Rating: 
Summary: The reviews reviewed (in chronological order)
Review: "An exceedingly broad, academic look at the development of computers, beginning in the 1600s with Thomas Hobbes, whom author George Dyson dubiously credits as an intellectual father of the World Wide Web... His argument, though a slog at times... is worthwhile mostly for its quirky history of human, not computer, thought." --Laurence Hooper, WORTH, 5.97 / "[Dyson's] theory of mechanical intelligence is a grind... This is a dense, difficult book [and] should be approached like it's a $20-an-hour job." --Scott Lommers, BELLINGHAM HERALD, 5.18.97 / "A fresh and sometimes startling viewpoint of the emerging relationship between nature and machines... in which the twin processes of intelligence and evolution are inseparably intertwined." --Danny Hillis, WIRED, 6.97 / "A remarkable work of true scholarship of tremendous breadth... encompassing field after field to provide a perspective not nearly as visible from the vantage point of any single specialty." --Paul Baran, 5.25.97 / "Two Darwins for the price of one" --J.D. Biersdorfer, NYT BOOK REVIEW, 6.15.97 / "This book is not easy [and] deals with complex scientific and philosophic concepts with little or no attempt at explanation." --Lynn Yarris, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, 6.15.97 / "A very good book about life's grand project after animals: machines." --Simon Ings, NEW SCIENTIST, 6.21.97 / "The reader is drawn down a rabbit's hole of intellectual intrigue... designed to instill curiosity more than answer questions, a method the great physicist Richard Feynman, one of Dyson's subjects, used." --Paul Andrews, SEATTLE TIMES, 6.22.97 / "A cogent, succinct history of thinkers and thinking that paved the way, occasionally unwittingly, to today's technology... The final irony: it took someone from outside the discipline to advance our understanding of the ongoing dance of life, evolution and machines." --Katie Hafner, NEWSWEEK, 6.23.97 / "To bring Hobbes and Samuel Butler and Olaf Stapledon together, and John Wilkins and von Neumann and Lewis Thomas and Erasmus Darwin, would seem almost beyond the bounds of possibility; but they all, and fifty others, come together with a sort of miraculous naturalness in this book, which is as remarkable an intellectual history as any I have read." --Oliver Sacks, 6.24.97 / "All the computer intelligentsia are talking about... the darndest book by the unlikeliest of authors, and it has caught the attention of everyone from Microsoft technology chief Nathan Myhrvold to the executive editor of Wired magazine." --Kevin Maney, USA TODAY, 7.3.97 / "What if artificial intelligence isn't?" --Jonathan Weber, LOS ANGELES TIMES, 7.14.97 / "How can a guy who makes kayaks (yes kayaks the boats) write such a great book about computers? Read it and see." --Greg Michetti, EDMONTON SUN, 7.23.97 / "An innovative river of thought, but it's flowing the wrong way." --Chip Lusko, Calvary Chapel Bookshelf / "A dense pastiche of historical sketches... [which] debunks some of our more common myths... Dyson's intellectual appetite for detail hammers this home--a few times too many." --Matthew Schwartz, SOFTWARE, 8.97 / "Dyson makes no predictions. Instead, he lets scientists and philosophers--some dead, some not--predict the present with their long overlooked words." --Richard Mateosin, IEEE MICRO, 8.97 / "Makes no concrete predictions [and is] neither philosophy, nor history, nor good critique." --Michael Mattis, UPSIDE Magazine, 8.97 / "What's refreshing about Dyson is that instead of a metaphor, he finds a direct and ineluctable interrelationship between humans and machines. Even better, he exhibits little interest in pronouncing whether that relationship is destroying or saving the human race... I understood for the first time why predictions about the techno-future nearly always fall short: Evolution itself is a separate intelligence, and as such, it has plans of its own." --Judith Lewis, LA WEEKLY, 8.15.97 / "Useful information, regrettably immersed amid relentless prose and often gratuitous quotations." --SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 8.97 / "Evolution as intelligence and digital intelligence as evolution... completely alters our sense of... the present and future, and it recasts the histories of evolutionary theory and digital technology... revelatory at every step." --Stewart Brand, 9.97 / "Worth the real effort it requires... if you wonder about the evolution toward a Digital Age."--Dan Gillmor, SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, 10.26.97 / "[Dyson's] ramblings about the global mind are feeble in the extreme. But throw away these first and last chapters, and a very readable book appears." --Jack Schofield, GUARDIAN ONLINE, 10.29.97 / "A digital prehistory persuasive enough to become the established version... puts a new spin on the ideas of all those people theorizing about the new economy and all those others warning that we worship the market like a god." --Mark Williams, RED HERRING, 12.97
Rating: 
Summary: Good Historical References
Review: Another good read on the origins of modern computer science. Some interesting stories of Babbage, Hollerith and Van Neumann. I particularly enjoyed Babbage's human computers.A great read while kicking back at the beach.
Rating:
Summary: An intelligent, literary story the past and future of AI.
