Darwin Among the Machines Quotes

“Music allows us to assemble temporal sequences into mental scaffolding that transcends the thinness of time in which we live.”
― George B. Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Both Samuel Butler and Olaf Stapledon saw that mind, once given a taste of time, would never rest until eternity lay within its grasp. Thus we pursue those relations between sequence and structure that allow us to escape time’s surface, venturing into that ocean that separates eternity from the instant in which we exist. Mathematics and music are two of the vehicles that assist us in our escape. Mathematics is available to a few; music is available to all. Mathematics allows us to assemble mental structures by which we comprehend entire sequences of logical implication at once. Music allows us to assemble temporal sequences into mental scaffolding that transcends the thinness of time in which we live. Through music, we are able to share four-dimensional structures we are otherwise only able to observe in slices, one moment at a time.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“No one can say what contribution randomness has made to software development so far. Most programs have grown so complex and convoluted that no human being knows where all the code came from or even what some of it actually does. Programmers long ago gave up hope of being able to predict in advance whether a given body of code will work as planned.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Code was written, copied, combined, borrowed, and stolen among software producers as freely as in a primordial soup of living but only vaguely differentiated cells. Anyone who put together some code that could be executed as a useful process—like Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc in 1979—was in for a wild ride. Businesses sprouted like mushrooms, supported by the digital mycelium underneath. Corporations came and went, but successful code lived on.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“in other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“He insisted on using punch cards, even when everybody had computer screens,” Gaure remembered. “He gave two reasons for this: when you sit in front of a screen your ability to think clearly declines because you’re distracted by irrelevancies, and when you store your data on magnetic media you can’t be sure they’re there permanently, you actually don’t know where they are at all.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“As Alan Turing had blurred the distinction between intelligence and nonintelligence by means of his universal machine, so Barricelli’s numerical symbioorganisms blurred the distinction between living and nonliving things.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Von Neumann knew that a structure vastly more complicated, flexible, and unpredictable than a computer was required before any electrons might leap the wide and fuzzy distinction between arithmetic and mind. Fifty years later, digital computers remain rats running two-dimensional mazes at basement level below the foundations of mind.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Von Neumann was as reticent as Turing was outspoken on the question of whether machines could think. Edmund C. Berkeley, in his otherwise factual and informative 1949 survey, Giant Brains, captured the mood of the time with his declaration that “a machine can handle information; it can calculate, conclude, and choose; it can perform reasonable operations with information. A machine, therefore, can think.”44 Von Neumann never subscribed to this mistake. He saw digital computers as mathematical tools. That they were members of a more general class of automata that included nervous systems and brains did not imply that they could think. He rarely discussed artificial intelligence. Having built one computer, he became less interested in the question of whether such machines could learn to think and more interested in the question of whether such machines could learn to reproduce.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“The prototype operated in serial mode, cycling through the pattern of spots in a series of traces, like an oscilloscope or a television, thereby reading and writing the entire sequence of bits thousands of times per second—a vastly accelerated version of one of the loops of paper tape used by the Colossus at Bletchley Park. You could watch the bits of information dancing on the screen as a computation proceeded, and Turing, who soon joined the Manchester group, was noted for his ability to read numbers directly off the screen, just as he had been able to read binary code directly from teletypewriter tapes as intercepted messages were being sorted out.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Our first job was to build work tables for us to work on,” recalled Ralph Slutz, a Princeton graduate student who joined the group in June after completing his degree. “We asked von Neumann if he would pay for the paint if we painted the walls a more reasonable color than they were when we moved in. This he did.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“My father observed that although most university professors are parasites feeding on the living, Institute professors are saprophytes, feeding on the dead.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“This presumption of discrete sequence allows us to make sense of the world. Logic assumes the sequence of cause and effect; physical law assumes a sequence of observable events; mathematical proof assumes a sequence of discrete, logical steps.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Turing introduced two fundamental assumptions: discreteness of time and discreteness of state of mind.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Turing took off from first principles on his own. He began by constructing an imaginary device now known as the Turing machine.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“It is almost true to say that Turing succeeded in his analysis because he was not familiar with the work of others,” commented Turing’s colleague Robin Gandy. “Let us praise the uncluttered mind.”3”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Recursive functions are functions that can be defined by the accumulation and strictly regulated substitution of elementary component parts. As multiplication can be reduced to a series of additions, and addition reduced to repeated iterations of the successor function (counting ahead one integer at a time), so can all recursive functions be deconstructed into a finite number of elemental steps. The list of ingredients is short: the existence of 0, the existence of 1, the concept of a successor, the concept of identity, a least number operator, and some clerical substitution rules. Loosely speaking, these elements require no mathematical skills beyond the ability to count.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Turing sought to prove the existence of noncomputable functions, but he had to establish the nature of computability first. A function—in essence a list of questions and their answers—is effectively calculable if it is possible to list all the answers by following a finite set of explicit instructions (an algorithm) that defines exactly what to do from one moment to the next. A computable function is a function whose values can be determined by a mechanical procedure performed by a machine whose behavior can be mathematically predicted from one moment to the next. Effectively calculable and computable appear to be saying the same thing, in a circular sort of way. Proving this equivalence required extending the third leg of the tripod, the concept of recursive functions, to set the whole structure on mathematically solid ground.