Artificial Life by Steven Levy
This enthralling book alerts us to nothing less than the existence of new varieties of life. Some of these species can move and eat, see, reproduce, and die. Some behave like birds or ants. One such life form may turn out to be our best weapon in the war against AIDS.What these species have in common is that they exist inside computers, their DNA is digital, and they have come into being not through God's agency but through the efforts of a generation of scientists who seek to create life in silico.
But even as it introduces us to these brilliant heretics and unravels the intricacies of their work. Artificial Life examines its subject's dizzying philosophical implications: Is a self-replicating computer program any less alive than a flu virus? Are carbon-and-water-based entities merely part of the continuum of living things? And is it possible that one day a-life will look back at human beings and dismiss us as an evolutionary way station -- or, worse still, a dead end?
Steven Levy is Wired's editor at large. The Washington Post has called him America's premier technology journalist. His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books, and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for his book Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the past twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780679743897 |
| ISBN 10 | 0679743898 |
| Title | Artificial Life |
| Author | Steven Levy |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Random House USA Inc |
| Year published | 1993-07-27 |
| Number of pages | 400 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |