Customer Reviews

Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, Updated With a New Preface

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Far from being a dry scientific text, this book is a probing look into the work and lives of the sometimes bizarre "tribe" of articial life researchers at the Santa Fe Institute. Written by an Anthropologist it gives a relatively objective outsiders view into the heart the emerging science of Artificial Life. The cultural implications of Artificial Life are explored as well as the effects on the culture of the researches on the life they are creating. This outside-in viewpoint really changes the awareness of the reader towards these new creations.

Be careful, this is not a reference manual or a textbook. It is extremely well researched and documented, and surprisingly readable.

The context the science is put into almost makes it read like "Science Fiction" but without the "Fiction".

The book is easy-to-read and yet profound. It delineates some of the biases, givens, and constants that may exist and are unperceived. The book also serves as an excellent intro to ALife studies at one of the worlds major thinktanks and research centers.

As a novelist, I delight in creating artificial life, primarily the human kind, and the more realistic the better. No wonder, then, that the idea of artificial life interests me in general. Still, my motive to weigh in here comes less from the book itself than from the reviews already posted, since I found little to agree with, whether they offered pans or praise. My own take is that Mr. Helmreich deserves four stars, at least for readers seeking a broad and thought-ful intro-duction to the field of computer-resident artificial life (AL).

One big plus is that he's an anthropologist, not a super-techie like most AL practi-tioners. Hence, no meandering pages of equations or endless tech-speak. Moreover, an anthropo-logical approach allows examination of not only the notable AL experiments and their methodo-logy, but of the field's intellectual roots, its cultural assumptions, and the perso-nal and professio-nal biographies of its prominent figures. In other words, pure fun by my definition.

In the early chapters especially, much is made of how the name AL arose. The emphasis, though, for many practitioners, is on the L, life, with some making extravagant claims that this life is in-distinguishable in "realness" from natural forms that we all acknow-ledge as alive. Sorry, I don't buy it, and Helmreich presents a number of counter arguments. Yet I'm quite wil-ling to settle for the name AL, as long as both words, artificial and life, are accorded equal weight.

It's also troubling to read of experimenters who refer to the entities their byte-models of DNA produce as "people" and to themselves as "gods." Certainly Helmreich could have titled that par-ticular chapter Prometheus Lives. One also wonders if these human gods have program-med their people to worship them. From the attitudes expressed, the impulse is clearly there. Helmreich apparently chose not to ask. Nonetheless, I find the experiments fascinating and think they may ultimately tell us quite a bit about evolutionary processes that we currently don't know and have no other means to find out.

Perhaps the Achilles Heel in all this isn't the fact that, since AL forms have no corporeal exis-tence, they can't independently store energy in case of a power failure, but that the researchers are in such a hurry. What evolution took billions of years to accomplish they want within their life-times--think Nobel Prize--so all manner of shortcuts abound, even including, in some models, a Lamarckian passing along of traits acquired by individuals within a single generation. As per the old saying, you can have fast, cheap and good, pick two. Yet, again, I'm fasci-nated by what might unfold and not all models are polluted by obvious expediency.

The book's major faults represent things I hold the publisher, University of California Press, more accountable for than I do Helmreich. One is that its hardcover pub date remains 1999. A field that is changing--dare I say evolving--at an exploding rate cries out for a new, updated edition, and Helmreich would be a fool to turn down the opportunity, were it offered.

The second fault echoes what some negative reviewers have already said. In commenting on prac-titioners at the Santa Fe Institute, AL's international ground zero, Helmreich points out that they are over-whelmingly well-fed, white, heterosexual males with backgrounds in physics and engineering, and speculates that it colors the attributes they program into their AL worlds. Not hard to grasp and likely true. Where this line of analysis goes wanting is that UC Press allowed him to repeat it boringly and redundantly in nearly every chapter rather than simply mak-ing refer-ence to the potential cultural biases previously noted. Authors tend to get carried away with their own words. I know, I am one, but that's exactly why we need, and put up with, editors.

The best I can say about this book is that it is the most outstanding example of academic pretentiousness I've ever encountered. The author's acknowledgments alone cover six pages and include over 185 names.
My own background includes a college education (philosophy and mathematics) and ten years as a college instructor in computer science. I'm quite used to reading and comprehending technically sophisticated literature, often poorly written. I can even claim to have understood much of Microsoft's documentation for their developer products. Nevertheless, I found Mr. Helmreich's prose quite inpenetrable. If his goal was to explain the people and culture behind the new field of Artificial Life to a lay audience, he has failed miserably.
To be fair, I must admit that I put the book down after struggling through the first thirty pages of the main text. The book's cover states that Mr. Helmreich is a professor at NYU. If the prose in his book is any indication of the lucidity of his lectures to his students, they have my deepest sympathy.

I must admit that it took me repeated readings to appreciate the depth of the research that has gone into this insightful book. Dr. Stefan Helmreich's critique of the tribe of Artificial Life scientists is right on, courageous and extremely thought provoking.

(...)

The cover blurb says "Anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's look at the social and simulated worlds of Artificial Life" and it turns out to be horribly true. I hoped to learn how the programmers viewed their simulated worlds, and how that relates to their culture. Instead I found how Stefan looks at the programmers, and what he thinks of science. The background description of individuals and institutions isn't bad. The rest is.

Camille Paglia is not usually classified as an anthropologist, but this book reminded me of her - if she couldn't write well and ignored the culture she wrote about. This book has little bearing on its purported subject, and the author's personal views of science aren't interesting (largely because he's speaking on a subject he clearly doesn't understand). If you want Camille Paglia, read Camille Paglia. If you want an actual anthroplogical study of science or A-life, don't waste your time here.