Part Five
SOMETHING THAT GOES BEYOND OURSELVES
New technology equals new perceptions. As we create tools, we re-create ourselves in their image. Newtonian mechanics gave birth to the metaphor of the heart as a pump. A generation ago, with the advent of cybernetics, information science, and artificial intelligence, we began to think of the brain as a computer. We now have arrived at a new intersection of the empirical and the epistemological. Recent technological breakthroughs in the realm of massively parallel computers and their associated algorithms are having a major impact on the images we have of ourselves and our place in the universe. We have broken through the von Neumann bottleneck of the serial computer.
W. Daniel Hillis brings together, in full circle, many of the ideas in this book: Marvin Minsky's society of mind; Christopher G. Langton's artificial life; Richard Dawkins' gene's-eye view; the plectics practiced at Santa Fe. Hillis developed the algorithms that made possible the massively parallel computer. He began in physics and then went into computer science — where he revolutionized the field — and now he has begun to bring his algorithms to bear on the study of evolution. He sees the autocatalytic effect of fast computers, which lets us design better and faster computers faster, as analogous to the evolution of intelligence. At MIT in the late seventies, Hillis built his "connection machine," a computer that makes use of integrated circuits and, in its parallel operations, closely reflects the workings of the human mind. In 1983, he spun off a computer company called Thinking Machines, which set out to build the world's fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture.
The massively parallel computational model is critical to the whole set of ideas presented in this book. Hillis's computers, which are fast enough to simulate the process of evolution itself, have shown that programs of random instructions can, by competing, produce new generations of programs — an approach that may well lead to the first machine that truly "thinks." Hillis's work demonstrates that when systems are not engineered but instead allowed to evolve — to build themselves — then the resultant whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Simple entities working together produce some complex thing that transcends them; the implications for biology, engineering, and physics are enormous.
Excerpted from The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution by John Brockman (Simon & Schuster, 1995) . Copyright © 1995 by John Brockman. All rights reserved.