As a Founder, having a strong sense of direction, purpose, and context for what you are doing every day gives you an advantage. Finding the deeper meaning gives you speed and power. Your work matters. But to see how it does clearly requires us to step outside of the caves of our day-to-day lives of running startups to understand how we all got here, and where we're going. There is a rich history you are building upon, and your work - whether a corner or floor of the cathedral - is a foundation that others will build on as we collectively build the future. Dyson is an exceptional mind. His perspective brings light to our greater purpose in building new technology. Read the full essay here - https://www.nfx.com/post/why-your-work-matters/
James Currier (00:00):
This is just a chance for me to actually meet you. And I've got to say, that I am just so pleased to have you, because you have influenced my thinking for decades. I have had Darwin among the Machines on my bedside table for most of the years of my adult life. And your essay Turing's Cathedral in 2005, which was on Edge.org. Absolutely changed my thinking and was something that was needed by me and really changed how I moved through the world. And I wanted to thank you for that. And the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast today is we've got early stage technologists, early stage founders.
James Currier (00:36):
And I felt like when I read your books and your essays, I was given a great gift, which was to sort of fill in a Joseph Campbellion creation myth. A sense of direction and purpose and context for what I was doing every day. Like I, as a founder, was running around worrying about offices or W2's or calendars or venture capital ant the chaos of all that. And the frenetic ness of that. What is the meaning? What is the purpose of what we're doing? What is the context in what we're doing? And you provided that to me, with your writing. So thank you so much. And today I'm hoping to do a podcast with you that allows me to bring that to the other founders who might not have read your stuff, who might not have heard it in a way. And if I can give them chills the way I got chills, reading your stuff, that would be a great outcome for me in this. So thank you for being here George. I really appreciate it.
George Dyson (01:24):
Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, as a writer like me just sort of exists in a vacuum and you sort of
construct these worlds, it's like a novel, but it's the past. And so to find an audience is just great.
James Currier (01:35):
Absolutely. So I'd like to set the stage for a second because we're going to get back to the content of Turing's Cathedral in a second, but in the title you're referring, of course, to Alan Turing, who with John von Neumann invented the first digital computer. And could you take us back and explain to us how the digital universe sort of began to explode after World War II?
George Dyson (01:57):
Yes. And you have to be careful of saying first, because obviously it was not the first digital computer. There were lots of digital computers going back a very long time. What you can say was first was the von Neumann computer was one of the first to have a memory that worked at the speed of light rather than the speed of sound. That was the big transition that suddenly you could calculate the speed of light rather than the speed of sound that made all the difference. And Turing was abstract logician. I mean, he came from the world ... In fact, my father told me, he read that paper when it came out in the 1930s and thought it had no connection to reality at all, I mean, it was interesting piece of mathematics, but one would never have expected it to completely change our tangible day to day world. And it did.
James Currier (02:41):
That's where we started to move into digital computers that moved at the speed of light. And so we
have the atomic bomb. We have World War II, and then things start to accelerate. George Dyson (02:51):
Yes. So what Turing did was produce, which mathematicians like to do, sort of a toy model. So he produced this one dimensional model of digital computing that you had not infinite, but an unbounded, a finite, but unbounded length of paper tape, just a string of bits. And you can move this string back and forth, but to any point a 100 feet ahead, you have to go through all 99 feet of tape. And so that was very impractical, but it was very interesting. And then by series of accidents, I mean, Turing ended up in the middle of World War II, as everyone did. And that then became a real problem because you had the Germans were using digital codes to communicate with a U-boat fleet. And this question of could one machine imitate the behavior of another machine became a very influential in saving England and the rest of us during the war.
