A visionary writer and thinker encapsulates many tales and enlists a startling cast of characters, in this deeply personal and unforgettable history of the digital ageAnother fascinating and revelatory book from the historian of technology and author of
Turing's Cathedral,
Darwin Among the Machines and
Project Orion 'Brilliant ... idiosyncratic ... to read him is to be led on the strangest of adventures, on paths untread, up and down trees, and through rivers of time'
WIREDGeorge Dyson is a historian of technology and the author of several books including
Turing's Cathedral,
Project Orion and
Darwin Among the Machines. His subjects range from the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak to the evolution of artificial intelligence.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 familyThe 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 surpriseAn odyssey of discovery ... part autobiography, part science manual, part history bookFew writers could string together a coherent and compelling tale out of elements as varied as the Bering-Chirikov expedition to Siberia in 1741, the construction of a US heliograph intelligence network, tree houses, kayak designs and the future of artificial intelligence. Dyson is one in this quirky personal history of technology.Brilliant ... idiosyncratic ... to read him is to be led on the strangest of adventures, on paths untread, up and down trees, and through rivers of time
A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020
How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand?
George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead.
From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.
