Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

WORKING

Dyson, George B. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books (Helix), 1997. To be perhaps studied with, but not to be confused with, Samuel Butler's essay, "Darwin Among the Machines."

Opening sentences: "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" (p. xi; "Preface: Edge of the World").

In his review of 30 September 1998, Tal Cohen notes

• The main idea suggested by George Dyson in this book is simple: In the digital universe, too, a conscious mind will evolve naturally, rather than as the result of some design. Artificial Intelligence researches might as well spend their time searching for signs of intelligence on the net rather than try to develop it. [* * *]
• Dyson’s main claim is that the evolution of a conscious mind from today’s technology is inevitable. It is not clear whether this will be a single mind or multiple minds, how smart that mind would be, and even if we will be able to communicate with it. He also clearly suggests that there are forms of intelligence on Earth that we are currently unable to understand.[1]

Note this book's appearance about the same time as, but without citation to, Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay, "The Coming Technological Singularity."

Darwin might be put in useful dialog with Jessica Riskin's 2016 The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick.

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From a couple of the blurbs at the beginning of the Helix edition (pages unnumbered):

[A]n almost perfect example of the effective literary treatment of scientific subjects. — Philip W. Anderson, Nature

Charles Darwin and the computer seem an unlikely couple. But [...] Dyson makes us wonder why we've waited so long to pair the two. That's one of the many surprises Dyson offers in his idiosyncratic view of the evolution of computers ... a cogent, succinct history of thinkers and taking that paved the way, occasionally unwittingly to today's technology ... The Final irony: it took someone from outside the discipline to advance our understand of the ongoing dance of life, evolution[,] and machines. — Katie Hafner, Newsweek

Dyson also deals with Erasmus Darwin.

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Chapters

1. Leviathan
 Opens with a discussion from Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, where "the artificial life [AL] and artificial intelligence [AI] that so animated Hobbes's outlook [...] 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, artifice organism more ccharacteristic of the technologies and computational architectures of approaching with the arrival of the twenty-first." Moves on with a quick survey from Hobbes as "the patriarch" of AI to (briefly) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Marvin Minsky and Alan Turing (pp. 1-2 f.) — and from there to networked computers and other digital devices up to 1995 or so, with a glance back at H. G. Wells, with Wells working from the idea of a "World Encyclopaedia" toward 1938 and his desire for "'widespread world intelligence conscious of itself'" in a World Brain (p. 10).[2][3]
2. Darwin Among the Machines
 Erasmus Darwin as well as Charles, and Samuel Butler in defense of Erasmus Darwin — with Dyson commenting on E. Darwin's contributions to the Industrial Revolution in England (pp. 21-22), and SF through M. W. Shelley's Frankenstein (p. 22).
 
3. The General Wind
4. On Computable Numbers 
5. The Proving Ground
6. Rats in a Cathedral
7. Symbiosis
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

RDE, finishing, 23Jan22