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A review by thomcote
Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
2.0
The historical portions are semi-interesting, if a bit dry, but as others have pointed out in the reviews it's apparent that Dyson doesn't really understand that much about how computers actually work, and definitely is not able to make it clear in this book.
It's clear he's more interested in speculating about the future of artificial intelligence and how technology and biology interact. All well and good, and he does connect it to some speculations made by Von Neumann and others. But Dyson frequently veers off into "are we using the computers or are they using us"-type hypotheticals where he compares the Internet and neural nets to biological beings with will instead of the very human-dependent systems held together by duct tape that they are. These sections of the book gave me a strong sense that Dyson is very passionate about technology but has rarely if ever actually worked with computers at a systems level.
I also felt Dyson needed to better address the fact that the early computers he writes about were built in large part for military purposes, particularly the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Maybe because his father was Freeman Dyson and he knew some of the subjects of the book personally, or for some other reason, he rarely engages with the role the IAS computers and the people who worked on them had in the perpetration of the two largest war crimes in history and the subsequent half century of cold war. I would say there are (must be) books with more objective and knowledgeable histories of the computer.
It's clear he's more interested in speculating about the future of artificial intelligence and how technology and biology interact. All well and good, and he does connect it to some speculations made by Von Neumann and others. But Dyson frequently veers off into "are we using the computers or are they using us"-type hypotheticals where he compares the Internet and neural nets to biological beings with will instead of the very human-dependent systems held together by duct tape that they are. These sections of the book gave me a strong sense that Dyson is very passionate about technology but has rarely if ever actually worked with computers at a systems level.
I also felt Dyson needed to better address the fact that the early computers he writes about were built in large part for military purposes, particularly the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Maybe because his father was Freeman Dyson and he knew some of the subjects of the book personally, or for some other reason, he rarely engages with the role the IAS computers and the people who worked on them had in the perpetration of the two largest war crimes in history and the subsequent half century of cold war. I would say there are (must be) books with more objective and knowledgeable histories of the computer.