Fourteen years ago, I sat down with George Dyson to talk about “Turing’s Cathedral.”
We talked about the machines that were coming. Now they are here.
Dyson watched the digital revolution get built from the inside. His father was Freeman Dyson. Einstein’s secretary was his babysitter. He grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, playing in the halls where Turing’s ideas became von Neumann’s machines.
He gave me a line I still cannot shake:
“There is no way to completely govern the digital universe. It will always be a wildness, not a bureaucracy or a national park.”
Read it again. Then look at every #AI governance debate happening right now.
We keep trying to fence the wilderness. Dyson told us in 2012 that the fence will not hold.
He traced the exact moment numbers stopped meaning things and started doing things. That shift built our world. It also built the tools we now argue about controlling. The #Singularity was never a date on a calendar. It was always a wildness.
The conversation ran wide: von Neumann’s “deal with the devil,” the hydrogen bomb, Samuel Butler, Ted Kaczynski, artificial intelligence, and whether we survive what we are making.
This 14-year-old interview is now more current than the day I recorded it. wink
George Dyson witnessed the conjunction of mathematics & physics that brought the digital revolution. He’s been observing the relationship between nature and technology ever since. Check out his interview on Singularity 1 on 1.