Show for May 6, 2012. George Dyson: The Dawn of the Digital Universe
Historian George Dyson tells the story of the Electronic Computer Project. Led by the brilliant polymath John Von Neumann in 1940’s and 50’s, the project laid the groundwork for much of modern computing. In doing so, Dyson says, it birthed a new, digital ecosystem, a world of self-reproducing, ever-evolving numbers that may be said to have a life of their own.
We talked about that and about Dyson’s own very personal connection to the story. He’s the son of famed physicist Freeman Dyson and grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Von Neumann and crew did their pioneering work. He’s also an earth-loving outdoorsman, and has a foot in both the natural and technological worlds.
John Von Neumann and the “MANIAC” computer at the Institute for Advanced Study. The cylinders at bottom house cathode ray tubes used as memory devices. Most present-day computers are descendants of this ancestral machine, as Dyson explains in his new book Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe.
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Show for December 11, 2011. Oh, the Machinery!
Yes, people have been fretting that mechanization would render them redundant ever since the early industrial revolution. And though predictions of deep and persistent “technological unemployment” have failed to come true in the past, MIT researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee say this time it’s for real. In their new book, Race Against the Machine, they argue that the current “jobless recovery” is in large part due to advances in machine intelligence and other technologies. I spoke to Erik Brynjolfsson about the problem and some possible fixes. I also played a bit of my 2010 interview with composer David Cope, who’s trained computers to write classical music in the manner of Bach, Beethoven and others. You can listen to that here.
The idea that machines will take our jobs isn’t new, of course. In fact, it was considered pretty hoary by the time of this 1931 article from Modern Mechanix. Read it here.
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