This is just a a chance for me to to actually meet you. And I've gotta say that I am just so pleased to have you because you have influenced my thinking for decades. I have had Darwin among the machines on my bedside table for most of the years of my adult life. I, and, and your essay, Turing's Cathedral in 2000 and 5, which was on Edge.org. Absolutely changed my thinking and was something that was needed by me and really changed how I moved through the world. And I wanted to thank you for that.
And, you know, the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast today is we've got early stage technologists, early stage founders. And I felt like when I read your books and your essays, I was given a great gift which was to sort of fill in a, you know, Joseph Beller creation myth, a sense of direction and purpose and context for what I was doing Beller day.
Like, I, as a founder, was running around, worrying about offices or w twos or calendars or venture capital, and, you know, in the chaos of all that and the freneticness of that. What is the meaning? What is the purpose of what we're doing? What is the context and what we're doing? And you provided that to me with your writing. So thank you so much.
And today, I'm hoping to do a podcast with you that allows me to bring that to the other founders who might not have read your stuff, who might not have have heard it away. And and if I can give them chills, the way I got chills reading your stuff, that would be a great, great outcome for me in this. So thank you for being here, George. I really appreciate it. Yeah. Well, thank you. I mean, sort of writer like me just, you know, sort of exists in a vacuum and you sort of construct these worlds.
It's like a novel, but it's, you know, it's the past. And then so to find an audience is is great. So Oh, absolutely. So I'd like to, you know, set the stage for a second because we're gonna get back to the content of Tourings Cathedral in a second. But in the title, you're referring, of course, to Alan Turing, who with John Von Neumann invented the first digital computer. And could you go take us back and explain to us how the digital universe sort of began to to explode after World War 2?
Yes. And you have to be careful of saying first because, obviously, it was not the first digital computer. There were lots of, you know, there were digital computers going back a very long time. What you can say was first was the Von Neumann computer was one of the first to have a memory that worked at the speed of light rather than Pete the speed of sound. That made, that made all the difference. And Turing was abstract logician.
I mean, he came from the world in fact by father told me, you know, he read that paper when it came out in the 1930s and and thought it had no connection to reality at all. I mean, it was Flint interesting piece of mathematics. But would Beller, one would never have expected it to, you know, to completely change our, our tangible day to day world. And it did. That's where we started to move into digital computers that moved at the speed of light. And so we have the atomic bomb.
We have World War 2, and then things start to Beller. Yes. So what Turing did was produce, which mathematicians liked to do, sort of a toy model. So he produced this one dimensional model digital computing that you had a not infinite, but an unbounded, a finite, but unbounded length of paper tape, just a string of bits, and you can move this string back and forth, but you can't, to get to any point 100 feet ahead, you have to go through all 99 feet of tape.
And so that was very impractical, but it was very interesting. And then by series of accidents, I mean, touring ended up in the middle of World War 2 as Beller everyone did. And that then became a real problem because you had the Germans were using digital codes to con communicate the u boat Flint. And this question of could one machine imitate the behavior of another machine became a very influential and saving England and the rest of us during the war.
Von Neumann was working on the other side, you know, Tony was working on decoding messages. Von Neumann was in America.
He came to America in 1930, and he was working on the atomic bomb problem where you needed to compute hydrodynamics, radiation hydrodynamics, And what he did, which now seems entirely obvious, but he sort of made Tourings 1 dimensional model, 2 dimension producing, which we now absolutely take for granted that you have an address where you give 2 coordinates like a chessboard, and that gives you a location, a memory location. Is there everything changed after that?
Once you had this original addresses matrix, and the version that he built was 32 bits by 32 bits by 40 bits. It's like this little array of memory. And if you add that all up, it's by our modern nomenclature. It's 5 kilobytes. So the number that stuck in my mind. I was born in 1953. And in 1953, there were 53 kilobytes of of this high speed memory on the entire planet. Just exploded from there.
It starts to, you know, grow in a sort of, geometric pattern, which is slowly at first, but then it starts to accelerate with Metcalfe's law, and we had a lot more compute, a lot more storage. In 1997, you came out with this book about Darwin among the machine.
And in it, you go through the history of how we got here, how we get to 1997, and what's the motion as as the intelligence of the planet creates life, the intelligence of the life creates language and culture, and that is now producing this digital silicon based life and we are in the midst of this moment and that nature itself is sort of birthing these machines to life, even though they don't seem like to us. They really are.