George Dyson (03:39):
When Neumann was working on the other side, Turing was working on decoding messages. Von Neumann was in America, he came to America in 1930 and he was working on the atomic bomb problem where you needed to compute hydrodynamics, radiation, hydrodynamics, and what he did, which now seems entirely obvious, but he sort of made Turing's one dimensional model two dimension. Producing, which we now absolutely take for granted that you have an address matrix where you give two coordinates like a chess board, and that gives you a location, a memory location. Sort of everything changed after that. Once, you had this original address matrix in the version that he built was 32 bits by 32 bits by 40 bits. So it was like this little array of memory. And if you add that all up, it's by our modern nomenclature, it's five kilobytes. So the number that sort of always stuck in my mind, I was born in 1953. And in 1953, there were 53 kilobytes of this high-speed memory on the entire planet. It just exploded from there.
James Currier (04:37):
It starts to grow in a sort of a geometric pattern, which is slowly at first, but then it starts to accelerate with Metcalfe's law and we get a lot more compute, a lot more storage. In 1997, you came out with this book about Darwin among the Machines. And in it, you go through the history of how we got here, how we get to 1997. And what's the motion as the intelligence of the planet creates life. The intelligence of the life creates language and culture, and that is now producing this digital silicon-based life. And we are in the midst of this moment. And that nature itself is sort of birthing these machines to life. Even though they don't seem like life to us, they really are. And Hans Moravec and others like you were talking about various forms of AI. So I got a chance to read that book and it really set a tone for me about where we were in our journey.
James Currier (05:28):
And then in 2005, you come out with the Turing's Cathedral where you having finished a talk about the future. And Google are asked by one of the young engineers, why is everyone so upset that we're digitizing the books and violating their publishing revenues? Don't they understand we're not digitizing the books for people, we're digitizing them for the coming AI. So the AI can become intelligent by reading everything that we've written. And at that moment, you realize that here's a group of people who fundamentally already believe in what you had written about eight years earlier. That we are in this movement, and at the same time SecondLife is coming and we've got virtual worlds.
James Currier (06:08):
I was on the board of that company for five years at that time. And you start to see this pattern, you see this Turing's Cathedral article that you wrote, what was it like feeling at that moment for you to sort of
encounter a group of people who are so in the midst of this process, what inspired you to write that article?
George Dyson (06:25):
In a way it was a revelation. A poor engineer, who I talked to. At that time, Google is very secretive and not supposed to be quoted, almost lost his job for saying that to me. The title came out of that. I mean, that afternoon it came out of Google and Southern end of San Francisco Bay there. See when Turing was ... He sort of in advance, he answered the critics. He wrote a paper. Why are you trying to create intelligent machines? You're going to get in trouble. Only God can create intelligent machines. And his answer was that we are no more ... The question sort of goes further is, are you going to create artificial souls? And his answer was, that we are no more creating intelligent machines than humans are when we create children. And so his exact words were, we are only creating mansions for the souls that only he, capital H can create. And that's when I walked out of there, I said, "Oh, this isn't Turing's mansion. This is Turing's Cathedral." What Google is doing at that time.
James Currier (07:22):
It's a brilliant title. It really captures the sort of religiousness of it. Right? Sort of like Joseph Campbell would say with The Hero with a Thousand Faces, this is another moment at which the hero is born. I might be an AI hero, but it's coming to be born.
George Dyson (07:34):
Yeah. So it captures also the group effort in the sense that like old cathedrals were built over hundreds of years where nobody really laid claim to any part of it. Spend your life working on one corner of a tower and someone else would spend their life working on the floor. And then after a few hundred years it was finished.
James Currier (07:52):
As I read it, I felt like I was one of the stonemasons and I wasn't at Google, but I felt like what you were saying was that Google might be in the end of the biggest company, but it can't be the only company. And it might be based in Silicon Valley, but eventually the Google employees will span the globe as they do today. And it wasn't just people in Silicon Valley or at Google, but it was everybody who was reading and contributing to Edge.org. The wonderful place where you publish this. It's that whole community of minds was birthing this together. Right?
George Dyson (08:25):
Yes. Yeah. Lots of people have been thinking about this for a long time. I was at a part of a conference a couple months ago that was canceled. So they did it of course, online. And part of it was on SecondLife. I didn't even know. I had no idea SecondLife still existed.
James Currier (08:40): They have indeed survived.
George Dyson (08:42):
Yeah. That's quite remarkable.
James Currier (08:44):
It is remarkable. It's the most unlikely of outcomes. It was either going to get big or it was going to crash
and burn and it did neither, it just hit a steady state of a half a million people and just stays there.
George Dyson (08:54):
Yeah. It's like one of these little island that's a 1,000 miles from isolated species.
James Currier (08:58):
And have you visited Google since you wrote Turing's Cathedral in 2005?
George Dyson (09:02):
Yes. Quite a number of times.
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:09:04] ... Since you wrote Turing's Cathedral in 2005?
James Currier (09:03): George Dyson (09:03):
Yes. Quite a number of times. And then I part this... Google hosts a science conference every year that I've always gone to. Which, again, was canceled this year, so that's a chance, but of course it's changed enormously. Google sort of went from nothing-garage to IBM in 10 years. It's a very different world.
James Currier (09:19):
You feel as if the progress that we've seen in the last 15 years is about what you were expecting, or has
something surprised you?
George Dyson (09:27):
What's surprising to me is how little things change. Turing and von Neumann developed this model, and it worked, and we've just been stuck in it ever since. Everything still more or less exists in this two dimensional address matrix. It's just expanded, but it's still every bit in the digital universe has a von Neumann address. And now that is finally starting to change. Finally we're starting to see shifts away from that model. But no one has come forward like touring and really given us a formal description of what this new model will be. We're just sort of stumbling around discovering it blindly.
James Currier (10:01):
So we've got a lot of people publishing ideas about what a new system would be, but nothing has really
coalesced yet?
George Dyson (10:09):
Not yet. Maybe it is coalescing and we just don't see it. And of course that's not formally my field, but what I see as an outside observer, it's just remarkable how much we're doing by just expanding the old system.
James Currier (10:22):
So 70 years into the digital revolution, things bigger, but not fundamentally different yet, but we would expect them to change soon. And one of the things I think you've said is that we have all this digital infrastructure lying around and we're putting it all together, and then we're building analog computers.
George Dyson (10:36):
Right, that's of course my personal theory of what's going on, how there's this big fundamental shift at
the moment, but it's not very explicit the way we were explicit about digital computing.
James Currier (10:46):
Could you unpack that for me about what you mean by we're now building analog computers with the
digital infrastructure?
George Dyson (10:51):
The fundamental difference between analog and digital computing, it's not what you use to compute, you can have digital computers made out of wood, and you can have analog computers made out of silicon. But digital computing, the information is in the logical sequences of bits. Every bit has an exact meaning. So in digital computing you're using discrete functions, and in analog computing you're computing with continuous functions. You're using sort of the general differences in frequency.
George Dyson (11:20):
And in nature, we see this very, very clearly divided; that nature has learned to use digital computing, which is very good for error correction, we use digital computing in our genetic systems because they correct the errors from one generation to the next, or introduce the errors that lead to improvement. But in nature, all real-time control is done with analog computing because it's much more adaptable and robust. There is no programming, there's no algorithm.
George Dyson (11:48):
So what happened was after World War II, we had all this analog equipment lying around, war surplus vacuum tubes and radar screens, and so on. And this very small group of odd balls, which is what Turing's Cathedral is about, put that equipment together and built... realized Turing's vision of digital computers.
George Dyson (12:07):
And now I see the exact, this has sort of gone full circle, and the reverse is happening. We have all this infinite amount of digital computing, it's effectively free, and a lot of companies and a few individuals are starting to starting to assemble that equipment into big analog computers, where the meaning and the information is in the continuous functions rather than discreet functions. If you look at like, the YouTube network doesn't care what the bits actually say, it just cares about the magnitude of the stream of bits and the frequency at which things connect. Information is in the topology of the network rather than the actual meaning of the code. And for the same reason it works so well in nature, it works very well in these large systems we're seeing like Google or Amazon or Facebook
James Currier (12:53):
Got it. So what they care about is how many people are watching that video and how frequently; they don't really care what the bits are?
