enterprise, in size and scale of any age. The question is, how much closer to essential truths this endeavor brings us?

Bailey would have us understand that we are about to transcend the time of maths as we know them and that we shall reach a new plateau of pattern recognition that renders the schema of ancient Babylon, the thinking of Kepler and even the cogitation of the Sante Fe Institute fellows obsolete. Perhaps, but, then again, perhaps not. The leaps of genius have outrun the numbers throughout history, however the scientific elite have formulated them. Our experts propose; Nature disposes otherwise. The human intellect itself has been found far more powerful than the sum of all the crunching power of all the machines in being or under consideration-working individually or working together.

Two cautions to Bailey's line of reasoning-for its determinism seems to partake of the confining features of Newton's laws, which he claims to eschew. First, no true scientist ever deceives himself or herself that absolutes are inviolate. Second, the very open inquiry at the root of the scientific method-even among the ancient Greeks-has never really surrendered to the rigors of numbers.

We fall between the pattern that has broken and the patterns that we sense as possible in Chaos every time. Taken that way, we can all still engage in our common task of understanding taking the fruits of our data looms as yet another set of features against which we try to move from apprehension to comprehension, the latter of which we approach as that dark and all-transforming glass of eternity.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good history, bad assumptions, wrong conclusions, June 27, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: After Thought: The Computer Challenge To Human Intelligence (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful intellectual history of modern logics. However, Mr. Bailey should probably have known more about brains and less about computers before he wrote this book. That human brains can think sequentially and that this has been the mode of scientistic thinking since Descartes, does not mean that brains only think sequentially as he assumes. Furthermore, that computers can be built in parallel does not mean that "wires" have any better capacity to process intermaths than brains. His conclusion, therefore, that we need parallel computers to complement our serial brains is silly. Alas, he is as captivated as all of the busy complexity theorists at Santa Fe by the notion of the "object" whose interior processes can remain "intractable" so long as we recognize their behaviors. A better conclusion might have been that since we can see computers producing order without bendfit of formulaic algorithms, then perhaps we should investigate if this isn't really how the massive parallel processors between our ears actually work. Or, he could spend some time just observing and reporting on the creative processes of ... well ... artists