Image via Macmillan
George Dyson has written a curious book. The science writer behind Turing’s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines returns with Analogia, which glances at the rise of machines that transcend their instructions and chronicles the Russian colonization of Alaska and the U.S. subjugation of the Apaches and becomes a memoir from the author. The fragile lynchpin clipping Analogia together is the 1716 conversation between Tsar Peter the Great and German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who laid some challenges to the Russian ruler. One was to explore and conquer the far regions at the northwest corner of North America and another suggested digital computers (surely not Leibniz’s terminology) involving black and white marbles (representing the binary system) to encode and manipulate complex concepts and “open a new era in human affairs.” Although Peter took up Leibniz’s third idea, to establish a Russian science academy, he didn’t seem as interested in marbles as Alaska.
The American Indian wars enter Dyson’s picture through “the first large-scale high-speed wireless data communication network”—the U.S. Army’s heliographic signaling system deployed to help the cavalry track the Apaches. Along the way Dyson makes a strong case for indigenous technologies such as kayaks and throwing sticks. The surprise to many readers is that—once the wildcat frontier days had ended—Russian policy in Alaska was relatively enlightened. But then Dyson leaps from vacuum tubes to transistors, travels with the scientific refugees from Hitler’s Europe instrumental in the development of atom bombs and computers and then recalls his own low-tech phase when he lived in a treehouse.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Analogia is fascinating, alarming and enlightening. Loosely holding its many tangents together through lucid prose, Dyson’s underlying theme is that our civilization has built machines whose functions have surpassed our comprehension. But he argues that this might be a good thing, suggesting a return to the primeval world humans once “shared with creatures large and small, animated by spirits that some were privileged to communicate with but no one claimed to understand, let alone control.”
