Analogia
The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines
-
- CHF 12.00
-
- CHF 12.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020
How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand?
George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead.
From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
History, philosophy, science, and memoir blend in this unique look at how technology has remade the world and will likely command humanity's future. Historian Dyson (Turing's Cathedral) divides time into four epochs: preindustrial, industrial, a third where nature temporarily cedes control to human tech, and a final fourth, where artificial intelligence and nature will ally against humans. This touchstone argument launches readers on a chronological journey, from the role of information technology in the European exploration and conquest of North America, to how WWII-era atomic research left postwar scientists with new scientific tools and data and the development of information theory in the transition from analog to digital. Between scenes from history, Dyson weaves in details from the life of his father, the physicist Freeman Dyson, including his involvement with the first nuclear reactor designed to shut down automatically, and his own, including a period he spent living in a tree house he built himself from scavenged driftwood. This unusual book examines its themes with smooth, lyrical writing, but fails to deliver much evidence in support of its predictions, other than briefly sketching out how complex human-made networks Dyson cites an early computer-run airspace monitoring system can develop their own internal logic. It works best as a digressive look at how advances in technology have constantly reshaped the world.
