Turing's Cathedral Quotes

“There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms. Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms?”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Random search can be more efficient than nonrandom search—something that Good and Turing had discovered at Bletchley Park. A random network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“the politicians have inherited the stone age syndrome of the tribal chieftains, who take for granted that they can rule their people only by making them hate and fight all other tribes,” Alfvén continued. “If we have the choice of being governed by problem generating trouble makers, or by problem solvers, every sensible man of course would prefer the latter.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“One of the facets of extreme originality is not to regard as obvious the things that lesser minds call obvious,”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“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.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“When the computers developed, they would take over a good deal of the burden of the politicians, and sooner or later would also take over their power,”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Monte Carlo is able to discover practical solutions to otherwise intractable problems because the most efficient search of an unmapped territory takes the form of a random walk. Today’s search engines, long descended from their ENIAC-era ancestors, still bear the imprint of their Monte Carlo origins: random search paths being accounted for, statistically, to accumulate increasingly accurate results. The genius of Monte Carlo—and its search-engine descendants—lies in the ability to extract meaningful solutions, in the face of overwhelming information, by recognizing that meaning resides less in the data at the end points and more in the intervening paths.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“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?”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“We want Google to be the third half of your brain,” says Google cofounder Sergey Brin.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“How much human life can we absorb?” answers one of Facebook’s founders,”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“The term bit (the contraction, by 40 bits, of “binary digit”) was coined by statistician John W. Tukey shortly after he joined von Neumann’s project in November of 1945.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“The question of whether something is feasible in a type belongs to a higher logical type. It is characteristic of objects of low complexity that it is easier to talk about the object than produce it and easier to predict its properties than to build it. But in the complicated parts of formal logic it is always one order of magnitude harder to tell what an object can do than to produce the object.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Where does meaning come in? If everything is assigned a number, does this diminish the meaning in the world? What Gödel (and Turing) proved is that formal systems will, sooner or later, produce meaningful statements whose truth can be proved only outside the system itself. This limitation does not confine us to a world with any less meaning. It proves, on the contrary, that we live in a world where higher meaning exists.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left,” he said, in Klári’s account, “yet it would be impossible not to see it through, not only for the military reasons, but it would also be unethical from the point of view of the scientists not to do what they know is feasible, no matter what terrible consequences it may have. And this is only the beginning!” The concerns von Neumann voiced that night were less about nuclear weapons, and more about the growing powers of machines.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“There is reason to suspect that our predilection for linear codes, which have a simple, almost temporal sequence, is chiefly a literary habit, corresponding to our not particularly high level of combinatorial cleverness, and that a very efficient language would probably depart from linearity,” von Neumann suggested in 1949.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“That seems reasonable,” I agreed. “My own personal theory is that extraterrestrial life could be here already … and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as there’s a digital world—a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine—for it to colonize when it gets there. And that’s why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all these computers, to create a home for this kind of life.” There was a long, drawn-out pause. “Look,” Teller finally said, lowering his voice to a raspy whisper, “may I suggest that instead of explaining this, which would be hard … you write a science-fiction book about it.” “Probably someone has,” I said. “Probably,” answered Teller, “someone has not.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Over long distances, it is expensive to transport structures, and inexpensive to transmit sequences. Turing machines, which by definition are structures that can be encoded as sequences, are already propagating themselves, locally, at the speed of light. The notion that one particular computer resides in one particular location at one time is obsolete.”
― George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“algorithms with names such as BigTable, MapReduce, and Percolator are systematically converting the numerical address matrix into a content-addressable memory, effecting a transformation that constitutes the largest computation ever undertaken on planet Earth.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Life, which evolved into ever more complex structures, was nature’s substitute for directly bred computers,” he wrote. “Yet it was more than a substitute: it was a road—a winding road, yet one which despite all errors and hazards, arrived at last at its destination.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“The transition to virtual machines (optimizing the allocation of processing cycles) and to cloud computing (optimizing storage allocation) marks the beginning of a transformation into a landscape where otherwise wasted resources are being put to use.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“In our universe, we measure time with clocks, and computers have a “clock speed,” but the clocks that govern the digital universe are very different from the clocks that govern ours. In the digital universe, clocks exist to synchronize the translation between bits that are stored in memory (as structures in space) and bits that are communicated by code (as sequences in time). They are clocks more in the sense of regulating escapement than in the sense of measuring time.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life,” von Neumann explained to Stan Ulam, “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“If life, by some chance, happens to have originated, and survived, elsewhere in the universe, it will have had time to explore an unfathomable diversity of forms. Those best able to survive the passage of time, adapt to changing environments, and migrate across interstellar distances will become the most widespread. A life form that assumes digital representation, for all or part of its life cycle, will be able to travel at the speed of light.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Complex networks—of molecules, people, or ideas—constitute their own simplest behavioral descriptions. This behavior can be more easily captured by continuous, analog networks than it can be defined by digital, algorithmic codes. These analog networks may be composed of digital processors, but it is in the analog domain that the interesting computation is being performed. “The purely ‘digital’ procedure is probably more circumstantial and clumsy than necessary,” von Neumann warned in 1951. “Better, and better integrated, mixed procedures may exist.”49 Analog is back, and here to stay.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“This behavior can be more easily captured by continuous, analog networks than it can be defined by digital, algorithmic codes. These analog networks may be composed of digital processors, but it is in the analog domain that the interesting computation is being performed. “The purely ‘digital’ procedure is probably more circumstantial and clumsy than necessary,” von Neumann warned in 1951. “Better, and better integrated, mixed procedures may exist.”49 Analog is back, and here to stay.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. The model (of the social graph, or of human knowledge) constructs and updates itself.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

“Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning—the Precambrian phase. “If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it,” von Neumann admitted in 1948.”
― George B. Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe