Quotes from George B. Dyson

Random search can be more efficient than nonrandom search—something that Good and Turing had discovered at Bletchley Park. A random network, whether of neurons, computers, words, or ideas, contains solutions, waiting to be discovered, to problems that need not be explicitly defined.

the politicians have inherited the stone age syndrome of the tribal chieftains, who take for granted that they can rule their people only by making them hate and fight all other tribes," Alfvén continued. "If we have the choice of being governed by problem generating trouble makers, or by problem solvers, every sensible man of course would prefer the latter.

When the computers developed, they would take over a good deal of the burden of the politicians, and sooner or later would also take over their power,

One of the facets of extreme originality is not to regard as obvious the things that lesser minds call obvious,

The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to be understandable is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand. The path to artificial intelligence, suggested Turing, is to construct a machine with the curiosity of a child, and let intelligence evolve.

How much human life can we absorb?" answers one of Facebook's founders,

We want Google to be the third half of your brain," says Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

Music allows us to assemble temporal sequences into mental scaffolding that transcends the thinness of time in which we live.

Life, which evolved into ever more complex structures, was nature's substitute for directly bred computers," he wrote. "Yet it was more than a substitute: it was a road—a winding road, yet one which despite all errors and hazards, arrived at last at its destination.

In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates. —Alan Turing, 1950

the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.

algorithms with names such as BigTable, MapReduce, and Percolator are systematically converting the numerical address matrix into a content-addressable memory, effecting a transformation that constitutes the largest computation ever undertaken on planet Earth.

The brain is a statistical, probabilistic system, with logic and mathematics running as higher-level processes. The computer is a logical, mathematical system, upon which higher-level statistical, probabilistic systems, such as human language and intelligence, could possibly be built.

Each question was precisely the best one based on the information he had uncovered so far. His logic was faultless—he never asked a question that was irrelevant or erroneous. His questions came in rapid-fire order, revealing a mind that was lightning-fast and error-free.

Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning—the Precambrian phase. "If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it," von Neumann admitted in 1948.

The term bit (the contraction, by 40 bits, of "binary digit") was coined by statistician John W. Tukey shortly after he joined von Neumann's project in November of 1945.

The transposition of two Letters by five placeings will be sufficient for 32 Differences [and] by this Art a way is opened, whereby a man may expresse and signifie the intentions of his minde, at any distance of place, by objects … capable of a twofold difference onely,

Instead of learning from one mind at a time, the search engine learns from the collective human mind, all at once. Every time an individual searches for something, and finds an answer, this leaves a faint, lingering trace as to where (and what) some fragment of meaning is. The fragments accumulate and, at a certain point, as Turing put it in 1948, "the machine would have 'grown up.

Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two faculties, which we may call intuition and ingenuity,

If life, by some chance, happens to have originated, and survived, elsewhere in the universe, it will have had time to explore an unfathomable diversity of forms. Those best able to survive the passage of time, adapt to changing environments, and migrate across interstellar distances will become the most widespread. A life form that assumes digital representation, for all or part of its life cycle, will be able to travel at the speed of light.

ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life," von Neumann explained to Stan Ulam, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race.

In our universe, we measure time with clocks, and computers have a "clock speed," but the clocks that govern the digital universe are very different from the clocks that govern ours. In the digital universe, clocks exist to synchronize the translation between bits that are stored in memory (as structures in space) and bits that are communicated by code (as sequences in time). They are clocks more in the sense of regulating escapement than in the sense of measuring time.

The transition to virtual machines (optimizing the allocation of processing cycles) and to cloud computing (optimizing storage allocation) marks the beginning of a transformation into a landscape where otherwise wasted resources are being put to use.

analogue computers are stupidly named; they should be named continuous computers." For real-world questions—especially ambiguous ones—analog computing can be faster, more accurate, and more robust, not only at computing the answers, but also at asking the questions and communicating the results.