I love reading history to a point. Many times it seems the author is simply rehashing what others have said and this is perfect for falling a sleep to. In other cases the author has found a new take on things and this is when history mimics fiction and I become enthralled. I believe that the latter will be the case with a new history of computing book called Turing’s Cathedral. You can read an interview with its author George Dyson over at wired.

One of the most interesting points he brings up is that the computational world or universe is less like a national park and more like pure wilderness. He talks about digital organisms and Turing’s initial research which lead to the birth of the computer: that code is unpredictable until it is run. Since we cannot predict what software is going to do until we let it run we can never know exactly how it will operate until we “bring it to life”.

This reminds me of a really dark sci fi series I read last year by Peter Watts staring with the book Starfish. As the series continues we learn more about the future earth where the Internet is known as the Wilderness and AI works tirelessly to keep the wilderness out of the networks used by people. The vision is very bleak but the concept is right in line with what Dyson claims the original creators of the computer already understood.

Dysons suggestion is that companies start hiring biologists.