George Dyson (12:58):
Right. And you build exactly... you start building circuits, the way we built circuits with... In vacuum tubes the streams of electrons are treated just as a continuous function. And we're doing that now. Streams of bits are treated like vacuum tubes treated streams of electrons.
James Currier (13:14):
And you would see that not as positive or negative, just as interesting?
George Dyson (13:16):
Just as the next stage in evolution. I mean, evolution never stopped. We had the digital revolution to get
where we are, but it's not going to stay there.
James Currier (13:24):
Could we talk about AI for a bit? So if we look at Turing and his paper, Computing, Machinery and Intelligence, which you've called a founding document of the quest for true AI, what do you think most people are still getting wrong about AI?
George Dyson (13:39):
Well they're anthropomorphizing it the same way we... The other big... there's this search for AI, and
then there's the search, which is a big part of my childhood, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
George Dyson (13:50):
And I think we sort of have both of those things wrong. My personal third angle on that is the search for other intelligent creatures on Earth. I spent a lot of time on the northwest coast among killer whales, who I firmly believe are highly intelligent. It's a nonhuman intelligence, and we have trouble communicating with it.
George Dyson (14:08):
So we tend to assume that the other intelligence is going to be like us. And we look for language and things like that. I think that's a dead end. Other kinds of intelligence are going to be other kinds of intelligence. We're getting very good at building imitations of our own intelligence, sort of captive systems.
George Dyson (14:26):
I'm much more interested myself in wild AI, AI that it will evolve on its own and be very different from
us.
James Currier (14:32):
And be adapted to it's [crosstalk 00:14:33]-
George Dyson (14:33):
Yeah, and may operate on a completely different timescale. There's no reason that other intelligence has to operate on our timescale. It could be operating much faster or much slower.
James Currier (14:42):
Or operating in non-carbon.
George Dyson (14:44):
Yes, or in completely different ways; perhaps not using language the way we use language at all. We
tend to equate intelligence with language.
James Currier (14:50):
Right. And so we're making progress with AlphaGo and other forms of human intelligence mimicry, both in task, and in speed, and approach. But that's the only one sliver; maybe akin to the amount of visible light spectrum we can see with our eye [crosstalk 00:00:15:04]-
George Dyson (15:05):
Right. AlphaGo is interesting because Go, if you watch a couple of really good Go players, they're sort of almost non-human anyway. I mean, it really is a alien way of operating. And so getting a machine that can do that is a very interesting step.
James Currier (15:17):
Interesting. So you think it's starting to be quite a different flavor of intelligence, right on the edge of
what humans naturally do?
George Dyson (15:24):
Right. That's what I think. And also personally, that paper of Turing's is famous for what we call the Turing test, which is this idea that you can determine whether a machine is intelligent by having a conversation with it.
George Dyson (15:36):
And I believe exactly the opposite. The test of a real true AI would be intelligent enough not to reveal its intelligence to us. So the fact that we don't have machines that pass the Turing test is no proof that there are not intelligent machines.
James Currier (15:51):
When you say that there are intelligent machines somewhere, you're saying somewhere in our vast digital landscape that we've built over the last 40 years, 50 years, there is some form of intelligence potentially lurking out there that is operating... and not, "Lurking," because that sounds nefarious. That's what you mean when you say, "There's no proof there's no intelligence."
George Dyson (16:08):
It could it be, it doesn't necessarily... I'm a huge skeptic about discreet artificial intelligence, that we will ever have this system in a box that you can put in your car that will do everything; but in terms of a distributed artificial intelligence, I'm a believer.
James Currier (16:23):
Because with a distributed system, you have an opportunity for evolution, for it to find itself.
George Dyson (16:28):
And to learn on its own without-
James Currier (16:29):
I'd love to read something quickly here, something you wrote, if you'll permit me, because I found it so
fascinating. And I want to quote it for our listeners before I ask you about it.
James Currier (16:37):
You wrote, "For 30 years, I've been wondering what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted autonomous power supply. But the real sign I suspect would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI."
