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432 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
”That seems reasonable,” I agreed. “My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already … and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there’s a digital world—a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine—for it to colonize when it gets there. And that’s why von Neumann and you other Martians (the five Hungarian “Martians”: John von Neumann, Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Wigner) got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life.”
There was a long, drawn-out pause. “Look,” Teller finally said, lowering his voice to a raspy whisper, “may I suggest that instead of explaining this which would be hard … you write a science-fiction book about it.”
“Probably someone has,” I said.
“Probably,” answered Teller, “someone has not.”
‘It is an irony of fate,’ observes Françoise Ulam, ‘that much of the hi-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.’
How can this be intelligence, since we are just throwing statistical, probabilistic horsepower at the problem, and seeing what sticks, without any underlying understanding? There's no model. And how does a brain do it? With a model? These are not models of intelligent processes. They are intelligent processes.
Von Neumann made a deal with “the other party” in 1946. The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get their bombs. This seems to have turned out well enough so far, because, contrary to von Neumann’s expectations, it was the computers that exploded, not the bombs.
Search engines and social networks are analog computes of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. [p. 280]
What if the price of machines that think is people who don't? (314)
"Information was never 'volatile' in transit; it was as secure as an acrophobic inchworm on the crest of a sequoia." -Julian Bigelow (137)
Our ever-expanding digital universe is directly descended from the image tube that imploded in the back seat of [Vladimir] Zworykin's car. (81)
We owe the existence of high-speed digital computers to pilots who preferred to be shot down intentionally by their enemies rather than accidentally by their friends. (116)
Von Neumann made a deal with "the other party" in 1946. The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs. This seems to have turned out well enough so far, because, contrary to von Neumann's expectations, it was the computers that exploded, not the bombs. (303)
"It is an irony of fate that much of the high-tech world we live in today, the conquest of space, the extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man's monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not." -Francoise Ulam (216)
"A clock keeps track of time. A modern general purpose computer keeps track of events." This distinction separates the digital universe from our universe, and is one of the few distinctions left. (300)
"We are Martians who have come to Earth to change everything - and we are afraid we will not be so well received. So we try to keep it a secret, try to appear as Americans... but that we could not do, because of our accent. So we settled in a country nobody ever has heard about and now we are claiming to be Hungarians." -Edward Teller (40)
Global production of optical fiber reached Mach 20 (15,000 miles per hour) in 2011, barely keeping up with the demand.Computers are ubiquitous now, and intimately interconnected... but there was a time not so long ago when they weren't. George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral is an instructive and often entertaining examination of the moment just before that amazing phase transition took place.
—p.300
“Look ... instead of explaining this ... you should write a science fiction book about it”.