Review: DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES is the most well-written, absorbing, and almost poetic account you will ever read about a subject which fascinates and awes us: Is the worldwide web of machines and humans evolving into a universal, global consciousness? George Dyson is a gifted writer and thinker without an agenda; a man who grew up surrounded by genius, and by the discarded hardware of a new age. His is a new, important voice in the always crowded but barely understandable world of artificial intelligence research. Read his book; become aware
Rating:
Summary: FISH & CHIPS: WILL I HAVE TO "SWIM" AT 10GHZ?
Review: From the by now epic times of early computing systems, when giant machines with one thousandth the power of a present-day entry-level family PC filled enormous rooms, up to the current prospects of an ever-widening network of networks, the Internet: this is the technological time span on which the author deploys his powers of analysis and prediction. But throughout the book meaningful and brilliant anecdotes take us even further back into the history of human attempts at building, or dreaming of, artificial minds and knowledge-spreading mechanisms. Can a parallel between our fast-changing computing scene and nature's evolutionary schemes be established and with how much logical, scientific and philosophical legitimacy? The question is open to many answers and one of them may well be that the analogy is totally out of place and cannot take us too far, because living organisms are something completely different from virtual, digital "beings" at their most basic level, such as microprocessors, program subroutines, or even more sophisticated software objects like operating systems, telecommunications monitors or AI shells. However, following the nowadays widely-held view that new qualities may unexpectedly emerge when a given level of complexity is reached in a system, Dyson suggests that a vast, epochal process has been set in motion by the accelerating convergence of human and digital intelligence, with humans becoming more and more behaviourally machinelike and computers quickly acquiring humanlike features like, for instance, the ability to speak, understand voices, recognize things, animate and inanimate, establish and develop communications links between themselves and with mankind at large. Every new step of progress sparks unanticipated novelties, opening further horizons in surprising mixes of new kinds of communications, of new software objects and of new human adaptation stages to the digital habitats. In a Darwinian scenario which may be a bit too stretched but which imparts Dyson's vision a strong flavour of promethean intellectual charm, the single computer is not seen as a digital loner but rather as an elementary component, a cell, of an immense, worldwide neural creature spanning the continents and endowed with an extremely articulate structure. This creature keeps expanding, adhering to growth mechanisms partly resembling those of Darwin's natural selection. The growth is both in quantity and quality, with the fast evolution of nanoelectronics and software systems on one side, and the mutual behavioural solidarity of men, natural environments and the new hybrid forms of "digital biology" coming into being at an ever-quicker pace on the other side. Are we constructing a new, more powerful race of bionic successors able to eventually establish a lasting material and cognitive power over our planet? And how much will it take for this new life form to set a steady grasp on our bionic habitat? Are the doomed images of science fiction gradually changing into reality and starting to sketch a nightmarish picture of our future? And will it all be a nightmare or rather a paradise? Questions, questions: this is what all good books are about.... Of course I cannot supply any answer: all I can do is placing myself in a cautious, but realistic position and promising to have a check on the general world's situation some moment later in time, let's say 2010, maybe by rewriting an additional Amazon review on this book in the course of that year: provided Amazon and myself have, the both of us, still a sense by then.... humanly speaking!
Rating:
Summary: FISH & CHIPS: WILL I HAVE TO "SWIM" AT 10GHZ?
Review: From the by now epic times of early computing systems, when giant machines with one thousandth the power of a present-day entry-level family PC filled enormous rooms, up to the current prospects of an ever-widening network of networks, the Internet: this is the technological time span on which the author deploys his powers of analysis and prediction. But throughout the book meaningful and brilliant anecdotes take us even further back into the history of human attempts at building, or dreaming of, artificial minds and knowledge-spreading mechanisms. Can a parallel between our fast-changing computing scene and nature's evolutionary schemes be established and with how much logical, scientific and philosophical legitimacy? The question is open to many answers and one of them may well be that the analogy is totally out of place and cannot take us too far, because living organisms are something completely different from virtual, digital "beings" at their most basic level, such as microprocessors, program subroutines, or even more sophisticated software objects like operating systems, telecommunications monitors or AI shells. However, following the nowadays widely-held view that new qualities may unexpectedly emerge when a given level of complexity is reached in a system, Dyson suggests that a vast, epochal process has been set in motion by the accelerating convergence of human and digital intelligence, with humans becoming more and more behaviourally machinelike and computers quickly acquiring humanlike features like, for instance, the ability to speak, understand voices, recognize things, animate and inanimate, establish and develop communications links between themselves and with mankind at large. Every new step of progress sparks unanticipated novelties, opening further horizons in surprising mixes of new kinds of communications, of new software objects and of new human adaptation stages to the digital habitats. In a Darwinian scenario which may be a bit too stretched but which imparts Dyson's vision a strong flavour of promethean intellectual charm, the single computer is not seen as a digital loner but rather as an elementary component, a cell, of an immense, worldwide neural creature spanning the continents and endowed with an extremely articulate structure. This creature keeps expanding, adhering to growth mechanisms partly resembling those of Darwin's natural selection. The growth is both in quantity and quality, with the fast evolution of nanoelectronics and software systems on one side, and the mutual behavioural solidarity of men, natural environments and the new hybrid forms of "digital biology" coming into being at an ever-quicker pace on the other side. Are we constructing a new, more powerful race of bionic successors able to eventually establish a lasting material and cognitive power over our planet? And how much will it take for this new life form to set a steady grasp on our bionic habitat? Are the doomed images of science fiction gradually changing into reality and starting to sketch a nightmarish picture of our future? And will it all be a nightmare or rather a paradise? Questions, questions: this is what all good books are about.... Of course I cannot supply any answer: all I can do is placing myself in a cautious, but realistic position and promising to have a check on the general world's situation some moment later in time, let's say 2010, maybe by rewriting an additional Amazon review on this book in the course of that year: provided Amazon and myself have, the both of us, still a sense by then.... humanly speaking!
