Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence (Helix…

Dyson is a master storyteller weaving a beautiful and romantic story rendered as a mesh of evolution, computation, communication, artificial life, and artifical intelligence. The book is a page-turner, coming alive through the voices of the great names such as Hobbes, Leibniz, Hilbert, Gödel, Turing, von Neumann, Baran and many other pioneers who have dedicated lives to pursue dreams of enhanced automation of computation, communication and intelligence. Even though it feels somewhow eclectic, making far-fetched jumps between various topics at hand, Dyson manages to argue for a collective and global intelligence to come. A modern-day computing expert will probably find some of his sentences naïve, or maybe overambitious, at best, but this nevertheless does not decrease the beauty of the book, after all it '... makes no claim to have separated the fables from the facts. Both mythology and science have a voice in explaining how human beings and technology arrived at the juncture that governs our lives today.'

The nature of machines and intelligence is a debate that continues to this day and it is yet to be solved definitely. This short book captures some of the critical turning points that shaped this debeate so far and presents them to the reader in a lively manner. I recommend it people curious about how current Internet and computing technology came to be, as well as to the students of mathematics, physics, egineering and computer science. ( )

What do Thomas Hobbes, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Butler, Alan Turing, Olaf Stapledon, and the RAND Corporation have in common? George B. Dyson explains what they have in common and more in his sometimes uneven but always fascinating book about "evolution of global intelligence" Darwin among the Machines. Dyson relates the story behind the growth of our global digital world through the individual stories of the above thinkers and more. They were all visionaries who saw beyond the everyday into the future and whose ideas led to the development of artificial intelligence and related fields that continue to undergo development in our new century. Dyson is good at relating these stories while weaving them into an evolutionary web that captures the changes that have occurred in the areas of digital computing and telecommunications, and the mechanics of the mind and artificial intelligence over the past century. The story that evolves from all his telling is both exciting and filled with possibilities for the future that border on science fiction. But in retrospect we see that science fiction has a way of becoming science fact. Readers who appreciate and want to learn more about the relationship of technology, humanity and nature will enjoy this book. ( )

This is sort of a strange book about the historical and possible future interactions of human and machine intelligence. ( )

http://dragonchasers.com/2007/09/08/darwin-among-the-machines/ ( )