Darwin Among the Machines

"Dyson is looking at the genesis of thinking machines. Well, machines that do something like thinking. He is really good on the history of computing. One of his early chapters covers Samuel Butler, who in the mid-19th century took a ship from London to New Zealand and set up a sheep farm there. He was on the other side of the world, both literally and figuratively, and yet, around 1860, a boat came into the harbour carrying a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species . Butler read it, and it provoked him into some very interesting thoughts. Humans aren’t really evolving much physically: we have pretty much the same brains and bodies that people had in ancient times. Machines, on the other hand, are moving ahead very, very quickly. In other words, the evolution of humans is actually taking place through our tools. Our intellectual advance is going to be tied to our tools. He was thinking this when the telegraph was still very new, and the machines he was thinking about were steam engines. So for him to come to this conclusion was brilliant. He foresaw the age when we would create smart machines that would take cognitive leadership of the planet. Hopefully, the machines will be kind to us, the way we are to animals we care about… Our tools, and the know-how of our fellow humans. I couldn’t farm; I couldn’t build a house or a car. If I were reduced to my own abilities, I would really be living a Stone Age type of existence. We should all take a moment to appreciate engineers, because they take this stuff and they make it happen for us."