Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

by George Dyson

Even in a perfectly deterministic universe, there is no consistent method to predict the ending in advance.

Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.

Turing’s question was what it would take for machines to begin to think. Von Neumann’s question was what it would take for machines to begin to reproduce.