Book Review: Turing's Cathedral, by George Dyson
I was sufficiently fed by Gleick's book "The Information" to further pursue our recent history and how we arrived in this "Digital Age". George Dyson, yes, Freeman's son, does an almost overwhelmingly good job of documenting the who, where, when, what over decades, and in some cases centuries.
My uncomfortable feelings from "The Information" are continuing to grow - how odd that all these people worked so hard and most of us know absolutely nothing about them. Von Neuman's words of feeling compelled to work hard and fast to get these new inventions out seem common for those leading this change. Compelled by war, to create these new bombs and computers before the Germans; then after the war compelled to create more bombs and bigger computers quicker than the Russians. Now are all compelled because we want to increase the pace of business, making money, gossip, porn, movies, games - we are still just as compelled. The situation in the 1940s/50s seems like a play script in its impossibility. Do I usher in this new age with all its forms of killing, or do I sit back, do nothing, and wait for the Hitler to create an atomic bomb and wipe out America? Even in hindsight, these were impossible situations. There was no right answer. If it were me at the time, I don't see how one could in the midst without going crazy.
There are the high-profile people, like the Young Feynman, who after the Manhattan project swore off any military work for the rest of his life. Or Einstein who, after the bombs were dropped, said he truly wished he could have been a cobbler rather than one of the fathers of the atomic age. "Turing's Cathedral" fills out these well-known cases with dozens of other characters, and allows the reader to further fill in the hundreds and thousands of other characters all part of this enormous change. And it all leaves me really, really wondering about what forces push all of humanity in the directions we find ourselves having traveled.
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