Darwin Among the Machines

by George B. Dyson

  To guard against mechanical error, eighteenth-century navigators carried three chronometers. When one chronometer differed, the other two were assumed to be correct. When you have three watches and no two of them agree, there is no way of telling which, if any, is right. The three differing interpretations of the argument from design given by Butler, Paley, and Darwin correspond loosely to the three different approaches to the design of complex computer systems represented by Leviathan, SAGE, and Pandemonium in 1959. The Romes’ Leviathan embodied Butler’s faith in nature’s mysterious ability to intelligently organize its own design. The air force’s SAGE embodied Paley’s faith in a centralized, overruling intelligence that administered all instructions from above. Selfridge’s Pandemonium embodied Darwin’s faith in a tangled bank of subprograms flowering by natural selection out of computational mud.

  Over forty years of software development, none of the three approaches has proved entirely wrong. Leviathan attempted a black-box approach to building systems that accumulate empirical knowledge through mechanisms whose details the designer doesn’t necessarily understand—a process invoked, if not always admitted, by the authors of most large assemblages of code. SAGE’s authoritarian, Grand Central Station approach to system development descended directly, via IBM, to the operating systems that ruled the mainframes of the 1970s and govern the desktops of today. Pandemonium descended, with modification, to the fertility of modular programming and the object-oriented languages and quasi-intelligent agents that are now replicating across the network as a whole. We have transcended the old argument over whether artificial intelligence should be built from linear, sequentially coded processes or incubated within massively parallel webs. Is life the result of linear strings of code-bearing DNA or the result of three-dimensional proteins swimming in auto-catalytic soup? The answer is not one or the other, but both.

  The evolution of a diversifying computational ecology from simple strings of 0s and 1s embodies certain ideas in mathematical logic concerning how formal systems evolve into higher types. “I am twisting a logical theorem a little,” admitted John von Neumann in a lecture on self-reproducing systems given in December 1949, “a theorem of Gödel that the next logical step, the description of an object, is one class type higher than the object and is therefore asymptotically longer to describe.”39 Evolution is a recursive process, and given the power of recursive functions, we should not be surprised at the complexity and intelligence exhibited by a language or genetic system operating repeatedly on itself. “The possibility of producing an infinite sequence of varieties of descendants from a single program is methodologically significant in a manner which might interest biologists more than artificial intelligencers,” remarked logician John Myhill in 1964. “It suggests the possibility of encoding a potentially infinite number of directions to posterity on a finitely long chromosomal tape.”40 In this lies the frustration, and the power, of coded instructions—you cannot always predict the results.

  As von Neumann explained to the Hixon Symposium in 1948, “this fact, that complication, as well as organization, below a certain minimum level is degenerative, and beyond that level can become self-supporting and even increasing, will clearly play an important role.”41 This statement is less an echo of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species of 1859 than of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844: “The idea, then, which I form of the progress of organic life upon the globe—and the hypothesis is applicable to all similar theatres of vital being—is, that the simplest and most primitive type, under a law to which that of like-production is subordinate, gave birth to the type next above it, that this again produced the next higher and so on to the very highest, the stages of advance being in all cases very small.” Chambers, writing anonymously and without a scientific reputation to protect, added, “and probably this development upon our planet is but a sample of what has taken place, through the same cause, in all the other countless theatres of being which are suspended in space.”42

  What leads organisms to evolve to higher types? (Darwinian evolution, as Stephen J. Gould, among others, has pointed out, does not “progress” toward greater complexity, but Darwinian evolution, plus symbiogenesis, does.) Is a global electronic intelligence something new, or merely the materialization, on a faster scale, of an intelligence that has existed all along? Natural selection is based on the death, or favored survival, of individuals, and its speed is limited by the time it takes to proceed from one generation to the next. In the age of information the pace of orthodox Darwinism is being left behind. Darwinian evolution, in one of those paradoxes with which life abounds, may become a victim of its own success, unable to keep up with non-Darwinian processes that it has spawned. Erasmus Darwin may turn out to be right.

  We have been moving in this direction for some time. “Cultural patterns are in a sense a solution of the problem of having a form of inheritance which doesn’t require killing of individuals in order to evolve,” observed Nils Barricelli in 1966. “You can evolve them by selecting for cultural patterns, and in this respect it would be a much faster evolutionary phenomenon.”43 The same goes for digital organisms, which do not need to die in order to evolve, although, if memory is limited, the threat of death may help. It also applies to biochemical circuits, such as the molecular hypercycles that preceded the origin of life, or to the topology of an electronic network—a pattern of connections that persists over time, transcending the individual lifetimes of the components from which it is formed. Individual cells are persistent patterns composed of molecules that come and go; organisms are persistent patterns composed of individual cells that come and go; species are persistent patterns composed of individuals that come and go. Machines, as Butler showed with his analysis of vapor engines in 1863, are enduring patterns composed of parts that are replaced from time to time and reproduced from one generation to the next. A global organism—and a global intelligence—is the next logical type, whether we agree with the diagnosis, the terminology, or the assumption of life and intelligence or not.

