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Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine
Describes the nature of information, looks at how it is generated, stored, and communicated, and discusses the processing of text, speech, and pictures
- GenresNonfiction
411 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1989
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 17, 2025
Insane and amazing in that this guy foresaw the LLM paradigm - and many key questions of today's AI discourse - from first principles all the way back in the 80s..
Cool in that it gives some glimpse into the workings of ancient tech like the first compression algorithms, the first synthetic voice and voice recognition systems.
May be valuable to some in that parts of the book cover some basic information theory in an accessible and engaging manner!
Funny in that it also offers some quaint retro anecdotes such as 80s engineers working on compression algorithms perpetually fearing for their jobs due to the Kilobyte lines being upgraded so fast that soon all data transmission needs were expected to be met making compression redundant (lol), or calculations how many thousands and thousands of floppy disks it would require to store a library worth of text (which can comfortably fit on a microSD card these days).
Also, insights such as the absolute unimaginability of something like image recognition with 80s tech, paired with talk about 'the information age radically changing every aspect of society' really put today's tech into perspective:
How primitive 80s IT was, yet how transformatively it still affected civilization even back then. Gives you a feel for how long this deep transformation has now been ongoing.
Still, I'm giving three stars only because ultimately all of the above are interesting meta realizations, but the books' content itself is quite rambley and mostly aims to inform 80s readers about the 'future' possibilities of information technology. Most of those are obviously trivial facts of our daily lives by now!
Thus, the information density isn't very high for a 21st century reader.
Cool, interesting, inspiring book, but not a must read!
Cool in that it gives some glimpse into the workings of ancient tech like the first compression algorithms, the first synthetic voice and voice recognition systems.
May be valuable to some in that parts of the book cover some basic information theory in an accessible and engaging manner!
Funny in that it also offers some quaint retro anecdotes such as 80s engineers working on compression algorithms perpetually fearing for their jobs due to the Kilobyte lines being upgraded so fast that soon all data transmission needs were expected to be met making compression redundant (lol), or calculations how many thousands and thousands of floppy disks it would require to store a library worth of text (which can comfortably fit on a microSD card these days).
Also, insights such as the absolute unimaginability of something like image recognition with 80s tech, paired with talk about 'the information age radically changing every aspect of society' really put today's tech into perspective:
How primitive 80s IT was, yet how transformatively it still affected civilization even back then. Gives you a feel for how long this deep transformation has now been ongoing.
Still, I'm giving three stars only because ultimately all of the above are interesting meta realizations, but the books' content itself is quite rambley and mostly aims to inform 80s readers about the 'future' possibilities of information technology. Most of those are obviously trivial facts of our daily lives by now!
Thus, the information density isn't very high for a 21st century reader.
Cool, interesting, inspiring book, but not a must read!
September 17, 2007
very insightful, but there was a lot of information in there- I would recommend this only for readers willing to read a lot of stuff. I actually never even finished it!
Want to Read
October 7, 2009recommended in Information Theory by Thomas Cover and Joy Thomas
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews