The Enchanted Loom: Robert Jastrow on the Human Brain, the Computer and the Future of Intelligence
The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (1981) sets out the latest advances of its day in astronomy, biology and brain science, and explains how these discoveries give us a new view of humanity: our place in the Universe, our origin and our destiny. That research leads Robert Jastrow to a startling prediction about a new form of intelligent life in the future.
Author: Robert Jastrow (1925–2008), astronomer and founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Title: The Enchanted Loom: Mind in the Universe (1981)
Format: English paperback (Simon & Schuster)
Scope: Popular science on cosmic evolution, the brain and computers
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/067147068X (ASIN 067147068X)
From the Cosmos to the Brain
The author begins by describing the cosmic setting of human existence. He then highlights the evolutionary forces that have shaped humans and their predecessors. Finally, he explores and explains intelligence itself: how and why our brain evolved, how it works, and what will replace it.
Man and His Electronic Slave
Jastrow examines the looming conflict between humanity and its powerful electronic slave, the fully developed computer. He concludes that humans are not the last link in the development of intelligence, but only one more step towards a new and more intelligent form of life. We can already see the beginning of that future: intelligence made of plastic, metal and silicon chips instead of flesh, blood and neurons.
The Title
The title comes from the great physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington, who shared the 1932 Nobel Prize for his work on the nervous system. In Man on His Nature (1940) he described the waking brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern". Jastrow uses the image as the thread of his book: from the formation of stars and planets, through the evolution of life, to the brain as the most complex structure we know, and perhaps to whatever comes after it.
The Author
Robert Jastrow trained as a physicist at Columbia University and became the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York in 1961. He later taught at Dartmouth College and was a prolific popular writer, best known for God and the Astronomers (1978), in which he argued that the Big Bang had surprising points of contact with the biblical account of creation. His later career was more controversial: he co-founded the George C. Marshall Institute, which questioned the scientific consensus on climate change.
Prophecy Then and Now
When the book appeared in 1981, personal computers were barely arriving in homes, and Jastrow’s prediction of a coming silicon intelligence seemed like science fiction. Similar ideas were soon developed by the roboticist Hans Moravec in Mind Children (1988) and later by Ray Kurzweil. Read today, in the age of machine-learning systems that write and converse, the book feels both prescient and dated: prescient in seeing that machine intelligence would become a central question, dated in its specific forecasts about how it would arrive.
Who Should Read It
Readers interested in the history of ideas about artificial intelligence, and anyone who enjoys a sweeping "big history" from the cosmos to the mind. The science of the brain has moved on since 1981, so treat those chapters as a starting point.
A Silicon Future
The era of carbon-based intelligence on Earth, he argues, is coming to an end, and a new era of silicon-based intelligence, indestructible, infinitely expandable, creative and immortal, is within our reach. In the future, the human brain and the silicon brain will merge into one. Written more than four decades ago, the book reads today as a remarkably early take on questions about artificial intelligence that now fill the news.
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