Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence

Dyson traces the idea that machines might evolve intelligence from its seventeenth-century origins — Hobbes's Leviathan as artificial organism, Leibniz's calculus of reason — through Samuel Butler's 1863 essay that gave the book its title, to von Neumann's cellular automata and the global telecommunications network of the 1990s. The argument is not that machines will become conscious but that evolutionary dynamics apply to technological systems whether we intend them to or not. Dyson draws on deep historical research, connecting Turing, Barricelli's digital organisms at the IAS, and the architecture of the early internet into a single lineage. The result has considerably more historical depth than most books on machine intelligence, treating three centuries of ideas about self-reproducing systems as a coherent intellectual tradition. Written before the current AI wave, it reads now as remarkably prescient about the trajectory of distributed computation.