And, you know, Hans Morgan and others like you were talking about various forms of AI. So I got a chance to read that book and it really set a tone for me about where we were in our journey.
And then in 2005, you come out with the Turing's Cathedral where you having finished a talk about the future in Google are asked by one of the young engineers, why is everyone so upset that we're digitizing the books and violating their publishing revenues don't they understand we're not digitizing the books for Pete? We're digitizing them for the coming AI so the AI can become intelligent by reading everything that we've written.
And at that moment, you realize that here's a group of people who fundamentally already believe in what you had written about 8 years earlier that we are in this movement, you know, and at the same time, 2nd life is coming. And we've got virtual worlds. I was on the board of that company for 5 years at that time. And you start to see this pattern. You see this this Turing's Cathedral article that you wrote.
What was it like feeling at that moment for you to to sort of encounter a group of people who are so in the midst of this process. What inspired you to write that article? In a way, it was a revelation, poor engineer who I talked to, you know, at that time, Google was very secretive and not supposed to be quoted. Almost lost his job for saying that to me. Yeah. The title came out of that, I mean, the afternoon, I came out of Google and Southern end of San Francisco Bay there.
Pete, when Turing was he sort of in advance, he answered the critics. He wrote a paper. Why are you trying to create intelligent machines? You know, only you're gonna get in trouble. Only God can create intelligent machines. And his answer was that we are no more re there's a question that goes further. Are you gonna create official souls. And his answer was that we are no more, creating intelligent machines than humans are when we create children.
We all and so these exact words are we are only creating mansions for the souls that only got, but only he capital h can create. And then when I walked out of there, I said, oh, this isn't Tourings Mansion. This is Tourings Consider, what Google was doing at that time. It's a brilliant title. It really captures the sort of religiousness of it. Right? Sort of like Joseph Campbell would say with the hero with a 1000 faces, this is another moment at which the hero is born. It might be an AI hero.
But it's, it's, it's coming to be born. Yes. It captures the, also, the group effort in the sense that the old catheros are were built over 100 years where nobody really laid claim to any part of it, spend your life working on one corner of a tower and someone else spend their life working on the floor. And then, you know, after a few 100 years, it was finished.
As I read it, I felt like I was one of the Stone Mason's, and I wasn't at Google, but I I felt like what you were saying was that Google might be in the end of the biggest company, but it can't be the only company, and and it might be based in Silicon Valley, but eventually the Google employees will span the globe as they could do today.
And it wasn't just people in Silicon Valley or at Google, but it was everybody who was reading and contributing to edge dot org, the wonderful place where you published this. It's like that whole community of minds was birthing this together. Right? Yes. Yeah. Lots. Yeah. Lots of people have been thinking about this for for a long time. So I went I was at a part of a conference a couple months ago that was canceled. So they they did it, you know, of course, online.
And part of it was on 2nd life. I didn't even know I had no idea 2nd life still They, they have indeed survived. Yeah. Yeah. So that's quite remarkable. I mean, it's It is remarkable. It's the most unlikely of outcomes. It was either gonna get big or it was gonna crash and burn, and it didn't either. Yeah. It just it it it hit a steady state of a half a million people and just stays there. Yeah. It's like one of these little island that's a thousand miles from isolated species.
And have you visited Google since you wrote Turing's Cathedral 2005? Yes. Quite a number of James, and then I part of this Google host a science conference every year that I've always gone to, which again was canceled this year. So that's a chance, but it's, of course, it's changed enormously. Google sort of went from nothing garage to IBM in 10 years. I mean, it's a very different world.
You feel as if the progress that we've seen in the last 15 years is about what you are expecting or is something surprised you? Well, what's surprising to me is how little things change, how we sort of, you know, Turing and Vannoyment developed this model, and it worked. And we've just been stuck in it ever since. I mean, everything's still more or less exists in this 2 dimensional address matrix.
It's just expanded, but it's still every bit in the digital universe has sort of a fun James and address. And now that that is finally starting to change. She's finally starting to see shifts away from that mall, but no one has sort of come forward like Turing and really given us a sort of Morgan description of what this new model will be. We're just sort of stumbling around discovery and blindly.
So we've got a lot of, people publishing ideas about what a new sort of system would be, but nothing has really coalesced yet. Not yet. Maybe it is coalescing. We just don't see it, but I and of course, I'm not that's not formally my field, but for what I see as an outside observer, it's it's, you know, it's remarkable how much we're doing by just expanding the old system.
