X-Message-Number: 11503 From: Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 22:51:00 EST Subject: genius to imbecile in 2 generations Hugh Hixon has sent me a copy of a Scientific American article on Turing and his little-known ideas for possible computers more capable than the Universal Turing computer, and misunderstandings of the "Church-Turing" thesis. On this, more at some later time. What I pass along now is just the mention of an Establishment imbecile. No, I don't say that Establishment is equivalent to stupidity--but that is the reality more often than many will acknowledge. According to the authors of the S.A. article, in 1948 Turing was working for the National Physical Laboratory in London when he wrote a little-known paper entitled "Intelligent Machinery," a pioneering work of artificial intelligence which investigated connectionist networks nine years before Frank Rosenblatt. Director of the Laboratory was Sir Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of the famous naturalist. Back in the 70's or 80s I reported that Darwin was an imbecile, although at that time I knew nothing of the Turing connection. His density was manifested in a book he wrote called "The Next Million Years" (Greenwood, 1973) which I reviewed for THE IMMORTALIST. That vast span, according to C.G.D., is to be dominated by.....guess what? Starvation, the Malthusian syndrome! Even though there would be "marvelous flowerings" of science from time to time, there would never be effective birth control or manufactured food or any other way of avoiding the collision between expanding population and limited food resources. That was the prestigious Darwin who dismissed Turing's paper as a "schoolboy essay." Yes, authorities still usually know more than upstarts, but when authorities goof they tend to goof big-time. Be warned. Will you allow "authorities" to vote you into the grave, or to laugh you into it? Robert Ettinger Cryonics Institute Immortalist Society http://www.cryonics.org Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11503