After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence

Bailey's ruminations bear rereading now that five years have passed since their first appearance. We have survived the advent of the new Millennium, and we have found once again that, after the divine afflatus, human intellect reigns supreme in the cosmos.This is not to say that Bailey's postulations have no merit. The advances of the computer age, particularly in the still-infant and arcane discipline of artificial intelligence, continue to fascinate us and to challenge us. Yet even with the burgeoning networks and the increasingly powerful integration of humanity and its machines, the surprises offered by the observations of the young and young-in-spirit still outdo those of scientific teams. I suspect that pattern, as old as civilization, will prevail.The chapter in this book that most demands reflection-and rereading-is Chapter 17, where Henry David Thoreau is pitted against the myriad forces of the information age. As early as 1978 I was criticized by my literary colleagues for teaching the metaphysician of Walden Pond. At the time, I was working with Dr. Louis Uhle of USC on patterns of word usage in Renaissance English (primarily dramatic) texts as a scientific measure of authorship attribution. Yet Thoreau offered my students access not to data, but to genius, and that, not data, intrigued them.Another colleague from the life sciences took his students to the college lawns to look as if for the first time at the patterns of dandelion blossoms, evoking the kinds of questions that not much later spawned Chaos Theory. My maths colleagues, intrigued with what I was doing with language, proceeded to AI, and my psychology colleagues drifted off to work some of the same ideas in formulating new network designs at Bell Labs.Bailey's own accounts of elementary school children discerning the grounds for identifying a species that had remained unperceived by the "experts" reminds me of those halcyon days-before I also drifted into "line and circle" problem solving of the probabilistic kind. We had no idea we were participating in a revolution of thought, and perhaps that was just as well.A metaphor Bailey uses in After Thought, particularly in Chapter 17, is that of understanding the behavior of rivers, and I think he was trying to suggest something about the elusive construct of Nature, which, if we should only drop our preconceptions and listen, would always surprise us. The Mississippi, like the Nile (or the Yangtze, for that matter), remains a keen scientific concern, but offers no easy understanding.Yes, we have the potential to engage in collaborative enterprises involving computers and networks around the globe-the greatest parallel processing enterprise, in size and scale of any age. The question is, how much closer to essential truths this endeavor brings us?Bailey would have us understand that we are about to transcend the time of maths as we know them and that we shall reach a new plateau of pattern recognition that renders the

Bailey does an excellent job of combining computer theory with history, mathematics, economics and philosophy. I can only guess that the people who gave it a single star must have had difficulty with Bailey's style which, at times, requires a measure of diligence to locate the point.

This is a delightful book! Bailey brings a historian's eye to an intellectual history of mathematics, and how our tools for calculation shape the things we calculate. Every page is full of details --- Galileo's massively-parallel thought-experiment with beads on a wire; how the shift from hand-written manuscript to movable-type printing press sped the replacement of geometry with algebra; Kepler's lifetime of calculation; the intriguing suggestion of how different was Babylon's astronomy, which was not based on geometry. Bailey sees the history of mathematics filtered through three phases: the mathematics of place (geometry), the mathematics of rate (algebra to calculus), and now, with the emergence of computer tools, the mathematics of change and relationship (chaos theory, neural nets, simulation).

James Bailey boldly articulates the new communications paradigm for the bio-information age. His fascinating account of the evolution of human thought and its present transition to relying on the "alien logic" of machine parallelism reaches beyond the history of human socio-evolution to the very fabric of our existence as intelligent beings. This book is an A++++. I reccomend it to all sentient beings.....

After Thought delivers a convincing argument that humans think in patterns that optimize biological life -- slow "switches" and massively parallel processes in "meat processor." New silicon life, on the other hand, can choose other routes. Rather than using traditional mathematics (equations), computers may discover truths by massive databases or other unknown techniques. The author gives the example of how our intellectual paradigm changed from geometry in classical times to equations after the renaissance. We are ready for a new paradigm and nonbiological or semi- biological machines may supply the solution. For some, however, this is an unnerving development. Solutions and knowledge may be developed which we (humans) cannot trace to "first principles" or even follow. Good read for those who like to think. If you read the book "The Man who fell to the earth" you'll remember one key point made by the alien -- "On earth you only had one intelligent species." Maybe that is about to change. Bill Yarberry Houston, Texas