Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 09:28:37 -0800
From: Kristina Lerman <klerman@qdeck.com>
To: awaken@awaken.org
Subject: new book
>From Agents newsletter:
Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence,
George B. Dyson, Hardcover, 288 pages. Published by
Addison-Wesley Pub Co, May 1,1997, ISBN: 0201406497. An
astonishing prediction of the World-Wide Web's ultimate
challenge to human civilization: a globally networked,
electronic, sentient being George Dyson grew up at the Institute
for Advanced Study, where such scientists as his father, Freeman
Dyson, and John von Neumann laid the foundations for the
Information Age. From this vantage point, and with an
unprecedented cast of characters, Dyson traces the course of the
information revolution, illuminating the lives, work, and ideas
of visionaries who foresaw the development of artificial
intelligence, artificial life, and the global mind. He
constructs a straightforward, convincing, and occasionally
frightening view of the evolution of mind in the electronic
network, on a level transcending our own. Dyson concludes, based
on several centuries worth of scientific research, that nature
is on the side of the machines. In 1978, George Dyson, along
with his physicist father, was the subject of Kenneth Brower's
bestselling book, The Starship and the Canoe. The brother of
computer guru Esther Dyson, he brings inside knowledge to an
outsider's point of view.
Also see http://www.awl.com/gb/authors/dyson/darwin.html
----- End of forwarded message from Kristina Lerman -----