Analogia
The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control
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ISBN10: 1250798728
ISBN13: 9781250798725
Trade Paperback
336 Pages
$18.00
CA$24.99
In 1716, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent eight days taking the cure with Peter the Great at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, seeking to initiate a digitally-computed takeover of the world. In his classic books, Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral, Dyson chronicled the realization of Leibniz’s dream at the hands of a series of iconoclasts who brought his ideas to life. Now, in his path-breaking new book, Analogia, he offers a chronicle of people who fought for the other side—the Native American leader Geronimo and physicist Leo Szilard, among them—a series of stories that will change our view not only of the past but also of the future.
The convergence of a startling historical archaeology with Dyson’s unusual personal story—set alternately in the rarefied world of cutting-edge physics and computer science, in Princeton, and in the rain-forest of the Northwest Coast—leads to a prophetic vision of an analog revolution already under way. We are, Dyson reveals, on the cusp of a new moment in human history, driven by a generation of machines whose powers are beyond programmable control.
Reviews
Praise for Analogia
"This is the most delightfully peculiar book I've ever read. It's grand and intimate, personal and cosmic, and about digital computing and archaic hunter gatherers. Every paragraph is a surprise."—Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired
"George Dyson's Analogia is a wonderful combination of the universal and the intimate, the timeless and the immediate, the scientific and the humane. A wise and open-minded writer sheds new light on our world."—James Fallows, author of National Defense and Our Towns
"Analogia is a work of originality and ambition unlike any you've encountered. George Dyson transmutes memoir, history, and forecast into a page-turning tale in which Geronimo, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Catherine the Great, Kurt Gödel, and Steller's sea cow play roles. It's no less the story of the magnificent Dysons, a larger-than-life family spanning physicist Freeman, mathematician Verena, tech influencer Esther, and the author himself, an off-the-grid public intellectual. Analogia offers more serious fun than a dozen of the usual bestsellers."—William Poundstone, author of The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
"This strange, beautiful, haunting work is like a kaleidoscope of stories, its pattern locking into place at the end. Mixing the rise of computation, the brutal wars on the Apache, the construction of ancient kayaks, and a host of other matters with the author's own remarkable story, George Dyson's book will stick in readers' minds long after they close its covers. Analogia belongs on the shelf that holds Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival and Sebald's Rings of Saturn. And it can stand proudly in their exalted company."—Charles Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
"This book pierces through the fog of everyday life. Read and you will become aware of history you need to know, and of how the last few centuries of the human story sit within a much larger, epochal frame. An extra treat is insight into the remarkable Dyson family."—Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
“A thought-provoking deep dive into the ideas and stories behind some of the biggest issues of our time. One of Dyson’s best.”—Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio
"George Dyson, over the distance of a mere 250 pages, ties together the fine strands of time, space, science, and self, in a gossamer web as beautiful and strong as a spider’s. A wondrous and stellar work.”—Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
"Pleasingly eccentric [and] impossibly wide-ranging . . . Racing from the Stone Age to the coming singularity, Dyson is in fine fettle . . . [A] lively, if deeply strange, narrative . . . A thoughtful—and most thought-provoking—exploration of where our inventions have taken and will take us.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
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THE LEIBNIZ ARCHIPELAGO
From Analog to Digital and Back
In July 1716, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a seventy-year-old lawyer, philosopher, and mathematician whose “tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the...
About the author
George Dyson