  “I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go,” wrote physician Lewis Thomas in 1971. “I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell.”44 What appeared to be a single cell in 1971 appears to be something more than a single cell today. Contemplating an ant colony, Thomas wrote that “you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.”45 Comparing human beings to the ants, Thomas observed that “we are linked in circuits for the storage, processing, and retrieval of information, since this appears to be the most basic and universal of all human enterprises. It may be our biological function to build a certain kind of Hill.”46 With computer networks still in a tenuous, experimental stage, it was nonetheless obvious to Lewis Thomas that “all 3 billion of us are being connected by telephones, radios, television sets, airplanes, satellites, harangues on public-address systems, newspapers, magazines, leaflets dropped from great heights, words got in edgewise. We are becoming a grid, a circuitry around the earth. If we keep at it, we will become a computer to end all computers, capable of fusing all the thoughts of the world.”47

  As a physician and biologist, Lewis Thomas placed the health of human beings and their fellow creatures first. “The most profoundly depressing of all ideas about the future of the human species is the concept of artificial intelligence,” he later wrote. “That these devices will take over and run the place for human betterment or perhaps, later on, for machine betterment, strikes me as wrong in a deep sense, maybe even evil. . . . Machines like this would be connected to each other in a network all aro
und the earth, doing all the thinking, maybe even worrying nervously. But being right all the time.”48

  Thomas’s caution is understandable. On another level, the level of an earth that “seen from the right distance, from the corner of the eye of an extraterrestrial visitor . . . must surely seem a single creature, clinging to the round warm stone, turning in the sun,”49 his concerns may be misplaced, or at least no more unsettling than the tyranny of any nervous system over an individual organism’s component cells. As Nils Barricelli demonstrated with the growth of his numerical symbioorganisms at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1953, safety in numbers is a fact of life—perhaps the fact of life from which all other facts of life evolved. “An organic being is a microcosm,” observed Charles Darwin in 1868, “a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, and numerous as the stars.”50

  From atoms through metazoans to spiral galaxies, the laws of nature form a hierarchy we have yet to comprehend. The ten million transistors now engraved on a single square centimeter of our earth share their digital lifeblood with billions of fellow microprocessors, weaving a fibrous cocoon that spans the globe with a web of light. “If you take a cubic foot of sea water, you might very well find a small flounder in it,” Philip Morrison pointed out. “That is hopelessly far from the steady-state. . . . In a cubic mile you could find a submarine full of crew members and software, a still more complex configuration.”51 This hierarchy extends in both directions: in a cubic centimeter you might find a protozoan; in a cubic astronomical unit you might find a single collective organism, clinging to a warm planet, turning slowly in the sun.

  11

  LAST AND FIRST MEN

  There evolved at length a very different kind of complex organism, in which material contact of parts was not necessary either to coordination of behaviour or unity of consciousness. . . . Such was the single-minded Martian host which invaded the Earth.

  —OLAF STAPLEDON1

  Christmas 1917 was the fourth Christmas celebrated under the shadow of World War I. The winter, if not as severe as that of 1916–1917, was still cold enough to freeze mud, machines, and human flesh. William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), an English ambulance driver attached to the Sixteenth Division of the French infantry, wrote to his Australian cousin Agnes Miller on 23 December, “two or three people have to take it in turns to grind away at the starting handle and apply hot cloths to the induction pipe for half an hour or more before she will fire at all.”2 World War I, among its other distinctions, marked the transition of modern warfare from horses to machines. Over one-lane roads, horses set the pace. During the Champagne offensive in April 1917, Stapledon was following a galloping artillery team across an exposed stretch of road to retrieve casualties from the front when a shell landed just in front of his ambulance “and the road was immediately blocked with a confusion of splintered wood and the bodies of horses and men.”3

  The first task of the ambulance driver was to distinguish the living from the dead. Those who survived the shells, the bombs, the bullets, the hand grenades, and the gas were fortunate to have volunteers such as Olaf Stapledon to evacuate them to makeshift facilities away from the madness of the front. A pacifist but not a Quaker, Stapledon joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in 1915 when the operation was in dire need of help. “The Friends’ Ambulance Unit, an organisation of young Quakers who wished to carry on the great tradition of their faith by serving the wounded under fire while refusing to bear arms or submit to military discipline . . . sounded like the real thing,” Stapledon later explained. “It also offered a quick route to the front.”4

  Stapledon received five weeks of training, learning to drive while studying the rudiments of mechanical and medical first aid. “My brain is full of ‘sparking plugs,’ ‘gudgeon pins,’ ‘carburetors,’ ‘exhaust valves,’ ‘clutches,’ & ‘throttles,’” he wrote in March 1915. “Unfortunately it is also full of ‘scapula,’ ‘fibula,’ ‘complicated fractures,’ ‘spinal columns,’ and ‘femurs,’ and I begin to forget which are human and which mechanical.”5 Visits to the emergency ward of the Liverpool hospital provided a glimpse of things to come. Stapledon was familiar with the dispensary’s working-class clientele; as a tutor for the Workers’ Education Association he had delivered his first series of lectures, on the history of industrialism, to an audience of Liverpool dockyard workers in 1912. According to Stapledon, his students taught him more than he taught them. He joined the ambulance unit deeply troubled at the burdens of war, like those of industry, being borne by those who stood to benefit the least. Which side would win the war remained unclear; it was certain from the beginning that the working class, on both sides, would lose the most.

