<![CDATA[io9: george dyson]]> http://tags.lifehacker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: george dyson]]> http://io9.com/tag/georgedyson http://io9.com/tag/georgedyson <![CDATA[George Dyson's New Scifi Story About How Google Achieves Consciousness]]> If you're looking for some seriously mind-blowing hard science fiction online this afternoon, look no further than a new (free online) short story, "Engineers' Dreams," by science historian George Dyson. Brother of techbiz genius Esther Dyson, George is known for his meticulous, entertaining historical investigations into secret government science projects of the twentieth century. Now he's turned his eyes to the twenty-first century, and has written a highly-informed and brainy tale of how Google could become the first true artificial intelligence. Read an excerpt below.

From the story:

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else.

I've heard many webbish futurists speculate that A.I. is going to come from search algorithms and user-generated content, but this is the first time I've ever seen anybody explain it in a plausible way. Excellent read. Image via Modern Life is Rubbish.

Engineers' Dreams [Edge via BoingBoing]

]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5026843&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[NASA's Secret Mission to Saturn in Nuke-Powered Ships]]> Back in the mid-twentieth century, a bunch of NASA engineers had a dream — a highly-classified dream — about taking a nuclear-powered rocked to Saturn. They even went so far as to plan the entire device, create design specs and concept art (some of it pictured here), and name it "Project Orion." Now science historian George Dyson has unearthed a bunch of the recently re-classified papers related to Project Orion, which his father Freeman Dyson was involved in, and put them together into a short, entertaining presentation. Essentially he's unearthed an alternate history of the space program that might have been if NASA hadn't canceled it. Check out his entertaining story below.

]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=361219&view=rss&microfeed=true