The topics covered in this chapter cover the recent and not-so-recent history of technology. For some interesting views on this history, see Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari (Harper, 2014) and Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (Chatto & Windus, 1997).
Johan Goudsblom’s Fire and Civilization (Viking, 1992) and Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009) provide interesting accounts of the prehistoric use of fire. Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants (Viking Books, 2010) provides a view in several respects aligned with my own views on the evolution and the future of technology. William Rosen’s The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention (Random House, 2010) provides an excellent account of the radical changes brought in by the industrial revolution. James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (Fourth Estate, 2011) accounts for the many reasons information became the dominant factor of modern life. Jorge Luís Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” can be found in English translation in Ficciones (Grove Press, 1962).
Of the many books covering the story of science in the twentieth century, I recommend Robert Oerter’s The Theory of Almost Everything (Plume, 2006), Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, 2003), Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (Bantam Books), and Amir Aezel’s Entanglement (Plume, 2003). Bruce Hunt’s The Maxwellians (Cornell University Press, 1991) presents in detail the way Maxwell’s ideas were developed by his followers. Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson’s Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age (Norton, 1997) tells, in detail, how the transistor changed the world. Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton University Press, 1985) may still be the most accessible entry point to quantum physics. John Barrow’s The Constants of Nature (Random House, 2010) gives a fascinating account of the many numbers that encode the secrets of the universe. Robert Lucky’s Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine (St. Martin’s Press, 1989) is an informed discussion of the technologies that created the information age. Herbert Taub and Donald Schilling’s Digital Integrated Electronics (McGraw-Hill, 1977) is still a useful reference for those who want to understand the way digital circuits are designed. John Hennessy and David Patterson’s Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (Morgan-Kaufmann, 1990) remains the authoritative source on computer architecture.
The Universal Machine (Springer, 2012), by Ian Watson, is an excellent introduction to the history of computing and the perspectives of the evolution of computers. Another perspective can be obtained from George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (Pearson, 2012). Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation (PWS, 1997) introduces the reader gently to the subtleties of languages, Turing machines, and computation. Introduction to Algorithms (MIT Press, 2001; third edition 2009), by Thomas Cormen, Charles Leiserson, Ronald Rivest, and Clifford Stein, remains the reference on algorithms and data structures. Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness (Freeman, 1979), by Michael Garey and David Johnson, is an indispensable companion for anyone working on complexity. Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences (Cambridge University Press, 1997), by Dan Gusfield, is a comprehensive graduate-level treatise on algorithms for the manipulation of strings.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice-Hall, 1995; third edition 2010), by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, remains the reference text in artificial intelligence, despite the enormous number of alternatives. Elaine Rich’s Artificial Intelligence (McGraw-Hill, 1983) provides a good idea of the attempts to approach the problem of artificial intelligence with essentially symbolic approaches, although it is now dated. Perceptrons (MIT Press, 1969), by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, is still the final word on what a single perceptron can and cannot do, and is of historical interest. The two volumes of Parallel Distributed Processing, by David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and the PDP Research Group (MIT Press, 1986) were at the origin of the modern connectionist approach to artificial intelligence, and remain relevant. The Master Algorithm (Allen Lane, 2015), by Pedro Domingos, is an accessible and enthralling introduction to the topic of machine learning. Other, more technical approaches can be found in The Elements of Statistical Learning (Springer, 2009), by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani, and Jerome Friedman, in Machine Learning (McGraw-Hill, 1997), by Tom Mitchell, in Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference (Morgan Kaufmann, 1988), by Judea Pearl, and in Reinforcement learning: An introduction (MIT Press, 1998), by Richard Sutton and Andrew Barto.
The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1986), and The Ancestor’s Tale (Mariner Books, 2004), by Richard Dawkins, are only some of the books that influenced my views on evolution. Another is The Panda’s Thumb (Norton, 1980), by Stephen Jay Gould. Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (Fourth Estate, 1999) and Nature via Nurture (Fourth Estate, 2003), both by Matt Ridley, offer stimulating accounts of the way genes control our lives. The Cell: A Molecular Approach (ASM Press, 2000), by Geoffrey Cooper, is a reference on cellular organization. Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon & Schuster, 1995) is probably one of the main influences on the present book.