  Doctors removed a troublesome appendix, Stapledon’s father donated a custom-built Lanchester motor ambulance, and Stapledon was off to the quagmire of the western front. Ambulance duty was plagued with ambiguities. Quaker doctrine forbade submission to military discipline, yet to gain access to the front lines the ambulance units had to submit to military control. Assistance was to be given only to the wounded, but wasn’t this helping those who might fight again? When Stapledon stopped to clear the road of the gun crew blown to bits a few steps ahead, was he expediting the evacuation of the wounded, according to Quaker principles, or transgressing those principles by clearing the way for the gun crew following behind? As the war dragged on and compromise with the military authorities grew more defined, many left the ambulance unit to join their compatriots in the trenches or returned to England as conscientious objectors to offer witness against the war by going to jail. Stapledon stuck it out to the end. The final months of the war left even Stapledon, advancing behind the French army through the devastation of no-man’s-land, at a loss for words. After suffering through years of enemy assaults, Stapledon found it no less difficult to witness the loss of life and limb inflicted by his own side.

  Stapledon’s convoy, known as Section Sanitaire Anglaise Treize, or S.S.A. 13, reached a full strength of twenty ambulances and forty-five men. Between February 1914 and January 1919 they transported 74,501 patients over 599,410 kilometers of evacuation runs.6 The Friends’ Ambulance Service lost a total of twenty-one members during the war, receiving citations for bravery under fire numerous times. Stapledon was decorated with the croix de guerre, but apart from a hernia suffered by hand-cranking a cold engine he survived the war unharmed. “Yes, it was an attempt to have the cake and eat it, to go to war and be a pacifist,” he afterward confessed. “Its basis was illogical; but it was a sincere expression of two overmastering and wholesome impulses, the will to share in the common ordeal and the will to make some kind of protest against the common folly.”7 Ambulance drivers saw the worst of war’s results. For every life they saved, they ministered as best they could to others they were powerless to help. “Last night as I was going to sleep in my car I thought of the last person who had lain where I was lying,” wrote Stapledon in October 1918, three years of bloodshed having failed to dull his anguish over every passenger he lost. “I was perplexed whether to go slow to save him pain, or fast to save his life.”8 Alternating between the terror of battle and the boredom that intervened, Stapledon somehow found it possible “to catch a surprising glimpse of a kind of superhuman beauty in the hideous disaster of war itself.”9

  Peaceful moments intruded here and there. “The moon is brilliant, and the earth is a snowy brilliance under the moon. Jupiter, who was last night beside the moon, is now left a little way behind. Venus has just sunk ruddy in the West, after being for a long while a dazzling white splendour in the sky,” wrote Stapledon on Boxing Day, 26 December 1917, after a Christmas whose exhausted spirit had penetrated the defenses on both sides. “I have just come in from a walk with our Professor [Lewis Richardson], and he has led my staggering mind through mazes and mysteries of the truth about atoms and electrons and about that most elusive of God’s creatures, the ether. And all the while we were creeping across a wide white valley and up
a pine clad ridge, and everywhere the snow crystals sparkled under our feet, flashing and vanishing mysteriously like our own fleeting inklings of the truth about electrons. The snow was very dry and powdery under foot, and beneath that soft white blanket was the bumpy frozen mud. The pine trees stood in black ranks watching us from the hill crest, and the faintest of faint breezes whispered among them as we drew near. The old Prof (he is only about thirty-five, and active, but of a senior cast of mind) won’t walk fast, and I was very cold in spite of my sheepskin coat; but after a while I grew so absorbed in his talk that I forgot even my frozen ears. . . . We crossed the ridge through a narrow cleft and laid bare a whole new land, white as the last, and bleaker. And over the new skyline lay our old haunts and the lines. Sound of very distant gunfire muttered to us. . . . What a night it is.”10

  “Professor” Lewis Fry Richardson, meteorologist and mathematical physicist (see Chapter 5), was of solid Quaker background and sought to join the Friends’ Ambulance Unit when it was formed in 1914. Two years later he was assigned to Stapledon’s convoy after a protracted delay securing leave from his job. He was serving as superintendent of the Meteorological and Magnetic Observatory at Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, a branch of the National Physical Laboratory that moved to Eskdalemuir from Kew, near London, when electric railways came into use. The new location was deliberately situated as far as possible from any artificial magnetic fields.