James Currier (17:08):
So my question is, is that what we have today? Is that what Silicon Valley and the extended connectivity of that group in Bellingham, Washington and whatnot... is that it, a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually-nourished people nourishing this potential AI? Is that where we are?
George Dyson (17:23):
Yeah. So of course that paragraph is dated by... that was written after that visit to Google, where it just was like a magical kingdom at that time. I mean, people were getting their hair cut, swimming pools on the campus, and to me it was this incredible sense of, "Here's this machine that is absolutely making life paradise for the people who take care of it, making them wealthy and keeping them healthy, taking care of their..." There's a daycare taking care of the children. To me, that would be exactly what... if you're going to have a real AI, that's how people who take care of it would be taken care of.
James Currier (17:54):
Got it. And this was, again in 2005, when you saw that. And you go back now and it's similar in many
respects, and certainly in that respect, yes?
George Dyson (18:02):
Right, the problem now is that-
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:18:04]
James Currier (18:03):
Many respects and certainly in that respect. Yes.
George Dyson (18:03):
Right, the problem now is that now it has a little bit of the edge of, there's a little bit of a darker side to it now. I think, I mean, at that time it really seemed like this unbelievable happy play, which of course was maybe scary in its own way. Whereas now you really, you really do get a sense that the sort of rules and regulations are very thinly below the surface.
James Currier (18:20):
When you say that rules and regulations imposed by Google on itself, or by Google running up against
the laws of the land?
George Dyson (18:26):
No, by the regulations that regulate the company. I mean, I'm no expert on Google, but I think now it's become a much more organized has to, I mean to be that size, you can't have that happy playground that they had. At that time it really was a horizontal rather than vertical company. I mean, everybody was in contact with each other.
James Currier (18:43):
It was smaller and worth a lot less. And when you mentioned a dark side, could you talk to me about that? What sort of dark side are we experiencing as we move through this next phase of the development of the AI?
George Dyson (18:53):
And of course now that's very popular and fashionable to talk about that, but just the fact that people's lives are being increasingly controlled and regulated and, generally often in a positive way, but it's very easy for that to shift the other way.
James Currier (19:06):
I mean, one of the things I feel that as dramatically shift since 2005 is really a focus on money, right? So I think, Amazon is now worth $1.5 trillion or something, and you've got Facebook at $650 and Google just passed a trillion of its value and Apple as well. 15 years ago, none of this was true. These were small companies relative to the rest of the economy, the rest of wealth generation, and as the wealth has increased their the focus on the philosophy, which is where I would see, your great role being played here, George. It tends to get pushed to the background. And I feel like in 2005, there was more air, there was more oxygen and more attention being paid to the philosophy. Am I wrong about that?
George Dyson (19:48):
No, you're very right that time, there was still a connection to this, the origin myth that you're so interested in. I mean, the fact that Apple in particular, I mean, it was easy to imagine Apple becoming a big computer company. To imagine that they would become a big company in the sense of bigger than any company in the world is unthinkable. But at that time, even in turn of the century, there were still, and still are very few.
George Dyson (20:10):
I mean, there were people at Apple who were there from the beginning, I mean, who had been, academic mathematical logicians playing with computers, maybe doing the odd database for the
government or something and nowhere near turning any of that into a consumer product. And that all happened so quickly. The same at Google. I mean, Google came out of academic world.
James Currier (20:28):
It's almost as if the personality of those working on the AI has been shifting a bit from this cheerful hobbyist, technical cheerful hobbyist to more of a driven, purposeful, money conscious type of a professional as the whole thing has gotten bigger and vat. And in terms of the money and the people, it touches, it seems as if that means we're moving into a new phase here.
George Dyson (20:50):
Yes. The cycle is very much faster. I mean, if you build any academic AI group within what used to be the ivory tower, that talent Turing world, now in no time at all, it usually gets acquired or spun out. As either, as a company, or as part of one of these existing companies, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something to be careful of.
James Currier (21:14):
Yeah. It's definitely a shift. And is there anything that you'd love for, some of the early founders in their twenties and early thirties who are embarking on startups, are there some things that you hope that they are cognizant of as they move forward?
