DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES
‘Brilliant . . . a wonderfully chewy, nuggety tour of the fields of ideas behind technological history; and it’s a felt piece of work too’ Francis Spufford, Literary Review
‘Presenting ideas from 20th-century scientists, as well as from professional thinkers like Hobbes, Babbage and Leibniz, George Dyson has come up with a nicely condensed history of the people and processes that have led to today’s technology’ J. D. Biersdorfer, The New York Times Book Review
‘A cogent, succinct history of thinkers and thinking that paved the way . . . to today’s technology’ Katie Hafner, Newsweek
‘George Dyson’s clever, eccentric Darwin among the Machines brings evolutionary thinking to bear on 21st-century subjects such as machine intelligence . . . His arguments are subtle and careful’ Maggie Gee, Daily Telegraph
‘Lucid and thoughtful’ Sadie Plant, The Times
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Dyson was born in 1953. Through his father, a mathematical physicist, his mother, a logician, and his sister, a computer industry analyst, he indirectly witnessed the conjunction of theory, technology and high finance which precipitated the information age. A kayak builder and ethnohistorian, his experience in the Canadian and Alaskan wilderness has sharpened his skills as an observer of the convergence between technology and living things.
DARWIN
AMONG THE
MACHINES
The Evolution of Global Intelligence
George Dyson
BASIC BOOKS
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New York
Copyright © 1997 by George Dyson
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First published by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company in 1997.
The woodcut on page 228, from The Famous History of Frier Bacon, 1679, appears by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012943208
ISBN 978-0-465-04697-3 (e-book)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Anything can happen once.
—PHILIP MORRISON
CONTENTS
Preface: Edge of the World
Acknowledgments
1. LEVIATHAN
2. DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES
3. THE GENERAL WIND
4. ON COMPUTABLE NUMBERS
5. THE PROVING GROUND
6. RATS IN A CATHEDRAL
7. SYMBIOGENESIS
8. ON DISTRIBUTED COMMUNICATIONS
9. THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
10. THERE’S PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE TOP
11. LAST AND FIRST MEN
12. FIDDLING WHILE ROME BURNS
Notes
Index
PREFACE
EDGE OF THE WORLD
This is a book about the nature of machines. It is framed as history but 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.
I have attempted, in my own life and in this book, to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines. 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.
In November of 1972, at the age of nineteen, I built a small tree house on the shore of Burrard Inlet in British Columbia, and settled in. In winter I consumed books and firewood; in summer I explored the British Columbian and Alaskan coasts. The tree house, ninety-five feet up in a Douglas fir, was paneled with cedar I found drifting in Georgia Strait, split into boards whose grain spanned as many as seven hundred years.
During those tree house winters I had lots of time to think. It got dark at four in the afternoon, rained for days on end, and, when the ocean fog rolled in, the earth, but not the sky, was obscured. At odd, unpredictable moments I found myself wondering whether trees could think. Not thinking the way we think, but thinking the way trees think; say, two or three hundred years to form the slow trace of an idea.
I spent the summers working on a variety of boats. When running at night I preferred to take the midnight-to-daybreak watch. By three or four in the morning, I was alone with the trace of unseen landforms on the radar screen and the last hour or two of night. I sometimes left the helm and paced the decks. The world receded in a phosphorescent wake, while birds appeared as red or green phantoms in the glow of the running lights, depending on whether they took wing on the port or starboard side. I also found myself slipping down into the engine room for more than the obligatory check.
When you live within a boat its engine leaves an imprint, deeper than mind, on neural circuits first trained to identify the acoustic signature of a human heart. As I had sometimes drifted off to sleep in the forest canopy, boats passing in the distance, and wondered whether trees might think, so I sat in the engine-room companionway in the small hours of the morning, with the dark, forested islands passing by, and wondered whether engines might have souls. This question threads its way through the chapters of this book.
We are brothers and sisters of our machines. Minds and tools have been sharpened against each other ever since a scavenger’s stone fractured cleanly and the first cutting edge was held in a hunter’s hand. The obsidian flake and the silicon chip are struck by the light of the same campfire that has passed from hand to hand since the human mind began.
This book is not about the future. Where we are at present is puzzling enough. I prefer to look into the past, exercising the historian’s privilege of selecting predictions that turned out to be right. The past is where we find answers to our questions: Who are we, and why? The future is where we see questions to which the answers are up to us.
