Darwin: among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

George Dyson grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where such scientists as his father, Freeman Dyson, and John von Neumann laid the foundations for the Information Age. From this vantage point, and with an unprecedented cast of characters, Dyson traces the course of the information revolution, illuminating the lives, work and ideas of visionaries who foresaw the development of artificial intelligence, artificial life, and the global mind.

Dyson, son of scientist Freeman and brother of computer guru Esther, sees the World Wide Web as a major evolutionary development in the creation of "a globally networked, electronic, sentient being." Using historical fact as well as fiction, he explains how we have arrived at this juncture. He reveals an impressive literary and scientific background as he moves from Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Butler, and Leibniz to Turing, von Neumann, and others. However, it is not always obvious what point he is making, and he finds mythology as useful in explaining this evolution as historical fact. Dyson provides substantial detail about the development of intelligent machines as he traces the history of modern computing from the ballistics computations of the 1940s and 1950s to the SAGE project and other military applications, which had spinoffs and by-products culminating in today's network-based system. Certainly, computer technology is having a revolutionary effect on how we do many things and, in fact, what we do. But whether we are seeing Darwinian evolution among the machines remains unproved to this reviewer. Recommended for larger collections.?Hilary D. Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., Livermore, Cal.
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