Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Helix Books) [Hardcover]

George B. Dyson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0201406497 | ISBN-13: 978-0201406498 | Publication Date: May 1997 | Edition: First Edition first Printing

Introducing a cast of known and unknown characters, George B. Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives and work of visionaries - from the time of Thomas Hobbes to the time of John von Neumann - who foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and artificial mind. This book derives both its title and its outlook from Samuel Butler's 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines." Observing the beginnings of miniaturization, self-reproduction, and telecommunication among machines, Butler predicted that nature's intelligence, only temporarily subservient to technology, would resurface to claim our creations as her own. Weaving a cohesive narrative among his brilliant predecessors, Dyson constructs a straightforward, convincing, and occasionally frightening view of the evolution of mind in the global network, on a level transcending our own. Dyson concludes that we are in the midst of an experiment that echoes the prehistory of human intelligence and the origins of life. Just as the exchange of coded molecular instructions brought life as we know it to the early earth's primordial soup, and as language and mind combined to form the culture in which we live, so, in the digital universe, are computer programs and worldwide networks combining to produce an evolutionary theater in which the distinctions between nature and technology are increasingly obscured. Nature, believes Dyson, is on the side of the machines.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Here's a mesmerizing account of the evolution of machines and thoughts about machines, woven into a story about the evolution of intelligence. Darwin Among the Machines is not so much about how today's intelligence came to be, but about how it may further develop as humanity and computer grow closer together. George Dyson tells the story largely through stories--both historical and legendary--from the lives of scientists and philosophers who paved the way for today's cybernetics revolution, starting with the 17th-century insights of Thomas Hobbes. This book challenges the assumption that nature and machine are opposing forces. Dyson believes them to be allies.

From Library Journal

Dyson, son of scientist Freeman and brother of computer guru Esther, sees the World Wide Web as a major evolutionary development in the creation of "a globally networked, electronic, sentient being." Using historical fact as well as fiction, he explains how we have arrived at this juncture. He reveals an impressive literary and scientific background as he moves from Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Butler, and Leibniz to Turing, von Neumann, and others. However, it is not always obvious what point he is making, and he finds mythology as useful in explaining this evolution as historical fact. Dyson provides substantial detail about the development of intelligent machines as he traces the history of modern computing from the ballistics computations of the 1940s and 1950s to the SAGE project and other military applications, which had spinoffs and by-products culminating in today's network-based system. Certainly, computer technology is having a revolutionary effect on how we do many things and, in fact, what we do. But whether we are seeing Darwinian evolution among the machines remains unproved to this reviewer. Recommended for larger collections.?Hilary D. Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 286 pages
• Publisher: Perseus Books; First Edition first Printing edition (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201406497
• ISBN-13: 978-0201406498
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #38 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Artificial Life

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading, March 21, 2000

By 

[e-mail] (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books) (Paperback)

George Dyson has the rare skill of being able to put flesh on ideas. He is particularly good at Samuel Butler(evoked in the title essay) and a few Darwins: Erasmus (a great character and, we learn here, Mary Shelly's inspiration for Dr. Frankenstein), his grandson Charles (Origin of Species), and brief mention of Charles' grandson Sir Charles Darwin (who headed the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) which employed Alan Turing, but was unable to gain support for Turing's project to build an "Automatic Computing Engine" in 1945). Selected against.

The Chapter on Butler is worth the price of the book. Readers will also encounter many obscure names brought alive with interesting detail and then fit into the evolution of a familiar technology. For example, Dyson explains how wooden tally sticks, used as a primitive, secure means of record keeping in the English (twelfth century) pre-history of banking, both facilitated the establishment of a banking system and served as an early precursor and model for encryption keys.

Familiar, iconographic names, Charles Babbage and John Von Neuman, to name just two examples, are shown in somewhat different, and more human, light than they are usually presented. Babbage, for example, was a prophet of telecommunications whose early ideas for what we now call packet switching revolutionized the British mail system. Babbage analyzed the operations of the British postal system and found that its costs were governed more by switching than by distance. His recommendaton of a flat rate service was introduced in 1840 as the penny post. Von Neuman's influence is described in detail in many places, for his contributions to mathematics, game theory, computing, the Cold War defense system, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Students looking for a concise description of the history of "distributed communication" (most familiarly now the Internet) will also find a great and amusing chapter in this book. Dyson has written a remarkably compact description of how the issues and concerns of the defense establishment encouraged the creation of what we now know as the Internet.

