The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
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18 David E. Kalish. “Chip Makers and U.S. Unveil Project.” New York Times, September 12, 1997.
19 The chart “The Exponential Growth of Computing, 1900-1998” is based on the following data:
Cost conversions from dollars in each year to 1998 dollars are based on the ratio of the consumer price indices (CPI) for the respective years, based on CPI data as recorded by the Woodrow Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. See their web site,
Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine in the 1830s and continued to refine the concept until his death in 1871 Babbage never completed his invention. I have estimated a date of 1900 for the Analytical Engine as an estimated date for when its mechanical technology became feasible, based on the availability of other mechanical computing technology available in that time period.
Sources for the chart “The Exponential Growth of Computing, 1900-1998” include the following:
25 Years of Computer History
BYTE Magazine “Birth of a Chip”
cdc.html@www.citybeach.wa.edu (Stretch)
Chronology of Digital Computing Machines
Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers
The Computer Museum History Center
delan at infopad.eecs.berkeley.edu
Electronic Computers Within the Ordnance Corps
General Processor Information
The History of Computing at Los Alamos
The Machine Room
Mind Machine Web Museum
Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon University: Computer Data
PC Magazine Online: Fifteen Years of PC Magazine
PC Museum
PDP-8 Emulation
Silicon Graphics Webpage press release
Stan Augarten, Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers (New York: Ticknor &
Fields, 1984).
International Association of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), “Annals of the History of the Computer,” vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 150-153 (1987).
IEEE, vol. 16, no. 3, p. 20 (1994).
Hans Moravéc, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
René Moreau, The Computer Comes of Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
20 For additional views on the future of computer capacity, see: Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and “An Interview with David Waltz, Vice President, Computer Science Research, NEC Research Institute” at Think Quest’s web page
21 A mathematical theory concerning the difference between information and noise and the ability of a communications channel to carry information.
22 The Santa Fe Institute has played a pioneering role in developing concepts and technology related to complexity and emergent systems. One of the principal developers of paradigms associated with chaos and complexity has been Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman’s At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) looks “at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos” (from the card catalog description).
In his book Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), John Tyler Bonner asks the question: “How is it that an egg turns into an elaborate adult? How is it that a bacterium, given many millions of years, could have evolved into an elephant?”
John Holland is another leading thinker from the Sante Fe Institute in the emerging field of complexity. His book Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996) presents a series of lectures that Holland presented at the Santa Fe Institute in 1994.
Also see John H. Holland, Emergence: From Chaos to Order (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998) and M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
CHAPTER 2: THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVOLUTION
1 In the early 1950s, the chemical composition of DNA was already known. At that time, the important questions were: How is the DNA molecule constructed? How does DNA accomplish its work? These questions would be answered in 1953 by James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick.
Watson and Crick wrote “The Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acid: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” published in the April 25, 1953 issue of Nature. For more information on the race by various research groups to discover the molecular structure of DNA, read Watson’s book, The Double Helix (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1968).
2 Translation starts by unwinding a region of DNA to expose its code. A strand of messenger RNA (mRNA) is created by copying the exposed DNA base-pair codes. The appropriately named messenger RNA records a copy of a portion of the DNA letter sequence and travels out of the nucleus into the cell body There the mRNA encounters a ribosome molecule, which reads the letters encoded in the mRNA molecules and then, using another set of molecules called transfer RNA (tRNA), actually builds protein chains one amino acid at a time. These proteins are the worker molecules that perform the cell’s functions. For example, hemoglobin, which is responsible for carrying oxygen in the blood from the lungs to the body’s tissues, is a sequence of 500 amino acids. With each amino acid requiring three nucleotide letters, the coding for hemoglobin requires 1,500 positions on the DNA molecule. Molecules of hemoglobin, incidentally, are created 500 trillion times a second in the human body, so the machinery is quite efficient.
