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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.3
EAN num: 9780738200309
ISBN number: 0738200301
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: October 07, 1998
Publishing house: Basic Books
Sale Popularity Level: 227329
Studio: Basic Books
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Product Description:
In this astonishing prediction of the World Wide Web's ultimate challenge to human civilization--a globally networked, electronic, sentient being--Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives, work, and ideas of visionaries who foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and the global mind.
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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.
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Rated by buyers -
How does the development of "artificial" intelligence fit into biological evolution? George Dyson suggests that the fit is seamless. This profound investigation of the history of thinking machines and evolutionary theory is brilliant and engaging. It offers a far more palatable look at the human-machine future than the misanthropic vision of Ray Kurzweil in THE AGE OF SPIRITUAL MACHINES (Viking, 1999 ). (Palatability is no assurance of accuracy, of course, but it sure feels better going down.) Where Kurzweil sees machine intelligence as better than human and confidently predicts that we will upload ourselves and abandon our bodies, -- drawn initially by the superiority of cyber sex -- Dyson envisions a spreading macro intelligence that will involve humans in wholly new ways -- and suggests it is already emerging. He predicts that much like other life forms which share their eco-niche, we are apt to become symbionts with the machines, each doing what we do best and benefitting the other. But perhaps I have gotten ahead of myself here. Are there living, thinking, artificial minds on this planet already? Dyson asserts that it depends entirely on one's definition of "living," "thinking," "artificial," and "mind." There are self-replicating cybernetic entities evolving within computer networks. Self awareness is not yet evident, but it is not entirely clear that it doesn't exist. How will we know when and if it emerges? We don't have a clear definition of consciousness as it applies to our own condition, which makes consideration of the whole issue iffy at best. Tracing the history of evolutionary theory, following the startling course of mathematics in the past century, noting the lightning fast advances in silicon technology, and all underlain by a trenchant sense of human development, Dyson weaves a fascinating tale. He pulls in the Darwin family, Darwin's critics (then and now), oddball tinkerers, mainstream theorists, nuclear physicists, Turing, Godel, and von Neuman, and the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon in the telling. A highly rewarding if sometimes difficult read. Dyson ends with a quote from Thoreau, suggestive of his own open-ended view of our future: "In wildness is the preservation of the world." Exactly so.
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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 subsequent 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.
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EDVAC architecture by Von Newmann changed the world. Von Newmann chose to adopt the McCulloh-Pitts symbolism for diagramming logical structures of stored program codes. EDVAC had the ability to modify its own instructions similar too the theoretical Turing machine. EDVAC stored both data and instructions in mercury delay-line memory as binary and as in the Turing Universal Machine, long strings of bits represented numbers to be operated on and sequenced and potential dynamic structures of operations to be performed, such as bit shifting, multiplexing, Boolean logic, memory storage, and accumulation.
Von Newmann's subsequent machine was called the IAS. The initial development of the IAS design was distributed to multiple locations. A central processor operating in parallel on multiple bits of a word of data at a time characterized IAS. ISA had a hierarchical memory range with random acess to memory on limited media, and a distinction between software functionality and hardware functionality. "Science, as well as technology, will in the near future and in the far future turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy to problems of structure, organization, information and control." Von Newmann was persuaded that the high-speed computer would change the nature of mathematical research. The IAS machine contained the world's very first fully functional random-acess memory, RAM. Disk storage was provide through 40 cylinders arranged in a bank of 20 with 1024 bits per cylinder; additionally, 40 Williams tubes and 2,600 vacuum tubes performed digital processing with a 75% up time. IAS included an arithmetic unit, accumulator, two shift registers, an adder, and a digit resolver. Floating point was considered but not implemented. IAS included 20 basic instructions and 44 order codes.
Human calculators provided the pattern of processing modeled in the computer. Human calculators demonstrated coordinated computing, sequencing, and analytical capability. Human calculators worked in parallel managed and coordinated processes deciphered WWI Germany encryption messages. The brainpower and segmented problem solving 10 X 15 power number combinations.
The human calculator model could be simulated in the Von Newman and Turing machine and the connection machine architectures and software. Neural Nets could be model in the Turing machine.