The boundlessness of the book, its avoidance of the shelter of one or a few strict disciplines, is among its greatest attractions. If anyone ever asks you what a liberal arts education is, point them to this book. There is no better book on how ideas live and grow across generations.

Darwin Among the Machines is science writing, intellectual history, personal essay, and more.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Maybe not scientific, but that's not the point anyway..., July 8, 2006

By 

Chris Chatham (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books) (Paperback)

Several have criticized Dyson's philosophical and historical treatise "Darwin Among the Machines" for not articulating exactly how a global intelligence might emerge from today's synthetic biological and computational networks. But as Dyson says in the preface, the past is where we find answers, and the future merely a fog of questions "to which the answers are up to us." In the next 200 pages, Dyson explores the history of an idea: that man will someday create a form of artificial life, with intelligence that may match or exceed our own.

It may astound some readers to know that these ideas date much farther back than Alan Turing's "Turing Test," or Vannevar Bush's influential essay "As We May Think." Consider the following quote from Thomas Hobbes (1651): "Nature is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal." Or consider this excerpt from Samuel Butler's 1859 essay, which serves as Dyson's main theoretical foundation: "As the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kindgom has sprung up ... It appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors."

Careful to acknowledge his predecessors, Dyson profiles the lives of some of the most prescient Enlightenment- and modern-era thinkers in captivating detail. In so doing, he traces the evolution of the "Artificial Animal" from its earliest incorporeal appearances - as merely an idea - to its current computational incarnation in neural networks. But Dyson doesn't stop there.

In fact, he goes on to argue that the global telecommunications network (primarily the internet) may provide the appropriate architecture for a kind of global, distributed intelligence to evolve. Here Dyson borrows from Leibniz, who noted that the "soul" may be "born when the machine is organized to receive it, as organ-pipes are adjusted to receive the general wind."

To further support this claim, Dyson draws parallels between the development of increasingly efficient machines and the processes of biological evolution. In fact, this is one of the most interesting parts of the book, in part because the language in which Dyson details the principles of evolution might be considered dangerous today, in the midst of the raging Intelligent Design debate. For example, Dyson suggests that evolution itself may embody a kind of intelligence, though we frequently perceive it as merely a shallow process, highly dependent on chance and randomness.

As Dyson points out, this perception gets to a fundamental semantic confusion surrounding "intelligence," a phenomenon well known to AI researchers in which problems once thought to require intelligence are then seen as trivial after an algorithm is designed to solve them. As Dyson points out, intelligence may simply be a word we use to describe behavior that corresponds to our view of how humans behave. Not believing in "'the existence of an intelligence behind the achievements in biological evolution may prove to be one of the most spectacular examples of the kind of misunderstandings which may arise before two alien forms of intelligence become aware of one another.' Likewise, to conclude from the failure of individual machines to act intelligently that machines are not intelligent may represent a spectacular misunderstanding of the nature of intelligence among machines."

Ultimately, whether you agree with Dyson's perspective is besides the point. This is not a scientific book; many of the ideas are purely philosophical, and the logic used to support Dyson's assertions frequently rests on historical anecdote and analogy. These should not be considered weaknesses, however. The real, lasting value of "Darwin Among the Machines" is Dysons's imaginative and graceful writing, his impeccable historical research, and the conceptual ease with which he integrates ideas from ballistics, biology, hydrodynamics, set theory, Cybernetics, and uncountably more esoteric subjects.

Though I won't dispute that many of these exciting ideas are far-fetched, Dyson has found powerful allies for his assertions, from Hobbes and Leibniz to Goedel and Von Neumann. So if you find yourself believing - or simply wanting to believe - in these groundbreaking ideas, then you're in fine company.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Voice of Dissent, January 9, 2001

By 

frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (Helix Books) (Paperback)

While I understand and (to a certain extent) agree with all the positive comments from the reviewers on this page, I find myself unable to share the sentiments.

The book is well written in the sense that Dyson provides a rich series of anecdotes and historical facts to back up the connection between the evolution of man and machine that he posits as his central thesis. And while I really appreciated those anecdotes, I didn't find that he really earned my belief. I often found that he made leaps of logic in the way he lay the thing out that were expected to stand more on the charmingness of the stories and/or the pithiness of the quotations that preface each chapter than on a real well-constructed argument. I often didn't follow how he got from point C to point D and frankly I found many of the connections that he made rather streched in appropriateness.

This said, Dyson is clearly a very smart guy with a lot of interesting things to say on the topic, so despite my concerns/disbelief, the book is a worthwhile read.