3 The goal of the Human Genome Project is to construct detailed genetic sequence maps of the 50,000 to 100,000 genes in the human genome, and to provide information about the overall structure and sequence of the DNA of humans and of other animals. The project began in the mid-1980s. The web site of the Human Genome Project,
4 Thomas Ray’s work is described in an article by Joe Flower, “A Life in Silicon.” New Scientist 150, no. 2034 (June 15, 1996): 32-36. Dr. Ray also has a web site with updates on his software-based evolution at
5 A selection of books exploring the nature of intelligence includes: H. Gardner, Frames of Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Basic Books, 1983); R. J. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve (New York: The Free Press, 1994); R. Jacoby and N. Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate (New York: Times Books, 1995).
6 To further explore the theories of expansion and contraction of the Universe, see: Stephen W Hawking,
A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988); and Eric L. Lerner, The Big Bang Never Happened (New York: Random House, 1991). For the latest updates, see the International Astronomical Union (IAU) web site at
7 See chapter 3, “Of Mind and Machines,” including the box “The View from Quantum Mechanics.”
8 Peter Lewis, “Can Intelligent Life Be Found? Gorilla Will Go Looking.” New York Times, April 16, 1998.
9 Voice Xpress Plus from the Dictation Division of Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products (formerly Kurzweil Applied Intelligence) allows users to give “natural language” commands to Microsoft Word. It also provides large-vocabulary continuous-speech dictation. The program is “mode-less,” so users do not need to indicate when they are giving commands. For example, if the user says: “I enjoyed my trip to Belgium last week. Make this paragraph four points bigger. Change its font to Arial. I hope to go back to Belgium soon.” Voice Xpress Plus automatically determines that the second and third sentences are commands and will carry them out (rather than transcribing them). It also determines that the first and fourth sentences are not commands, and will transcribe them into the document.
CHAPTER 3: OF MIND AND MACHINES
1 To learn more about the current state of brain-scanning research, the article “Brains at Work: Researchers Use New Techniques to Study How Humans Think” by Vincent Kiernan is a good place to begin. This article, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (January 23, ,1998, vol. 44, no. 20, pp. A16-17), discusses uses of MRI to map brain activity during complex thinking processes.
“Visualizing the Mind” by Marcus E. Raichle in the April 1994 Scientific American provides background on various brain-imaging technologies: MRI, positron emission tomography (PET), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and electroencephalography (EEG).
“Unlocking the Secrets of the Brain” by Tabitha M. Powledge is a two-part article in the July-August issue of Bioscience 47 (pp. 330-334 and 403-409), 1997.
2 Blood-forming cells of the bone marrow and certain layers of the skin grow and reproduce frequently, replenishing themselves in a period of months. In contrast, muscle cells do not reproduce for several years. Neurons have not been considered to reproduce at all after one’s birth, but recent findings indicate the possibility of primate neuron reproduction. Dr. Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University and Dr. Bruce S. McEwen of Rockefeller University in New York found that adult marmoset monkeys are able to manufacture brain cells in the hippocampus, a brain region that is connected to learning and memory. Conversely, when the animals are under stress, the ability to manufacture new brain cells in the hippocampus diminishes. This research is described in an article by Gina Kolata, “Studies Find Brain Grows New Cells,” The New York Times, March 17, 1998.
Other types of cells will grow and reproduce if necessary For example, if seven-eighths of the liver cells are removed, the remaining cells will grow and reproduce until most of the cells are replenished. Arthur Guyton, Physiology of the Human Body, fifth edition (Phila., PA: W. B. Saunders, 1979): 42-43.
3 Oppression of human races, nationalities, and other groups has often been justified in the same way.
4 Plato’s works are available in Greek and English in the Loeb Classical Library editions.
A detailed account of Plato’s philosophy is presented in J. N. Findlay, Plato and Platonism : An Introduction. On the dialogues as Plato’s chosen form, see D. Hyland’s “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 38-50.
5 A brief history of logical positivism can be found in A. J. Ayer, Logical Positivism (New York: Macmillan, 1959): 3-28.
6 David J. Chalmers distinguishes “between the easy problems and the hard problem of consciousness,” and argues that “the hard problem eludes conventional methods of explanation entirely” in an essay entitled “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.” Stuart R. Hameroff, ed., Toward a Science of Consciousness: The First Tucson Discussions and Debates (Complex Adaptive Systems) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
7 This objective view was systematically defined early in the twentieth century by Ludwig Wittgenstein in an analysis of language called logical positivism. This philosophical school, which would subsequently influence the emergence of computational theory and linguistics, drew its inspiration from Wittgenstein’s first major work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book was not an immediate hit and it took the influence of his former instructor, Bertrand Russell, to secure a publisher.