So 70 years into the digital revolution, things bigger, but not fundamentally different yet, but we would expect them to change soon. And one of the things I think you've said is that, we have all this digital infrastructure lying around, and we're putting it all together, and then we're building analog computers. Right.
That's, of course, my, you know, personal theory of what's going on and how there's this big fundamental shift at the moment, but it's not very explicit the way we were explicit about digital computing. Could you unpack that? For me about what you mean by we're now building analog computers with the digital infrastructure?
The fundamental difference between analog and digital computing is not it's not what you used Pete can have digital computers made out of wood, and you can have analog computers made out of silicon. But digital computing, the information is in the illogical sequences of bits. Every bit has an exact meaning. And in analog computing, you're so in digital computing, you're using discrete functions. And in analog computing, you're computing with continuous functions.
You're using sort of the general differences in frequency. And in nature, we see this very, very clearly divided that nature has learned to use digital computing, which is very good for error correction. We use digital computing in our genetic systems because they correct the errors. From one generation to the next or or introduce the errors that lead to improvement. But in nature, all real time control is done with analog computing because it's much more adaptable and robust.
There is no programming. There's no algorithm. So what happened was after World War 2, we had this analog equipment lying around Wharf surplus vacuum tubes and radar screens and so on. And this very small group of odd balls for, which is what Turing's cathedral is about, put that equipment together, and built, realized Turing's vision of digital computers. And now I see the exact this is where it got full circle and the reverse is happening. We have all this infinite amount of digital computing.
It's it's effectively free. And a lot of companies and a few individuals are starting to we're trying to assemble that equipment into big analog computers where the meaning and the information is in the sort of continuous functions rather than discrete functions. I mean, sort of if you look at, like, you know, the YouTube network doesn't care what the bits actually say. It just cares about the are the magnitude of the stream of bits and the frequency at which things connect.
Information is in the topology of the network rather than the actual meeting of the code. And that and for the same reason, it works so well in nature. It works very well in these large systems we're seeing like Google or Amazon or face Got it. So what they care about is how many people are watching that video and how frequently they don't really care what the bits are. Right.
And you build exactly building circuits, the way we Beller circuits with, you know, in vacuum tubes, the, streams of electrons are treated just as a continuous function, and we're doing that now. We're sort of treating streams of bits are treated like vacuum tubes Pete streams of electrons. And you would see that not as positive or negative, just as interesting. Just as a the neck stage in evolution. I mean, evolution never stopped.
We had the digital revolution to get where we are, but it's not gonna stay that. Could we talk about AI for a bit? So if we look at Turing and, you know, his paper computing machinery Flint intelligence, which you've called a founding document of the for true AI. What do what do you think most people are still getting wrong about AI?
Well, their answer for morphizing it the same way we you know, the other big sort of there's a search Morgan, and then there's the search, which is a big part of my childhood, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And I think we sort of have both of those things wrong, and then my personal third angle on that is to search for, you know, for other intelligent creatures on earth.
I spent lot of time in the, you know, on the northwest coast among killer whales who I firmly believe are highly intelligent. It's a non human intelligence. We have trouble communicating with So there's a we tend to assume that the other intelligence is gonna be like us, and we look for language and things like that. I think that's a dead end. Other kinds of intelligence are gonna be other kinds of intelligence.
They're not we're getting very good at building sort of imitations of our own intelligence, sort of captive systems. I'm much more interested in myself Flint wild AI that will evolve on its own and be very different from us. And be adapted to it. Yes. I may may operate on a completely different time scale. There's no reason that other intelligence have to operate on our time scale. It could be operating much faster or much slower. Or operating in non carbs.
Yes. Yeah. Flint completely different ways, perhaps not using language the way we use language at all tend to equate intelligence language. Right. And so we're making progress with AlphaGo and other forms of human intelligence mimicry, both in task and in speed an approach, but that's only one sliver, maybe akin to the amount of visible light spectrum we can see with our eyebrows.
Right. I mean, Alpha Go is interesting because Go, you know, you watch a couple really good go players, they're sort of almost not human anyway. I mean, it really is a alien sort of way of operating. And so, you know, getting machine that can do that is a very interesting up. Interesting. So you think it's, starting to be a a quite a different flavor of intelligence, right, on the edge of what humans naturally do. Right. That's what I think.
