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In 2005, George Dyson, a historian of science and technology, visited Google at the invitation of some Google engineers. The occasion was the sixtieth anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. After the visit, George wrote an essay, “Turing’s Cathedral,” which, for the first time, alerted the public about what Google’s founders had in store for the world. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of his hosts after his talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

George offers a counternarrative to the digital age. His interests have included the development of the Aleut kayak, the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications, the origins of the digital universe, and a path not taken into space. His career (he never finished high school, yet has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria) has proved as impossible to classify as his books.

He likes to point out that analog computing, once believed to be as extinct as the differential analyzer, has returned. He argues that while we may use digital components, at a certain point the analog computing being performed by the system far exceeds the complexity of the digital code with which it is built. He believes that true artificial intelligence—with analog control systems emerging from a digital substrate the way digital computers emerged out of analog components in the aftermath of World War II—may not be as far off as we think.

In this essay, George contemplates the distinction between analog and digital computation and finds analog to be alive and well. Nature’s response to an attempt to program machines to control everything may be machines without programming over which no one has control.

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