George Dyson (21:27):
One of my careers or the one that brings me here is I'm a historian. So I dig around in the past. It's like looking for fossils and you find these things and you're showing them to people. And that's why I put those stories in my books, because I think if you work in this field today, those creation myths are really important. Look at computing, it has an old testament, and the new testament. The old testament was just these logicians and philosophers.
George Dyson (21:52):
And then in the new testament it became real, people started building machines and that moment between those two eras is where it all comes from. And if, I think for people who work in the field, it's a good thing to go back and look at what the people wrote and said at that time. And people of course, Turing and Von Neumann, but there were many others. And also the engineer who get always so little credit, the engineers who actually build the things and get them to work and have to understand things just as much, if not more than the scientists, but somehow the scientists get the voice and the engineers usually don't.
James Currier (22:24):
Yeah, because you've mentioned that while digital computers were formalized by Turing and delivered by Von Neumann, it was actually Julian Bigelow, who was the engineer there, and he doesn't seem to get much credit.
George Dyson (22:34):
No. He's the missing link and had an unbelievably prophetic, clear view of what was wrong with the Von Neumann system and how it should be improved. And he was just not listened to, he would have been generations ahead.
James Currier (22:47):
And this was back in the '50s? Is this when that-
George Dyson (22:49):
Yeah. He started working with Norbert Wiener in World War II on anti aircraft fire control. But when, so when Von Neumann needed an engineer, Bigelow was the guy. But he immediately, I mean, the mission was to build this machine, to do the hydrogen bomb calculations, but they wanted to build a second machine, and a third machine and he wanted to make them completely different. He saw the huge flaws in this Von Neumann architecture that had only used a fraction of a percent of the power of the machine. But we got stuck in that. Only beginning, I mean, only a few of our processors, used for graphics, GPU and so on are slightly beginning to escape from that Von Neumann. Von Neumann himself, he only ever took out one patent, it was for a method of non Von Neumann computing.
James Currier (23:33):
So it feels as if we have the philosophers and the logisticians, we've got the engineers and now we've got the financiers, these three groups of people, and do you empathize more with one, the idea person, the execution person?
George Dyson (23:45):
Well, I'm personally I'm on the side of the engineers because that's just the way I was as a child. I just was fascinated by nuts and bolts and wrenches and tools and machines. Mother was a philosopher and logician so I guess I have a soft spot for that world too. And then you had these unique people who like to do both, and they were very important.
James Currier (24:05):
How do you think we could do a better job of listening to these engineers?
George Dyson (24:07):
Elevate their voice and their status. I mean, that's a good thing about the Silicon Valley ecosystem that it does, a lot of these companies are built by engineers and funded because they have some engineering innovation. So that's changed, but in the academic world, it was always the other way around. That if you, you were tainted if you did any engineering, you were no longer a pure scientist.
James Currier (24:27):
Interesting. It was almost shunned to do the hard work. To do the work by hand was lower status.
George Dyson (24:32):
Right. War time, that's I think one of the reasons this all happened after World War II. War time had a wonderful way of breaking down those barriers, where suddenly the physicists were allowed to work with high explosives and the mathematicians were allowed to work with electronics.
James Currier (24:45):
I'd love to chat with you about also our evolving relationship with technology. At one point, when you were younger than you are now, you really rejected hi-tech right. I mean, you were canoeing or kayaking for months at a time. You were living in a tree house for years, 90 feet above the ground up in the
Pacific Northwest there. And what was the catalyst for that? How were you thinking about life at that point? You were in your early twenties, I guess.
George Dyson (25:08):
Yes. I moved to Canada when I was 17. So a big part of it was just escaping from the deadly boredom of, I dropped out of high school and I found Princeton to be the most boring place in the world and tried to get as far away as I could. And our family, my sister Esther, we have a mixed up extended family. It was a bunch of siblings, but Esther and I are the only siblings that, we have the same mother and the same father. And that's this unique bond thing.
George Dyson (25:33):
Nature does that for a reason. I mean, two kids and they're just completely different because I think nature is somehow hardwired that it's a good survival strategy to not have both your kids, do the same thing. So Esther went into the hi-tech world and I went 180 degrees the other way off to the Canadian wilderness, not against technology. I mean, I love chainsaws and diesel engines, electronics and so on, but just get away from the centers of civilization.
James Currier (25:57):
You talk about it as separate from the world of man.
George Dyson (26:00):
Yeah. I spent a lot of time out in the wild with nothing but animals and forests and trees and oceans and
boats. My passion was boats.
James Currier (26:07):
Do you typically do that alone or do you do that with small groups or?
George Dyson (26:10):
I did that mostly alone, but I love being in groups. When I would, work on a fishing boat or a tug boat
with a crew, I found that just great. A lot of the stuff I did completely alone.
James Currier (26:20):
And so you're doing that. And then what brought you back into this scientific analysis? What brought
you back to the world of math?
George Dyson (26:26):
That's actually, it's pretty much Esther, to her credit or her fault or whatever, but she was very generous about, back then in the 1980s, she was running this computer conference. It became the computer conference for the growing personal committee. It started out as a semiconductor conference and she invited me, my girlfriend at the time was a photographer. So she hired girlfriend who I married. And so we would get to go to her conference every year. It's like, I just was brought out of the woods into the beginning of that whole world and found it fascinating to watch and observe, but that's definitely otherwise I think-
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:27:04]
George Dyson (27:03):
... and found it fascinating to watch and observe, but that's definitely, otherwise, I think I would never
have gotten into that world at all.
James Currier (27:06):
That's fascinating that that's how you came back. And I've been to that conference many times, and it was indeed the tech conference of the year and in this country, for sure. And it was interesting because it was, "The Conference," most things happen there and so it kept everyone on the same page in a way. Now, as industries become much more far-flung, it's a little bit harder to keep all the edges together, to take a scope of what it all is. But, okay, I see how you came back through that. That makes sense.
George Dyson (27:31):
Yeah, Esther had a very extremely sensible policy of encouraging families, having family activities and stuff to try and avoid the sort of CEOs who come just for the afternoon, give their talk and leave. It was like, you wanted to go to that conference for the whole three days.
James Currier (27:46):
That's right. There was a humanity to it. There was a feeling to it in the same way that you must've had that feeling at Google. Those special happy, intellectually well-nourished people who are actually connecting both physically and emotionally, intellectually there. Interesting.
James Currier (27:58):
So how do you think we are doing, we humans, with our relationship to technology today?
George Dyson (28:04):
I think we're completely disoriented, and lost our ... I wouldn't say lost our bearings, but we're flying blind, would be the metaphor or something. We're moving so fast, we don't really, can't really see where we're going. It's just rushing forward. And particularly not just the technology side, but the biotechnology side, which everyone talks about the same way we talk about computing. "Oh, this stuff is going to happen," but it now is happening, real full scalability to edit genetic information. And so on, it opens an entirely new world. In the language of genetics, the machine language of cells and the machine language of computers are much closer to each other than to human language.
James Currier (28:44):
No, it's true. We had a podcast with Trevor Martin, who's the CEO of Mammoth Bio-Sciences, which is now the largest IP repository of CRISPR IP in the world. And we were talking with him about this new found ability to simply and inexpensively edit genes is going to unleash a whole set of new risks, as well as the opportunities that everyone can see, we should tread carefully, for sure.
George Dyson (29:08):
Yeah. The other way to look at it is that life has done this already and is very good at it. We had cells that were reproducing very well. The earth was covered in slimy life, but didn't have replication, or at least that's my belief. And then, nature figured out how to adopt these self-replicating almost viruses to build our genetic system. And I think life will just do that again. The technological systems we're building for replicating and distributing genetic information, it's ...
George Dyson (29:39):
One way of looking at it is that we are using life and we're building these bio-technologies. The other way to look at it is exactly the opposite way around, it's life using our technologies to build better, more distributed forms of it.
James Currier (29:51):
Well, I think that's right. And I remember the analogy, that we did not cultivate wheat, but that wheat
cultivated us to serve its own purpose.