Rating: 
Summary: Required Reading
Review: George Dyson has the rare skill of being able to put flesh on ideas. He is particularly good at Samuel Butler(evoked in the title essay) and a few Darwins: Erasmus (a great character and, we learn here, Mary Shelly's inspiration for Dr. Frankenstein), his grandson Charles (Origin of Species), and brief mention of Charles' grandson Sir Charles Darwin (who headed the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) which employed Alan Turing, but was unable to gain support for Turing's project to build an "Automatic Computing Engine" in 1945). Selected against. The Chapter on Butler is worth the price of the book. Readers will also encounter many obscure names brought alive with interesting detail and then fit into the evolution of a familiar technology. For example, Dyson explains how wooden tally sticks, used as a primitive, secure means of record keeping in the English (twelfth century) pre-history of banking, both facilitated the establishment of a banking system and served as an early precursor and model for encryption keys. Familiar, iconographic names, Charles Babbage and John Von Neuman, to name just two examples, are shown in somewhat different, and more human, light than they are usually presented. Babbage, for example, was a prophet of telecommunications whose early ideas for what we now call packet switching revolutionized the British mail system. Babbage analyzed the operations of the British postal system and found that its costs were governed more by switching than by distance. His recommendaton of a flat rate service was introduced in 1840 as the penny post. Von Neuman's influence is described in detail in many places, for his contributions to mathematics, game theory, computing, the Cold War defense system, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. Students looking for a concise description of the history of "distributed communication" (most familiarly now the Internet) will also find a great and amusing chapter in this book. Dyson has written a remarkably compact description of how the issues and concerns of the defense establishment encouraged the creation of what we now know as the Internet. The boundlessness of the book, its avoidance of the shelter of one or a few strict disciplines, is among its greatest attractions. If anyone ever asks you what a liberal arts education is, point them to this book. There is no better book on how ideas live and grow across generations. Darwin Among the Machines is science writing, intellectual history, personal essay, and more.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive work!
Review: I am exceptionally impressed with Dyson's work here. It is the deepest and clearest look at the evolution of collective intelligence that I think could have be written. When intelligent, conscious machines of the future ask us "Where did we come from?", I am certain we will begin our answer with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Title sizzles, but book was unappetizing.
Review: I bought this book in the hope of reading some intelligent speculations by the author about evolution, machines, and AI, which is what the title suggested I would find. However, it turned out to be a history of the evolution of computers with old speculations from the computer pioneers concerning the evolution of computers injected along the way. To be fair, the author does have an overarching thesis that he tries to weave into the historical narrative whenever some past speculation seems to lend it some support. It is that the World Wide Web - that well known network of millions of computers - may some day, at a certain critical size and running who knows what software (certainly not the author) will become intelligent in some way (also not specified by the author). Come to think of it, I think the author has used the historical angle of the book - the similar speculations of the computer pioneers of the past - as a device to lend credence to his thesis - a kind of proof by consensus. I remain unconvinced, however. His arguments (where there were any; it was hard to tell his arguments from narrative) were very weak and unconvincing. To his credit, the author did a tremendous job of scholarship for the historical side of the book. However, he left the speculative side undeveloped (at the most weakly developed) and, therefore, the book was unappetizing to me.
Rating:
Summary: good idea, not as good execution
Review: I think that the ideas in this book are important ones, but the book takes on a dull, dry, monotone, which makes finishing the book its only pleasure. I find it difficult to be too hard on this book because I feel that I learned something important, but for the life of me, I can't think of what it was I gained from this book.
Rating:
Summary: I've read "Darwin..." once. Now starting to read again.
Review: If young Mr. Dyson never does anything else, he's secured a place in history with his "Darwin..." It is difficult to understand other readers grading the book less than a 10. Perhaps the 10 grades and the lesser grades mirror the graders? In any event, I have enjoyed giving it a 100% recommendation among friends: "If you don't think it's worth reading, I'll refund you money. If you'll explain, I'll buy the meal."
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