Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

by George Dyson

What about von Neumann’s question—whether machines would begin to reproduce? We gave digital computers the ability to modify their own coded instructions—and now they are beginning to exercise the ability to modify our own. Are we using digital computers to sequence, store, and better replicate our own genetic code, thereby optimizing human beings, or are digital computers optimizing our genetic code—and our way of thinking—so that we can better assist in replicating them? In the beginning was the command line: a human programmer supplied an instruction and a numerical address. There is no proscription against computers supplying their own instructions, and an ever-diminishing fraction of commands have ever been touched by human hands or human minds. Now the commands and addresses are as likely to be delivered the other way: the global computer supplies an instruction, and an address that maps to a human being via a personal device. That the resulting human behavior can only be counted on statistically, not deterministically, is, as von Neumann demonstrated in 1952 with his Probabilistic Logics and the Synthesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Components, no obstacle to the synthesis of those unreliable human beings into a reliable organism. We are returning to the landscape as envisioned by von Neumann in 1948: with a few large computers handling much of the computation in the world. The big computers, however, are not physically centralized; they are distributed ac...