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Let's Get This Straight
By Scott Rosenberg
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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In Dyson's view, complex living organisms evolve out of the symbiotic cooperation of simpler organisms -- "symbiogenesis." Symbiogenesis "assumes that the most probable explanation for improbably complex structures (living or otherwise) lies in the association of less complicated parts."

"All intelligence is collective," writes Dyson. "This intelligence -- whether that of a billion neurons, a billion microprocessors, or a billion molecules forming a single cell -- arises not from the unfolding of a predetermined master plan, but by the accumulation of random bits of wisdom through the power of small mistakes."

The Net is the ultimate forum for collective intelligence, as well as for unlimited experimentation. It has long passed the point, as a complex system, at which it could be definitively mapped or succinctly summed up. And every signpost points the way to increasing volatility -- toward an environment in which increasingly mobile and autonomous conglomerations of code migrate from node to node, constantly mutating and reshaping themselves in response to circumstantial demands.

Just as natural selection resulted in the range of highly adapted species existing in the world today, so too will evolutionary pressure ensure that tomorrow's mobile code exhibits capabilities that will astound and baffle us. Indeed, the packet-switching protocols of the Net itself are, writes Dyson, a "particularly virulent strain of symbiotic code ... Successful code is now executed in millions of places at once, just as a successful genotype is expressed within each of an organism's many cells. The possibilities of complex, multi-cellular digital organisms are only beginning to be explored."

The possibilities are not confined to digital limits, either. "The Net wouldn't function for a minute if there weren't all those people sitting at their desks," says Dyson.

The Net is as much flesh-and-blood as it is chips and fiber optics. Humans are indispensable to the new intelligence equation. The emergent collective intelligence isn't just hardware and software -- it includes us.

And why not? If all of life up to now has been a series of ever more intricate joint ventures, who is to say this latest synthesis is unworkable? The principle has been well illustrated; all that's changed is the speed at which it can all happen.

"The cooperation between human beings and microprocessors is unprecedented, not in kind, but in suddenness and scale," writes Dyson. "Now, in the coalescence of electronics and biology, we are forming a complex collective organism composed of individual intelligences."

Some humanocentric nativists might well be dismayed at the prospect. They wouldn't be the first to eye the yoke of the machine with suspicion. Again, Samuel Butler staked out the territory. In an 1863 essay titled "Darwin Among the Machines," Butler noted that "the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them; more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life."

Submission to the machine -- from "Frankenstein" to "The Terminator," it's a recurring nightmare. But from Dyson's symbiogenetic perspective, Butler misses the point. We're not necessarily bound to become slaves, but we could well be partners. We're all in this together. There is no Net without humanity, no global intelligence without cooperation.

We could have an important role to play. Then again, we could be written out of the script.

"For the single-celled organisms, the advent of multi-cellular organisms, such as the nervous system, was the end of freedom," says Dyson. "We're at that stage now. Whether it is good or bad completely depends on how you look at it."

"Sure, we feel threatened," he adds. "We're loyal to our own life form. Americans feel threatened by foreigners, Earthlings feel threatened by Martians, and protoplasmic forms of life ought to feel threatened by other forms of life."

The real danger is not necessarily that machines will grow too smart but that human intelligence may atrophy. Evolution isn't necessarily on our side. Just because we are intelligent now doesn't mean that we always will be. Even as we get subsumed into a greater intelligent cooperative, individually, we may become dumber.

Evolution, argues Dyson, moves forward by constantly dispensing with unnecessary baggage. He is fond of pointing out that human babies are born with more neurons than a fully grown adult. As they grow older, they shed irrelevant neurons, while reinforcing the connections and neural pathways that make sense.

From babies, Dyson jumps to kayaks. It seems his true passion is repairing Inuit watercraft. It's part of a struggle to ensure that the human race doesn't get dumber. "There's a 10,000-year-old tradition of kayak design which is in danger of being lost," he says. "I want to prevent that if I can."

"To build a kayak," he writes, "you assemble a skeleton and then give it a skin that allows it to float, just as the architectural framework of a computer is fitted, by evolution or by design, with an envelope of code. To build a dugout, you grow a tree and then remove everything, one chip at a time, except the boat. This is how nature creates her intelligences, by spawning an overwhelming surplus of neurons and then selectively pruning them to leave a network that, if all goes well, becomes a mind."