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Hilberf s challenge aroused an instinct, prevalent in the aftermath of Gödel, that mathematical problems resistant to strictly mechanical procedures could be proved to exist. Turing’s strikingly original approach, completed when he was twenty-four, succeeded in formalizing the previously informal correspondence between “mechanical procedure” and “effectively calculable,” linking both concepts to the definition of recursive functions introduced by Gödel in 1931. “By what species of madness,” asked A. K. Dewdney, “might one have supposed that all three notions would turn out to be the same?”2”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Obviously the ability to compute depends on the ability to count; proving that from the ability to count all recursive, computable, or effectively calculable functions can be constructed by clerical procedures alone was less obvious. Patience is substituted for intelligence, with consequences both practical and profound.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Leibniz’s tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” concluded E. T. Bell.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Leibniz’s lifelong reflections on the nature of mind culminated in his Monadology of 1714, a universe of elementary mental particles that he called monads, or “little minds.” These entelechies (the local actualization of a universal mind) reflect in their own inner state the state of the universe as a whole. According to Leibniz, relation gave rise to substance, not, as Newton had it, the other way around. Our universe had been selected from an infinity of possible universes, explained Leibniz, so that a minimum of laws would lead to a maximum diversity of results. God was the supreme intelligence at both extremes of the scale. As Olaf Stapledon would later put it, “God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Butler was a satirist by trade, a prophet who knew that prophets who take themselves too seriously end up preaching to an audience of one. “There is a period in the evening, or more generally towards the still small hours of the morning, in which we so far unbend as to take a single glass of hot whiskey and water,” he admitted to the readers of the Canterbury Press in 1865. “We will neither defend the practice nor excuse it. We state it as a fact which must be borne in mind by the readers of this article; for we know not how, whether it be the inspiration of the drink, or the relief from the harassing work with which the day has been occupied, or from whatever other cause, yet we are certainly liable about this time to such a prophetic influence as we seldom else experience.”68”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Why should I write to the newspapers instead of to the machines themselves, why not summon a monster meeting of machines, place the steam engine in the chair, and hold a council of war?” asked the anonymous “mad correspondent.” “I answer, the time is not yet ripe for this. . . . Our plan is to turn man’s besotted enthusiasm to our own advantage, to make him develop us to the utmost, and find himself enslaved unawares. “My object is to do my humble share towards pointing out what is the ultimatum, the ne plus ultra of perfection in mechanized development,” the writer continued, “even though that end be so far off that only a Darwinian posterity can arrive at it. I therefore venture to suggest that we declare machinery and the general development of the human race to be well and effectually completed when—when—when—Like the woman in white, I had almost committed myself of my secret. Nay, this is telling too much. I must content myself with disclosing something less than the whole. I will give a great step, but not the last. We will say then that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development, when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself—may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in Ægypt at Exeter Hall—may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent garden. Multiply instance ad libitum—this is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.”67 This letter, bearing the stamp of Samuel Butler in style if not in name, was signed “Lunaticus.” One hundred years after Erasmus Darwin gathered his circle of Lunaticks in the English Midlands, a strand of telegraph wire was uncoiled at the antipodes of the earth. Sparked by the transit of a few pulses of electromagnetic code over this embryonic fragment of a net, Samuel Butler foresaw the evolution, perhaps not so far off as he imagined, of that phenomenon, somewhere between mechanism and organism, now manifested as the World Wide Web.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“In examining the prospects for artificial intelligence and artificial life Butler faced the same mysteries that permeate these two subjects today. “I first asked myself whether life might not, after all, resolve itself into the complexity of arrangement of an inconceivably intricate mechanism,” he recalled in 1880, retracing the development of his ideas. “If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only machines of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that that kind of mechanism was ‘being alive,’ why should not machines ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all to be? If it was only a case of their becoming more complicated, we were certainly doing our best to make them so.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Darwin’s great treatise appeared in November 1859, but, recalled Butler, “being on my way to New Zealand when the Origin of Species appeared, I did not get it until 1860 or 1861.”41 The long sea voyage, the grand spectacle of the New Zealand wilderness, and a religious upbringing that sought to shift its convictions to a scientific faith rendered Butler keenly receptive to the theories presented in Darwin’s book. Reading Origin of Species by candlelight in a thatched-roof hut, the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere above, Butler’s imagination took flight beyond where Darwin left off. “Residing eighteen miles from the nearest human habitation, and three days’ journey on horseback from a bookseller’s shop, I became one of Mr. Darwin’s many enthusiastic admirers,” Butler recollected, “and wrote a philosophical dialogue (the most offensive form, except poetry and books of travel into supposed unknown countries, that even literature can assume) upon the Origin of Species.”42”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“As Loren Eiseley suggested concerning the possibility of life on other planets, in 1953, “It is as though nature had all possible, all unlikely worlds to make.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Just as J. D. Bernal observed that “we are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about its death,”39 so we are still too close to the beginning of nature (not to mention the beginning of science) to be certain about its end.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings. Symbiosis operates by way of positive rewards. The benefits of telecommunication are so attractive that we are eager to share our world with these machines.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence

“The emergence of life and intelligence from less-alive and less-intelligent components has happened at least once. Emergent behavior is that which cannot be predicted through analysis at any level simpler than that of the system as a whole. Explanations of emergence, like simplifications of complexity, are inherently illusory and can only be achieved by sleight of hand. This does not mean that emergence is not real. Emergent behavior, by definition, is what’s left after everything else has been explained.”
― George Dyson, Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution Of Global Intelligence