After Thought: The Computer Challenge To Human Intelligence - Hardcover

Bailey, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465007813 ISBN 13: 9780465007813

Publisher: Basic Books, 1996

Synopsis

Through the first fifty years of the computer revolution, scientists have been trying to program electronic circuits to process information the same way humans do. Doing so has reassured us all that underlying every new computer capability, no matter how miraculously fast or complex, are human thought processes and logic. But cutting-edge computer scientists are coming to see that electronic circuits really are alien, that the difference between the human mind and computer capability is not merely one of degree (how fast), but of kind(how). The author suggests that computers think” best when their thoughts” are allowed to emerge from the interplay of millions of tiny operations all interacting with each other in parallel. Why then, if computers bring to the table such very different strengths and weaknesses, are we still trying to program them to think like humans? A work that ranges widely over the history of ideas from Galileo to Newton to Darwin yet is just as comfortable in the cutting-edge world of parallel processing that is at this very moment yielding a new form of intelligence, After Thought describes why the real computer age is just beginning.

About this title

Review

Can the habits of thought we've developed over centuries and the computers we've built to automate our thought processes help us in a world choking on data? In this sweeping examination of the history of scientific thought, James Bailey argues that our current approach to computing is crippled by our need to create computers in our own intellectual image. The solution, a parallel approach to computation, where the nature of electronic circuits rather than human nature determines the design, will produce self-modifying machines that are profoundly alien, yet have the power to extract meaning from the flow of data that surrounds us.

The author's interpretation of the history of Western science from Greek antiquity to the present is a highly personal and fits his theory almost too smoothly. But his central thesis, that our understanding of reality is strait-jacketed by the tools we've developed to describe it, is profound and well worth pondering. The book is filled with interesting historical examples based on the author's wide reading and many of his observations are pithy and thought provoking. After Thought requires a dose of corrective skepticism on the reader's part (after all, the author was an executive at Thinking Machines Corp., a manufacturer of parallel processing supercomputers), but given that caveat, it's a fascinating read.

About the Author

James Bailey was a senior manager at Thinking Machines Corporation, where a 64,000 processor parallel supercomputer and a wide range of evolutionary computing algorithms were developed. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0465007813
• ISBN 13: 9780465007813
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 277