However, evolution algorithms will not be able too produce a thinking machine. Thinking is limited to the humans and divine beings. Behavior can be represented in Finite automata graphs, AFSMs, and mechanized behavior may appear logical but this does not suggest the machine can cross the sphere into human intelligence. The title of the book directly is a criticism against the evolutionary humanist. Turing grammer suggests discrete processes can be interactive described by a language. Computer automata can not evolve beyond discrete functions and the machine will be confined to the range of mathematical theorem proofs. Mathematical reasons does not encapsulate all human reasoning and such an acceptance of this conclusion would be uncreative, limiting, and lacking in vision of the potential for humans to feel love, joy, and acquire greater intelligence.
Von Newmann saw digital computers as mathematical tools, a general class of automata and did not imply they could think. Von Newman became more interested in the machine reproduction. "Every automa that can produce other automa will only be able to produce less complicated ones." Celluar Automa has yet to produce a computer brain that will function. CA algorithms surprisingly can model many patterns found in nature and physics. However, no CA has produced a grammer or graph that can be reproduced by the machine yielding an intelligence reasoning machine. Von Newmann hoped for CA salvation, "there is, however, a minimal level where this degenerative characteristic ceases to be universal. At this point automata which can reproduce themselves, or even construct higher entities are possible." Von Newmann's inspiration was not CA but VLSI. VLSI were being replicated from computer generated patterns by computer operated tool. FAB in the 20th century continued Von Newmann's aspiration and robotic automated factories suggested to a minimum degree the theory had value. Intelligence move counter to entropy and if one observes a machine producing other machines of higher construct characteristics than one would declare intelligence has been proven. In "Flesh and Machine" the Brooks suggests GA do have the ability to create simple behaviors such as locomotion, tactics, and architectural models but fail too create higher-level concepts. Abstracting and creative thought are outside the realm of the machine. Brooks suggests AI breakthrough is limted by a lack of quality software, missing laws of intelligence, slow machines, and entropy caused by a lack ... Read More
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Though well written and informative, in the end DAM was a less than satisying read. Dyson marshals considerable data (and extensive and informative quotes) from the fields of history (of science and technology), the sciences (principally evolution and CS), and philosophy (as it has, historically, reflected on notions of mind and evolution). As an avid reader of history, with a deep interest in all of these subjects, I found the opening chapters of DAM quite interesting. That said, the history in DAM is not particularly deep. But Dyson writes well, and I appreciate his having shed light on several lesser known (and underappreciated) historical figures along the way.
Where DAM ultimately falters, in my view, is in its shallow futurism. I say "shallow" not because I don't think Dyson is highly imaginative. He is. And his predictions (to the extent he articulates them as such) may well be realized one day. However, though Dyson is skilfull in establishing the historical groundwork for the development of computer and communications technology as they exist today, he is far less skilfull in tracing even a speculative chain of developments from the present state of the art to the global/artificial intelligence he envisions as a possible (perhaps inevitable) future development. In fairness, every futurist has hit and will continue to hit this wall until the future comes knocking. But Dyson purports to do so.
In the final analysis, though Dyson does an admirable (and entertaining) job of accounting for the rise of computers, and the increasing complexity of computer networks, his discusion of artificial intelligence has more the ring of a leap of faith. It's a fascinating idea (though hardly original to Dyson), and certainly a possibility, but one whose potential trajectory (from idea to realization) is barely even attempted in DAM. DAM would have profited from a little more hard science, and a little less soft speculation.
Rated by buyers 
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I bought this book in the hope of reading some intelligent speculations by the author about evolution, machines, and AI, which is what the title suggested I would find. However, it turned out to be a history of the evolution of computers with old speculations from the computer pioneers concerning the evolution of computers injected along the way. To be fair, the author does have an overarching thesis that he tries to weave into the historical narrative whenever some past speculation seems to lend it some support. It is that the World Wide Web - that well known network of millions of computers - may some day, at a certain critical size and running who knows what software (certainly not the author) will become intelligent in some way (also not specified by the author). Come to think of it, I think the author has used the historical angle of the book - the similar speculations of the computer pioneers of the past - as a device to lend credence to his thesis - a kind of proof by consensus. I remain unconvinced, however. His arguments (where there were any; it was hard to tell his arguments from narrative) were very weak and unconvincing. To his credit, the author did a tremendous job of scholarship for the historical side of the book. However, he left the speculative side undeveloped (at the most weakly developed) and, therefore, the book was unappetizing to me.
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