Darwin, Machines, and the Future: A conversation with George Dyson

The lineage of technological progress does not follow the same path as commercial development of a pre-existing technology applied to a pre-existing market. We need to be careful not to equate the two. As much as a D2C brand or SaaS startup may brilliantly bring a new market innovation to the fore, they rarely bring new technological innovations--and the potential to expand the pie rather than extract market value--with them. Technological progress is a halting, stop-and-start process, and the market isn't always welcoming to it even in cases when the economics of the innovation make sense. So, yes--if you're working on truly progressive technology, take this sense of purpose the author speaks of to heart. But tech as an industry shouldn't appropriate this purpose when it cannot follow through on it.

&gt; As Dyson says, we’re in the middle of a Black Swan<p>It’s interesting to note that Nassim Taleb who coined the term “black swan” disagrees that the current pandemic qualifies. As he points out, not only was this predictable, it was also inevitable. We have literally made movies portraying it

From the article: &quot;In terms of a distributed artificial intelligence, Dyson is a believer. Because with a distributed system, you have an opportunity for evolution, for it to find itself and to learn on its own.&quot;<p>I published a paper in this year&#x27;s AGI conference that would certainly support this line of reasoning. In my paper, &quot;AGI and the Knight-Darwin Law&quot;, I argue that if an AGI single-handedly creates a child AGI with no outside assistance, than the child is necessarily less intelligent than the parent. Thus if machines are going to create more intelligent machines, it&#x27;s necessary for the creating machines to <i>collaborate</i> in order to do so. This closely parallels a law proposed by Darwin, called the Knight-Darwin Law, a cornerstone of his Origin of Species. The KDL states that it&#x27;s impossible for one organism to asexually produce another, which asexually produces another, and so on forever; sexual reproduction is necessary or the line must terminate. (Darwin was of course well aware of seemingly-asexual species. His motivation for postulating the KDL was the observation that seemingly-asexual species <i>do</i> rarely sexually reproduce, e.g. if a rainstorm damages the part of a flower that would otherwise isolate its stamen, etc.)<p>Here is the paper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;philpapers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;ALEAAT-10.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;philpapers.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;ALEAAT-10.pdf</a>

I have no idea what George Dyson means when he says Turing had a 1D memory and Von Neumann changed it to a 2D memory. I consider both to be equally 1D with Turing having sequential access and Von Neumann random access. What I call 2D memory is a segmented addressing scheme.<p>The implementation in the form of Williams Tubes (used in Von Neumann&#x27;s Princeton machine) is indeed 2D, as is a modern DRAM or SRAM. But it is wrapped up in a 1D interface to the rest of the computer (a little less obviously so with RAS and CAS in DRAMs).

Has any body been anlemto secure funding from the NFX FAST seed program ?<p>It was supposed to be an online only application with a clear timetable.

Am I the only one who thinks it&#x27;s weird Dyson rips off the title from Samuel Butler&#x27;s seminal masterpiece? It strikes me as extremely disingenuous; certainly unbecoming his intellectual aspirations.

This is how I imagine &#x27;mad scientists&#x27; justify their work.