14 Quotes by George B. Dyson

The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve.

We want Google to be the third half of your brain,” says Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital – reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning – the Precambrian phase. “If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it,” von Neumann admitted in 1948.

Life, which evolved into ever more complex structures, was nature’s substitute for directly bred computers,” he wrote. “Yet it was more than a substitute: it was a road – a winding road, yet one which despite all errors and hazards, arrived at last at its destination.

Random search can be more efficient than nonrandom search – something that Good and Turing had discovered at Bletchley Park. A random network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined.

The brain is a statistical, probabilistic system, with logic and mathematics running as higher-level processes. The computer is a logical, mathematical system, upon which higher-level statistical, probabilistic systems, such as human language and intelligence, could possibly be built.

This behavior can be more easily captured by continuous, analog networks than it can be defined by digital, algorithmic codes. These analog networks may be composed of digital processors, but it is in the analog domain that the interesting computation is being performed. “The purely ‘digital’ procedure is probably more circumstantial and clumsy than necessary,” von Neumann warned in 1951. “Better, and better integrated, mixed procedures may exist.”49 Analog is back, and here to stay.

In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates. – Alan Turing, 1950.

There is reason to suspect that our predilection for linear codes, which have a simple, almost temporal sequence, is chiefly a literary habit, corresponding to our not particularly high level of combinatorial cleverness, and that a very efficient language would probably depart from linearity,” von Neumann suggested in 1949.