George Dyson (30:00): Exactly.
James Currier (30:00):
And do you believe that we're going to continue to accelerate this rapidly? I would agree that we are disoriented at this point, given the speed of change of our own technologies. And it's growing exponentially now, we're getting into the steeper part of the curve, I would say, in the last 20 years, 30 years. And do you think it's going to continue? For the next, as Kurzweil and singularity university people say it to be, so that it will eventually be unrecognizable to us? Or do you think there's going to need to be a shift? A downshift, if you will.
George Dyson (30:27):
Well, it's an interesting time to ask that question. First of all, I strongly disagree with Ray Kurzweil. The things he is hoping for terrify me, and the things he's afraid of don't scare me at all. But yeah, I think we're on a very different trajectory.
George Dyson (30:42):
And then your question about limits, of course, we're in the middle of this very interesting Black Swan case where we thought everything was just rushing forward and then suddenly we hit this limit. "Oh, what if there's actually just a good old fashioned, novel virus that ..." The problem there is that whatever you argue about the origins of this virus, it's a bat virus that has learned to live and adapt and survive among bats, or at least call it mammals that live by the millions in caves. That's how we live. What we need to do is stop acting like bats, get out of the caves. But we're not. Across the street from here is a bar. That bar is full now of people. They're just flying back into their dark cave.
George Dyson (31:19):
From a technology point of view, this may be a really positive inflection point, the reset or reboot. You see things like, of course, Amazon is doing great. Systems are adapting to this very well, and other institutions like your local bar are not going to do well. But it's a huge, unexpected shift.
James Currier (31:36):
A reset or a slowing of the curve could come in one form or another, but it might just accelerate different parts of the curve, as this all mathematically plays out as the intelligence that we represent is going to be part of bringing the next intelligences around, as well. So what are you working on now, George?
George Dyson (31:52):
I just finished a new book that took me seven years. Turing's Cathedral took about 10.
James Currier (31:58):
And that came out in 2012, about seven years after the initial article.
George Dyson (32:02):
Yes, so that seems to be about what it takes me. The remarkable thing about Turing's Cathedral is that that group of people who I so admire, the Julian Bigelow group with von Neumann. And they conceived of the project, found the money, built their own work benches, built the machines, built the computer, and solved these nuclear weapons problems, and start working on climate and weather and everything else. They did all that in less time than it took me to write about it, which is the other message for the today's entrepreneurs and stuff. It's just, that's the reason to look back at these heroic efforts. And that's where, of course, the pandemic crisis is the same thing. It's going to push biotechnology the same way World War II, pushed physics. Everybody's working on this biological problem. And that in the end, will have all sorts of secondary effects.
George Dyson (32:52):
So I finished a new book and then there it is. It'll be out in a few weeks. So I was wondering whether they would delay it or not, but it's on schedule. Analogia, and it's in some ways a sequel to Turing's Cathedral, but in a very strange, it's a very, very odd book. It opens with the Russians coming to Alaska. It opens with Leibniz trying to take over the world with digital computers, and then come convinces Peter the Great to go to America. So it's a book of stories, it's written much more as a narrative. There's a chapter about the war against the Apaches. And then some very prophetic but possibly dark views of the future. And this is what we talked about earlier, this transition from the digital revolution back to an analog revolution, that's the theme of the book.
James Currier (33:36):
Got it, got it. Well, I look forward to seeing it. It will come up this summer, then.
George Dyson (33:40):
Yeah, August 18th, and heavily illustrated and very short. It's more of the length of Darwin Among the
Machines rather than a big thick book like Turing's Cathedral.
James Currier (33:51):
Well, George, this has been a real pleasure talking to you today. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you for everything you've done for all of us who have been following your writings and been inspired to feel some purpose and direction and meaning in the digital world we're building together.
George Dyson (34:02):
Thank you. And it's great to talk to you and have an audience out there who's looking to the future.
James Currier (34:07): Absolutely. Thank you, sir.
George Dyson (34:09): Thank you.