Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

A startling exploration of the deep history of the digital revolution--and an unsettling vision of our future
In 1716, the philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz spent eight days taking the cure with Peter the Great at Bad Pyrmont in Saxony, promoting a plan to build digital computers that would take over the world. In his classic books Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson chronicled the realization of Leibniz’s dream at the hands of a series of iconoclasts who brought his ideas to life. Now, in his pathbreaking new book, Analogia, Dyson offers a chronicle of people who fought for the other side―the Native American leader Geronimo and the physicist Leo Szilard among them―in a series of stories that will change our view not only of the past but also of the future.

Weaving together an astonishing excavation of our technological past and his own unusual personal story―set alternately in the rarified world of cutting-edge physics and computer science, in Princeton, and in the rain forest of the Northwest coast―Dyson offers a prophetic vision of an analog revolution that is already under way. We are, he reveals, on the cusp of a new moment in human history, driven by a generation of networked machines whose powers are beyond programmable control.