Of the many books that tell the story of the race for the human genome, James Watson’s DNA: The Secret of Life (Knopf, 2003) and J. Craig Venter’s A Life Decoded: My Genome—My Life (Penguin, 2007) are probably the ones with which to get started. J. Craig Venter’s Life at the Speed of Light (Little, Brown, 2013) continues the story into the dawn of synthetic biology. Another, more equidistant view of this race can be found in The Sequence: Inside the Race for the Human Genome (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), by Kevin Davies. An account of the impact of bioinformatics in today’s society can be found in Glyn Moody’s The Digital Code of Life (Wiley, 2004). Technical introductions to bioinformatics include Bioinformatics: The Machine Learning Approach (MIT Press, 1998), by Pierre Baldi and Søren Brunak, and An Introduction to Bioinformatics Algorithms (MIT Press, 2004), by Neil Jones and Pavel Pevzner.
This chapter was influenced most by David Hubel’s Eye, Brain, and Vision (Scientific American Library, 1988) and David Marr’s Vision (Freeman, 1982). Bertil Hille’s Ionic Channels of Excitable Membranes (Sinauer, 1984) remains a reference on the topic of membrane behavior in neurons. J. A. Scott Kelso’s Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior (MIT Press, 1995) is one of the few books that attempt to find general organizing principles for the brain. Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (Norton, 1997) and Stanislas Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts (Viking Penguin, 2014) are interesting attempts at explaining how the brain works, despite all the limitations imposed by our ignorance.
Michio Kaku’s The Future of the Mind (Penguin, 2014) includes accessible and entertaining description of the many directions being pursued in brain research. Steven Rose’s The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (Bantam, 1992) and Sebastian Seung’s Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012) are respectively a classic and a recent account of the efforts researchers have been pursuing to understand how the brain works. Olaf Sporns’ Networks of the Brain (MIT Press, 2011) provides a detailed account of the methods used to study brain networks.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Harvester Press, 1979), by Douglas Hofstadter, The Emperor’s New Mind (Oxford University Press, 1989), by Roger Penrose, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (Bantam Books, 1981), by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, and Brainchildren (MIT Press, 1998), by Dennett, are unavoidable references for those who care about brain and mind issues. Of the many books about consciousness and free will, I recommend Susan Blackmore’s Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005), Tor Nørretranders’ The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size (Penguin, 1991), Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves (Penguin, 2003) and Consciousness Explained (Little, Brown, 1991), Robert Ornstein’s The Evolution of Consciousness: The Origins of the Way We Think (Touchstone, 1991), and Sam Harris’ Free Will (Simon & Schuster, 2012). Eric Drexler’s classic Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Anchor Books, 1986) is still a good reference on the topic of nanotechnology. Feng-Hsiung Hsu’s Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion (Princeton University Press, 2002) provides an excellent account of the effort behind the creation of a champion chess computer. Finally, Greg Egan’s Zendegi (Gollancz, 2010) looks so realistic that it blurs the line between science fiction and reality.
Many of the moral questions discussed in these chapters are covered by Daniel Dennett’s previously mentioned books and by his Brainstorms (MIT Press, 1981). Economic, social, philosophical, and technological issues are covered extensively in Nick Bostrom’s though-provoking and fact-filled Superintelligence (Oxford University Press, 2014). Other topics of these chapters are also addressed by science-fiction books, among which I recommend Charles Stross’ Accelerando (Penguin, 2005) and Glasshouse (Penguin, 2006), Greg Egan’s Permutation City: Ten Million People on a Chip (Harper, 1994), and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Bantam Books, 1995) and Snow Crash (Bantam Books, 1992).
On the evolution of civilizations, the future of mankind, and the possibility of the singularity, I was influenced by Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Penguin, 2005) and, of course, by Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines (Orion, 1999) and The Singularity Is Near (Penguin, 2005). Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee’s Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe (Copernicus Books, 2000) presents the arguments for the rarity of life in the universe. Caleb Scharf’s The Copernicus Complex (Penguin, 2014) is probably the most comprehensive reference on the quest for extraterrestrial life.