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Darwin Among the Machines
George B. Dyson

This is an unusual book that takes a look at an old question: can machines become intelligent? In this book, subtitled "the evolution of global intelligence", the author (the son of Freeman Dyson) believes they can, and they are achieving it not through any specific design but rather, by evolving from our computers and the networks that connect them all together.

Dyson starts by looking at history, specifically at Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan which may one of the earliest times where the idea of an intelligence arising from a group was considered. He goes on to look at Darwinian Evolution which he believes should include some elements of intelligent design (here, I respectfully disagree with him).

He then goes on to look at machines built in the 19th century as well as in the 40s and 50s, especially at some of the early computer experts like Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, John Von Neumann, Paul Baran and others. He considers their ideas about how machines may be endowed with intelligence and show that some of our computer ideas (like neural networks, packet switching, distributed computing) were considered long ago but never developed.

Finally, he goes on to considered the state of the machine in its present day and finds conditions ripe (or soon to be ripe) for the rise of a Leviathan-type machine intelligence, rising out of the disparate network of computers now connected over the Internet. I don't know whether to accept his arguments here or not for they do have an outrageous feel to them. Yet, in some ways, the ideas he puts forward here are compelling and require more thought. Especially thoughtful are his ideas about evolution among machines and how Evolution by Natural Selection may be overtaken by Evolution by Design in machines.

A mixture of history and personal speculation, this book is sometimes dry and hard-going and sometimes fascinating (I was interested in what he had to say about Olaf Stapledon and and his novels). Only time will tell whether we have planted the seeds for the evolution of machine intelligence.

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Darwin Among the Machines George B. Dyson

Darwin Among the Machines
George B. Dyson