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[Darwin among the Machines
David Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 05:00:06 -0400
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 1997 23:31:32 -0700
To: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
From: Richard Mateosian <srm@cyberpass.net>
Subject: Darwin among the Machines
Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence by George B. Dyson (Addison-Wesley, NY, 1997, 298pp, ISBN0-201-40649-7, $25.00
George Dyson is the son of physicist Freeman Dyson and mathematician Verena Huber-Dyson. He is the brother of industry analyst Esther Dyson. He credits their respective writings for his knowledge of foundations of biology, foundations of mathematics, and computational ecology. He brings all of this knowledge to bear on the subject matter of this book.
Dyson grew up on the grounds of the Institute for Advanced Study, then left at age 16 to live in a tree and work aboard boats. Looking down into the Pacific Northwest fog from his tree house, nearly a hundred feet above ground, he wondered whether trees think. Calmed by the womb-evoking throb of engine rooms, he wondered whether machines have souls.
Others have had such thoughts, but Dyson develops them into a serious work on the history and significance of digital computers and global telecommunications. The speed with which these technologies are merging and changing leaves us with little time to consider our personal and societal attitudes toward the new issues they raise. Dyson's book helps us see those issues in perspective.
Dyson derives his perspective from a line of philosophers and scientists, going back to the seventeenth century. As he examines their work he always has one eye on the present. He wants to know where the proliferation of digital computers and the growth of the worldwide telecommunications network that connects them is leading us:
"Do we remain one species, or diverge into many?
Do we remain of many minds, or merge into one?"
Dyson makes no predictions. Instead, he lets scientists and philosophers - some dead, some not - predict the present with their long overlooked words. He hopes that those prophetic thinkers can help us answer his questions.
Dyson starts with Hobbes, whose Leviathan is a group intelligence representing the future of human society.
Hobbes believed that reasoning is computation. He believed that life arises from the physical behavior of the underlying objects. The parts of the body give rise to a person whose life and thought are of a higher order than those of its heart, nerves, or muscles. Similarly, people, their institutions, and their machines give rise to a group intelligence of even higher order.
The arguments of Hobbes and his detractors resonate loudly today in the speculations about human consciousness and artificial intelligence (AI). The only way Hobbes falls short of a coherent modern position is in the mechanism of evolution. For that part of the story Dyson turns to Samuel Butler, from whom he borrowed the title Darwin among the Machines.
Butler is interesting because he highlights the differences between Charles Darwin and his illustrious grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus originated the key ideas in Charles' theory of evolution, but he never gathered his ideas into a coherent theory. This left him open to misinterpretation and guilt by association with his follower Lamarck, who believed, mistakenly, in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Butler disliked the randomness of Charles Darwin's theory. Like Einstein, who nearly a century later said "I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world," Butler looked for design. He looked at species as superorganisms. He saw that ideas could develop like organisms, thus anticipating Dawkins' concept of memes. He took a germ-plasm-oriented view of life (a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg). This led him to wonder where it all began. He concluded that life must have arisen from the non-living forces and matter of the world.
In 1985, Dyson's father Freeman Dyson wrote about the origins of life. He observed that reproduction and replication need
not have arisen simultaneously. The type of living cell that replicates its germ plasm while reproducing may have arisen as a symbiotic merging of organisms that reproduce with organisms that replicate. If this is true, then a Lamarckian process may have governed the evolution of the self-reproducing branch for many eons.
Dyson doesn't do much with his father's idea beyond mentioning it. He does, however, trace the theory of symbiogenesis from its Russian origins early in the twentieth century through the early computer-based simulations of Nils Barricelli to the modern work of Thomas Ray. Ray is constructing a globally networked habitat, called Tierra, for digital organisms. He intends to turn them loose there and watch them evolve.
The ideas of Hobbes and Butler lead via Godel, Turing, von Neumann, and many others to digital computation. For distributed communications, Dyson follows a path running from Robert Hooke to Paul Baran and the global packet-switched data network. Communication at a distance has its roots in antiquity.
Robert Hooke, the greatest inventor of the seventeenth century - perhaps of all time - developed most of its modern form. His lantern array scheme used a 5-bit character encoding, control codes, and encryption. Store-and-forward schemes came later with the telegraph. Baran's packet-switching scheme for a network that can survive nuclear attack provides the distributed control and scalability to support global intelligence.
Dyson's accounts of recent history are one of the most interesting aspects of his book. Relying only on a small university library in Bellingham, Washington, Dyson has assembled many intimate pictures, based on eyewitness accounts, of the development of digital computers and global telecommunication since the 1940s.
Dyson weaves together all of this and more, skillfully but sketchily. Exclusive of the front matter, notes, and index, the book is only 228 pages. There are many parts I can't summarize without trivializing them. I don't know if the book has an identifiable thesis, but a central idea is this:
"In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines."
This is a deep book. There is not much point to reading it unless you want to think about the issues it raises. Most of us are usually too busy to do that. If you have a little free time this summer, reading and thinking about this book might be a good way to spend it.
Richard Mateosian <srm@cyberpass.net>
Review Editor, IEEE Micro President (1995-97), Berkeley STC
Director, 1996-97 Northern Calif Technical Communication Competition
(C) Copyright 1997. All rights reserved.
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