Do we remain one species, or diverge into many?
Do we remain of many minds, or merge into one?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Princeton University’s Firestone Library, the largest open-stack collection in the world, is one of the few libraries that require a university identification card to get in. The job of guarding the turnstile at the entrance to the library must dull one’s attention over the years, and I discovered in 1967 that by melting into the crowd of students flooding into the library at 8:30 in the morning, it was usually possible to sneak in. Firestone’s fifty-five miles of books, most of them shelved underground, offered a warm, anonymous refuge until it was safe to reappear out on the street and meet up with friends who had suffered through a day at school. I was left with a love of libraries, and a fear of librarians, that has lasted ever since.
Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College granted me research associate status, with library privileges, to write this book. The Mabel Zoe Wilson Library is a small, comfortable facility, and to its resources I owe most of the citations appearing here. Special thanks go to Frank Haulgren and colleagues at interlibrary loan, who successfully
pursued obscure requests. Bob Christensen, who enjoys confronting librarians as avidly as I shy away from them, helped excavate many things. Robert Keller, Marie Eaton, and others at Fairhaven College managed to bend the university’s rules around my absence of credentials. Without such support this book would not exist.
The engines of evolution are driven by the recombination of genes; human creativity is driven by the recombination of ideas; literature is driven by the recombination of books. This book owes its elements to many others, cited elsewhere, and to two books that deserve special mention here. My father’s Origins of Life1 and my mother’s Gödel’s Theorems2 contributed substantially to whatever limited understanding of the foundations of biology and of the foundations of mathematics is represented in this book. Both critiqued the manuscript as it took form, but any remaining errors or misinterpretations are my own.
In 1982 my sister, Esther Dyson, became editor of the Rosen Electronics Letter, a Wall Street investment newsletter that sensed wider implications as the personal-computer revolution began. Esther observed the new industry, and I observed Esther. All my perspectives on computational ecology can be traced to the Rosen Electronics Letter (which became RELease 1.0 in 1983). This does not imply that Esther agrees with any of my interpretations of her work.
Thanks to Esther, I met literary agent John “No Wasted Motion” Brockman in 1984, who, nine years later, with Katinka Matson, helped precipitate this book. William Patrick at Addison-Wesley accepted an ambiguous proposal, and Jeff Robbins had the patience to await a manuscript, followed by the efficiency as editor to produce a book without additional delay. Others, including Danny Hillis, William S. Laughlin, James Noyes, Patrick Ong, and Ann Yow, offered encouragement at different stages along the way. The builders of my boat designs kept me afloat. I owe the last sentence in this book, and more, to David Brower—archdruid, mountaineer, and editor of landmarks from In Wildness . . . to On the Loose.
My daughter Lauren had just turned five, in 1994, when we watched a videotape describing Thomas Ray’s digital organisms, self-reproducing numbers that had enraptured their creator by evolving new species and new patterns of behavior overnight. Ray was speaking at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where forty years earlier the first experiments at evolving numerical organisms were performed. Ray’s Tierran creatures inhabit a landscape entirely foreign to our own. Their expanding digital universe was first wrested into existence, out of the realm of pure mathematics, by the glow of twenty-six hundred vacuum tubes that flickered briefly at the dawn of digital programming in a low brick building at the foot of Olden Lane. Tom Ray and his portable universe now stood on ancestral ground.
“This is Tom Ray and his imaginary creatures,” I said, explaining what we were watching partway through the tape. “But Dad,” my daughter corrected, “they’re not imaginary!”
She’s right.
1
LEVIATHAN
Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?
or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?
Canst thou put an hook into his nose?
or bore his jaw through with a thorn?
Will he make many supplications unto thee?
will he speak soft words unto thee?
Will he make a covenant with thee?
wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird?
or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?
Shall the companions make a banquet of him?
shall they part him among the merchants?
Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
or his head with fish spears?
Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.
—JOB 41:1–8
“Nature (the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World) is by the Art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal,” wrote Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) on the first page of his Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, published to great disturbance in 1651. “For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the beginning whereof is in the principall part within; why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?”1 Hobbes believed that the human commonwealth, given substance by the power of its institutions and the ingenuity of its machines, would coalesce to form that Leviathan described in the Old Testament, when the Lord, speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, had warned, “Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.”