In a foreshadowing of early computer-programming languages, Wittgenstein numbered all of the statements in his Tractatus indicating their position in the hierarchy of his thinking. He starts out with statement 1: “The world is all that is the case,” indicating his ambitious agenda for the book. A typical statement is number 4.0.0.3.1: “All philosophy is a critique of language.” His last statement, number 7, is “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Those who trace their philosophical roots to the early Wittgenstein still regard this short work as the most influential work of philosophy of the past century Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness, Germany, 1921.
8 In the preface to Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Wittgenstein “acknowledges” that he made “grave mistakes” in his earlier work, the Tractatus.
9 For a useful overview of Descartes’s life and work, see The Dictionary of Scientific Biography, vol. 4, pp. 55-65. Also, Jonathan Rées Descartes presents a unified view of Descartes’s philosophy and its relation to other systems of thought.
10 Quoted from Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
11 “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950): 433-460, reprinted in E. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman, eds., Computers and Thought (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).
12 For a description of quantum mechanics, read George Johnson, “Quantum Theorists Try to Surpass Digital Computing,” New York Times, February 18, 1997.
CHAPTER 4: A NEW FORM OF INTELLIGENCE ON EARTH
1 Simple calculating devices had been perfected almost two centuries before Babbage, starting with Pascal’s Pascaline in 1642, which could add numbers, and a multiplying machine developed by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz a couple of decades later. But automating the computing of logarithms was far more ambitious than anything that had been previously attempted.
Babbage didn’t get very far—he exhausted his financial resources, got into a dispute with the British government over ownership, had problems getting the unusual precision parts fabricated, and saw his chief engineer fire all of his workmen and then quit himself. He was also beset with personal tragedies, including the death of his father, his wife, and two of his children.
The only obvious thing to do now, Babbage figured, was to abandon his “Difference Engine” and embark on something yet more ambitious: the world’s first fully programmable computer. Babbage’s new conception—the “Analytical Engine”—could be programmed to solve any possible logical or computational problem.
The Analytical Engine had a random-access memory (RAM) consisting of 1,000 “words” of 50 decimal digits each, equivalent to about 175,000 bits. A number could be retrieved from any location, modified, and stored in any other location. It had a punched-card reader and even included a printer, even though it would be another half century before either typesetting machines or typewriters were to be invented. It had a central processing unit (CPU) that could perform the types of logical and arithmetic operations that CPUs do today. Most important, it had a special storage unit for the software with a machine language very similar to those of today’s computers. One decimal field specified the type of operation and another specified the address in memory of the operand. Stan Augarten, Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers (New York: Tickn
or and Fields, 1984): 63-64.
Babbage describes the features of his machine in “On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine,” written in 1837 and reprinted as appendix B in Anthony Hyman’s Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). For biographical information on Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, see Hyman’s biography, and Dorothy Stein’s book Ada: A Life and a Legacy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
2 Stan Augarten, Bit by Bit, 63-64. Babbage’s description of the Analytical Engine in “On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine,” written in 1837, is reprinted as appendix B in Anthony Hyman’s Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
3 Joel Shurkin, in Engines of the Mind, p. 104, describes Aiken’s machine as “an electromechanical Analytical Engine with IBM card handling.” For a concise history of the development of the Mark I, see Augarten’s Bit by Bit, 103-107. I. Bernard Cohen provides a new perspective on Aiken’s relation to Babbage in his article “Babbage and Aiken,” Annals of the History of Computing 10 (1988): 171-193.
4 The idea of the punched card, which Babbage borrowed from the Jacquard looms (automatic weaving machines controlled by punched metal cards), also survived and formed the basis for automating the increasingly popular calculators of the nineteenth century. This culminated in the 1890 U.S. census, which was the first time that electricity was used for a major data-processing project. The punched card itself survived as a mainstay of computing until the 1970s.