Darwin Among the Machines
George Dyson(Author)
Allen Lane (Publisher)
Published on 5. February 1998
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-7139-9205-2 (ISBN)
Description
"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 machines". The author argues in this text that life, having first developed through biological evolution, is currently emerging once more, this time through the spontaneous evolution of intelligence within our rapidly expanding information networks. The result is a digital wilderness in which unseen creatures are evolving - creatures that will soon have the advantage of speed, intelligence and longevity over humans. The author also argues that the emergence of machines with a life, and perhaps a mind, of their own has long been anticipated by a singular scientific and literary tradition, traceable through the work of Hobbes, Samuel Butler, Erasmus Darwin and others. He describes how earlier thinkers rehearsed the discoveries of many 20th-century scientists, among them Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Illustrations
notes, index
Dimensions
Height: 242 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 29 mm
Weight
656 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7139-9205-2 (9780713992052)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
Leviathan; Darwin among the machines; the general wind; on computable numbers; the proving ground; rats in a cathedral; symbiogenesis; on distributed communications; theory of games and economic behaviour; there's plenty of room at the top; last and first men; fiddling while Rome burns.