While China endured a painful, century-long transformation of its culture and economy, America was the site of a different kind of revolution: a digital one. As my grandparents were swept up in the chaos of wartime displacement and my mother and father absorbed the shocks of the Cultural Revolution, a loose community of scientists and engineers in the U.S. and U.K.—from Cambridge to Boston to Northern California—were already decades into a scientific quest that would one day rank among the most profound in the history of our species.
