Intelligence and the Machines That Have It Book

George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, has no formal education; as a teenager he went to Canada, where he lived in a treehouse for three winters and built baidarkas instead of pursuing a more conventional career. He wanted to write a history of I am not sure what: computer science? artificial intelligence? evolutionary computation? but he is unqualified to do this, and does not realize that it is the case. I might smile at Nadine Gordimer's "Sam missiles" or "a reactor based on the harmless pebble a small boy takes home from the beach" but she is not claiming expertise in weaponry or nuclear energy. When George Dyson writes about "metalanguages, such as Java, that allow symbiogenesis to transcend the proprietary divisions between lower-level languages in use by different hosts" or claims that Turing's Automatic Computing Engine "foreshadowed the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) architecture that has now gained prominence after fifty years" it is not funny.