In the European, science historian George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, is interviewed about evolution and innovation. An excerpt from the Q&A:

“The European: Is the Internet increasing the innovative potential of mankind? 

Dyson: It is very easy to be a pessimist: There is no good music anymore, no good art. But maybe we have to recognize that innovation is still happening, albeit in very different ways. We might feel that all that time people spend on Facebook is a great loss for the creativity of the human species, but maybe that is not true.

The European: I expected a somewhat different answer: We used to have only human intelligence, and now that has been supplemented by computational intelligence. So we would expect the potential for innovation to become supplemented as well. 

Dyson: Yes and no. The danger is not that machines are advancing. The danger is that we are losing our intelligence if we rely on computers instead of our own minds. On a fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves: Do we need human intelligence? And what happens if we fail to exercise it?

The European: The question becomes: What progress is good progress? 

Dyson: Right. How do we maintain our diversity? It would be a great shame to lose something like human intelligence that was developed at such costs over such a long period of time. I spent a lot of my life living in the wilderness and building kayaks. I believe that we need to protect our self-reliant individual intelligence—what you would need to survive in a hostile environment. Few of us are still living self-reliant lives. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be cautious not to surrender into dependency on other forms of intelligence. I am a historian of science, I believe in preserving the past.

The European: Are there any predictions for the future we can make, based on these lessons from the past? 

Dyson: The universe is a probability space in which possible things can happen. Over the last fifty years, we have developed a combined human-computational intelligence that is able to search that space at a tremendous rate. But we have no way to predict what might happen in the future to that space of possibilities. The whole idea of species might be called into question. Darwin called his book On the Origin of Species, but evolution really isn’t limited to species. The next step might be the end of distinct species and the beginning of a more symbiotic life.” (Thanks Browser.)

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In 2002, George Dyson recalls the spectacular Project Orion: