Darwin Among the Machines

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

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

A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York

Copyright © 1997 by George Dyson

Published by Basic Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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[email protected]
.

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

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

T
his 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?

P
rinceton 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 Life
¹
and my mother's
Gödel's Theorems
²
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.