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Microsoft to Feds: Hands off my operating system!

Will the Net spawn intelligent life? Andrew Leonard on George Dyson's "Darwin Among the Machines"

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Will the Net spawn intelligent life?

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BY ANDREW LEONARD | A future full of super-intelligent machines is equal parts sci-fi cliché and computer-science holy grail -- grist for both Frankenstein fears and programmer dreams. But it's never been quite clear how that future will arrive. Not long ago, quite a few otherwise respectable scientists believed that artificial intelligence would spring forth fully formed in the lab, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, out of cleverly concocted code.

But there's another way, according to author George Dyson -- the evolutionary way. In his ambitious new book, "Darwin Among The Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence" (Addison-Wesley, 286 pages), Dyson suggests that a new kind of intelligence may one day emerge -- undirected and unplanned -- from the incomprehensible complexity of an interconnected, wired world.

The Net is where the intelligent action will be. In the Dysonian schema, fragments of software replicating across the Internet are analogous to strings of DNA replicating in living cells. Evolutionary pressure provides the drive: What works survives; what doesn't gets deleted, either by us or on its own.

So be prepared -- there's a new primordial soup in town, bubbling over with restless code, seething right toward the boiling point of sapience. And this new sapience won't be purely digital; the emergent new order will be defined by a commingling of the silicon and the biological, by a collective merging of human and hardware. That's both a promise and a threat.

Dyson was to the computer manner born. As a child he grew up on the campus of the Princeton-based Institute of Advanced Studies, where his mathematical physicist father, Freeman Dyson, hobnobbed with such luminaries of the computer world as John von Neumann, and where abandoned fragments of the earliest known computers rusted away in nearby barns. Dyson's sister, Esther, is the publisher of Release 1.0, a pricey newsletter that reports from the cutting edge of current digital developments.

Freeman Dyson is perhaps most famous for his theory that all intelligent species will inevitably progress to a point where they enclose their home sun with a vast shell -- a "Dyson sphere" -- in order to maximize living space. On their face, George Dyson's theories about emergent global intelligence might sound equally fantastic. No matter how persuasive the arguments, it's never clear how routers, high-speed telecommunication lines and torrents of data add up to a new intelligent species.

But that doesn't harm the book, because "Darwin Among the Machines" is as much a work of history as of speculation. In a phone interview from his kayak repair workshop in western Washington state, Dyson himself called it "a catalog of beginnings." Dyson explores the roots of computer design, of distributed networks and of the very concepts of artificial intelligence and even evolution.

It's a sound strategy. Just attempting to define terms such as "life" or "intelligence" can confound the most brilliant of minds. Since, as Dyson notes on several occasions, the only thing that can truly describe a complex system is the system itself, it makes sense to focus one's attention on first steps, rather than the goal line.

"You can only sort of hint at things," says Dyson. "How do you explain the explanations? You have to rely a great deal on analogies ... But what it all comes down to is that the more we understand about the way our brains work the more we find that evolution has a lot to do it."

And we also find, when we start at the beginning, that there is nothing new under the sun. From the earliest days of evolutionary theory, Dyson shows, fascinated observers speculated on the possibility that the same evolutionary laws that determined natural development might also shape emergent machine intelligence. As early as 1865, Charles Darwin's contemporary Samuel Butler wrote that "although we grant that hardly any mistake would be more puerile than to individualize and animalize the at present existing machines ... yet we can see no a priori objection to the gradual development of a mechanical life, though that life shall be so different from ours that it is only by a severe discipline that we can think of it as life at all."

From Butler onward, Dyson traces the history of the notion that it's possible to bridge the gap between nature and machine. It's all a matter of changing one's frame of reference.