George Dyson
No Time Is There
The digital big bang
When the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size. "That's just half a second of MP3 audio now," said Dyson. The place was the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The builder was engineer Julian Bigelow. The instigator was mathematician John von Neumann. The purpose was to design hydrogen bombs.
Bigelow had helped develop signal processing and feedback (cybernetics) with Norbert Wiener. Von Neumann was applying ideas from Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, along with his own. They were inventing and/or gates, addresses, shift registers, rapid-access memory, stored programs, a serial architecture—all the basics of the modern computer world, all without thought of patents. While recuperating from brain surgery, Stanislaw Ulam invented the Monte Carlo method of analysis as a shortcut to understanding solitaire. Shortly Von Neumann's wife Klári was employing it to model the behavior of neutrons in a fission explosion. By 1953, Nils Barricelli was modeling life itself in the machine—virtual digital beings competed and evolved freely in their 5-kilobyte world.
"In the few years they ran that machine, from 1951 to 1957, they worked on the most difficult problems of their time, five main problems that are on very different time scales—26 orders of magnitude in time—from the lifetime of a neutron in a bomb's chain reaction measured in billionths of a second, to the behavior of shock waves on the scale of seconds, to weather prediction on a scale of days, to biological evolution on the scale of centuries, to the evolution of stars and galaxies over billions of years. And our lives, measured in days and years, is right in the middle of the scale of time. I still haven't figured that out."
Julian Bigelow was frustrated that the serial, address-constrained, clock-driven architecture of computers became standard because it is so inefficient. He thought that templates (recognition devices) would work better than addresses. The machine he had built for von Neumann ran on sequences rather than a clock. In 1999 Bigelow told George Dyson, "Sequence is different from time. No time is there." That's why the digital world keeps accelerating in relation to our analog world, which is based on time, and why from the perspective of the computational world, our world keeps slowing down.
The acceleration is reflected in the self-replication of computers, Dyson noted: "By now five or six trillion transistors per second are being added to the digital universe, and they're all connected." Dyson is a kayak builder, emulating the wood-scarce Arctic natives to work with minimum frame inside a skin craft. But in the tropics, where there is a surplus of wood, natives make dugout canoes, formed by removing wood. "We're now surrounded by so much information," Dyson concluded, "we have to become dugout canoe builders. The buzzword of last year was 'big data.' Here's my definition of the situation: Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of making the decision to throw it away."
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primer
George Dyson grew up playing with spare parts from some of the world’s earliest computers at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. His father, Freeman Dyson, was one of the original collaborators with John von Neumann and Alan Turing in building these computers, which gave him an early glimpse into the functioning and future of digital technologies. After realizing that computers were going to, in his words, “take over the world”, Dyson built a treehouse in Vancouver to research and build upon indigenous kayak designs. While working in the wilderness, Dyson learned to track the signs of living creatures, but eventually started noticing similar clues in the digital world. The trail he found led him back to civilization, where he began studying the emergence of life-like systems within computers. By now, organic metaphors have saturated the digital landscape, but Dyson formulated, supported and propagated these metaphors well before they’d entered the mainstream.
Often called “an historian among futurists”, George Dyson’s scholarship carefully digs into the recent past to understand what lies before us. His first book, Darwin Among The Machines, gives a prehistory of computing, charting the characters that brought the computer into existence. His most recent book, Turing’s Cathedral, is the culmination of years of deep research into his childhood home, The Institute for Advanced Study. Dyson picks up where he left off in Darwin Among the Machines to examine the culture, structures, decisions, and people that led to the first computers and atomic weapons. Not merely history, Dyson explores what computers actually do when we’re using them and even while we aren’t:
We have created this expanding computational universe, and it’s open to the evolution of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than doubling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t consume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is filling up with. From the human perspective, computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction. While they’re waiting for us to come up with instructions, more and more computation is happening without us, as computers write instructions for each other. And as Turing showed mathematically, this space can’t be supervised. As the digital universe expands, so does this wild, undomesticated side.
When we turned on the first computer, we turned on a universe—a computational universe. In this universe, numbers are not merely descriptors, but also actors. They send instructions to other packets of numbers that generate more numbers, ad infinitum:
Like our own universe at the beginning, it’s more exploding than expanding. We’re all so immersed in it that it’s hard to perceive … You can’t predict how software will behave by inspecting it. The only way you can tell is to actually run it. And this fundamental unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives—not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things. This is why the digital universe will never be a national park; it will always be an undomesticated, unpredictable wilderness. And that should be reassuring to us.