About book Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence (1998)
The appropriate thing to say, I suppose, is that this is a good overview of the emergence of artificial intelligence, starting from the 17th century with Thomas Hobbes and The Leviathan until the rise of the World Wide Web. Fascinating. Thought-provoking. Well researched. Darwin Among the Machines is all of that, for sure, so why can't I give it more than a meagre three stars rating?The title refers to an essay written in 1863 by Samuel Butler, who argued that machines are a form of mechanical life that undergo evolution and could eventually overtake humans as the dominant species on earth. Dyson builds on this view and that of other visionaries, comparing the rise of machine intelligence with the evolution of multi-celled organisms, almost tearing down the wall between technology and biology. Almost.So, are there thriving, thinking, artificial minds on this planet already? Are machines ready to take on a life on their own? Dyson hints at it, but he never explicitly says so. Instead, what we get is quotes from the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and others (though Hofstadter and Penrose are strangely absent). All this is interesting, and I particularly liked Chapter 2 on Samuel Butler and the story behind Erewhon. But this is where my problem with the book lies: it suffers from an overload of quotes. Every time when the arguments are starting to get interesting, when Dyson is on the verge of making his point - there comes another quote from Hobbes, von Neumann or Barricelli. There isn't much in the way of a conclusion and the book ends abruptly with - how could it not - a quote.I did enjoy reading this and I thank the author for steering me towards Erewhon which I picked up right after finishing this. But I found myself wondering again and again, what do you think, George Dyson? Couldn't you just say it in your own words, for once?
George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, has no formal education; as a teenager he went to Canada, where he lived in a treehouse for three winters and built baidarkas instead of pursuing a more conventional career. He wanted to write a history of I am not sure what: computer science? artificial intelligence? evolutionary computation? but he is unqualified to do this, and does not realize that it is the case. I might smile at Nadine Gordimer's "Sam missiles" or "a reactor based on the harmless pebble a small boy takes home from the beach" but she is not claiming expertise in weaponry or nuclear energy. When George Dyson writes about "metalanguages, such as Java, that allow symbiogenesis to transcend the proprietary divisions between lower-level languages in use by different hosts" or claims that Turing's Automatic Computing Engine "foreshadowed the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture that has now gained prominence after fifty years" it is not funny.
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