Three centuries after Hobbes, automata are multiplying with an agility that no vision formed in the seventeenth century could have foretold. Artificial intelligence flickers on the desktop and artificial life has become a respectable pursuit. But the artificial life and artificial intelligence that so animated Hobbes’s outlook on the world was not the discrete, autonomous mechanical intelligence conceived by the architects of digital processing in the twentieth century. Hobbes’s Leviathan was a diffuse, distributed, artificial organism more characteristic of the technologies and computational architectures approaching with the arrival of the twenty-first.
“What is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?” asked Hobbes. “Art goes yet further, imitating that rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH . . . which is but an Artificiall Man.”2 Despite his reasoned arguments Hobbes was variously condemned by the monarchy, the Parliament, the universities, and the church. Hobbes saw human society as a self-organizing system, possessed of a life and intelligence of its own. Power was vested by mutual consensus, but not by divine right, in the hands of an assembly or a king. Loyalty was useful but need not be absolute. This ambivalence was viewed with suspicion from both sides. “Mr. Hobbs defyeth the whole host of learned men,” and was “dangerous to both Government and Religion,” warned Alexander Ross in Leviathan Drawn out with a Hook,3 the first of a series of attacks that culminated with the citing by the House of Commons of Hobbes’s blasphemies as a probable cause of the great fire and plague of 1666. Although threats against Hobbes were never executed, he destroyed his more incriminating manuscripts, fearing the worst. In his Historical Narration Concerning Heresie, and the Punishment Thereof, written in 1668, Hobbes maintained that his ideas did not fit the existing definition of heresy and accusations against him were unjust; in any event, he argued, there was no legal authority for burning heretics at the stake. Nonetheless, after Hobbes was safely dead, a decree by the University of Oxford in 1683 recommended that Leviathan, among other “Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines,” be burned.4
Hobbes’s blasphemy was his vision of a diffuse intelligence that was neither the supreme intelligence of God nor the individual intelligence of the human mind. Leviathan was a collective organism, transcending the individual beings and institutional organs of which it was composed. Human society, taken as a whole, constituted a new form of life, explained Hobbes, “in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officiers of Judicature and Execution, Artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seate of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the peoples safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill war, Death.”5
Hobbes sought not to diminish the intelligence of any existing being, human or divine, but rather to discover evidence of intelligence in the vacuum that supposedly intervened. As he argued a
gainst the physical vacuum demonstrated by the air pump of Robert Boyle, so he argued against the metaphysical vacuum that separated God from man. Hobbes hinted at a science of complex systems as comprehensive (and potentially heretical) as the two new sciences by which Galileo, befriended by Hobbes in 1636, had revealed the relative motion of all things. Hobbes’s shortcomings as a mathematician, ridiculed by other natural philosophers, were outweighed by his facility with words. His ambition—when not distracted by civil war, the Restoration, or other social upheavals of the time—was to construct a consistent and purely materialistic natural philosophy of mind. “Motion produceth nothing but motion,” he argued.6 “And consequently every part of the Universe, is Body, and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: And because the Universe is All, that which is no part of it, is Nothing.”7 His analysis revealed deep-seated contradictions within the doctrines of the church. “Wee are told, there be in the world certaine Essences separated from Bodies, which they call Abstract Essences, and Substantiall Formes: For the Interpretation of which Jargon, there is need of somewhat more than ordinary attention. . . . Being once fallen into this Error of Separated Essences, they are thereby necessarily involved in many other absurdities that follow it. . . . Can any man think that God is served with such absurdities?”8
Hobbes protested strongly against the metaphysics of René Descartes (1596–1650). His objections, along with a terse response, were published in 1641 as an appendix to Descartes’s Meditationes de prima philosophia, translated into English as Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein it is Proved that there is a God. And that Mans Mind is really distinct from his Body. “The question may be put infinitely, how do you know that you know, that you know, that you know? &c,” argued Hobbes. “Wherefore . . . we cannot separate thought from thinking matter, it seems rather to follow, that a thinking thing is material, than that ’tis immaterial.”9 Hobbes countered all the arguments that would reappear much later as arguments against the possibility of mind among machines. “Ratiocination will depend on Words, Words on Imagination, and perhaps Imagination as also Sense on the Motion of Corporeal Parts; and so the Mind shall be nothing but Motions in some Parts of an Organical Body,” he explained, treading dangerously close to heresy, though failing to dissuade Descartes.10
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