And and also personally, I mean, that paper of Tourings is famous for what, you know, what we call the Turing test, which is this idea that you can determine whether a machine is intelligent by by having a conversation with it. And and I've, I Beller, exactly the opposite. The test of a real true AI would be intelligent enough not to reveal its intelligence to us.
So the fact that we don't have machines that pass the Turing test is no, you know, there's no proof that there there are not intel machines. When you say that there are intelligent machines somewhere, you're saying somewhere in our vast sort of digital landscape that we've built over the last 40 years, 50 years. There is some form of intelligence potentially lurking out there that is operating and not lurking because that sounds nefarious That's what you mean when you say there's no proof.
There's no intelligence. It could be. I mean, doesn't necessarily I'm a huge skeptic about sort of discrete artificial intelligence that we will ever have sort of a system in a box that you can put in your car that do everything or but in terms of a distributed artificial since I'm a believer. Because with a distributed system, you have an opportunity for evolution, for it to find itself.
And to learn on its own without I'd love to read something quickly Pete, something you wrote, if you'll permit me, because I found it so fascinating. And I wanna quote it for our listeners before I ask you about it.
You wrote, quote, for 30 years, I've been wondering, what did of his existence might we expect from a true AI, certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug, anomalous accumulation creation of wealth might be assigned or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted power supply, but the real sign I
suspect would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually, and physically well nourished people surrounding the AI. So my question is, is that what we have today? Is that what Silicon Valley and the extended, connectivity of the that group and Bellingham, Washington, and whatnot. Is that it? A a circle of cheerful contented intellectually nourished Pete, nourishing this potential AI. Is that where we are?
Yes. So, of course, that That paragraph is dated by, you know, that was written after that visit to Google where I was it just was like a magical kingdom at that time. Pete were getting their haircut swimming in pools on the campus. And to me, it was this incredible sense.
So here's this, machine that is absolutely making life paradise for the people who take care of it, making them wealthy and keeping them healthy and take taking care of their, you know, there's a daycare taking care of the children. I mean, mean, that would be exactly what, you know, if you're gonna have a real AI, that's how how Pete who take care of it would be taken care of. Got it. And this was, again, in 2005, when you saw that.
And and and you go back now, and it's it's similar in many respects. And and and certainly in that respect, yes. Right. The problem now is that now it has a little bit of the edge of a little bit of a darker side to it now, I think. I mean, at that time, it really seemed like this unbelievable, happy play, which, of course, was maybe scary in its own Whereas now you really, really do get a sense that the sort of rules and regulations are very thinly below the surface.
When you say that rules and regulations imposed by Google on itself or by by Google running up against the laws of the land? No. By the the regulations that regulate the company. You have no expert on Google, but I think now it's become a much more organized has to be, I mean, to be that side. You kinda can't have that happy playground that they had. You know, at that time, it really was a horizontal rather than vertical company, and everybody was in contact with each other.
It was smaller and and worth a lot less. And when you mentioned the dark side, could you talk to me about that? What sort of dark side are we experiencing as we move through this next phase of the development of the AI? Of course, now that's it's very popular and fashionable to talk about that, but just the fact that people's lives are being increasingly controlled and and regulated, you know, generally often in a positive way, but it's very easy for that to the other way.
I mean, one of the things I feel that has dramatically shifted since 2005 is really a a focus on sort of money. Right? So I think, you know, Amazon is now worth 1.5 $1,000,000,000,000 or something. And you've got Facebook at 650 and Google just passed a trillion of its value in Apple as well. And 15 years ago, none of this true. Right? These were small companies relative to the rest of the economy, the rest of wealth generation.
And as the wealth has increased, they're sort of the focus on the philosophy, which is where I would see, you know, your great role, being played here, George. It tends pushed to the background. And I feel like in 2 1005, there was more air. There was more oxygen and more attention being paid to the philosophy. Am I wrong about that? No. You're you're very right. That time, there was still a connection to this, you know, the origin myth that you're you're so interested in.
I mean, the fact that Apple in particular. I mean, it was easy to imagine Apple becoming a big computer company to imagine that they would become a big company in the sense of bigger than any company in world is unthinkable. But at that time, even in turn of the century, there were still and still are a very few. I mean, there were people at Apple who who were there from the beginning.
I mean, who had been, you know, academic mathematical logicians playing with computers maybe doing the odd database for the government or something and nowhere near turning any of that into consumer product, and that all happened so quickly the same at Google. I mean, Google came out of academic world.
It's almost as if the personality of those work working on the AI has been shifting a bit from this sort of cheerful hobbyist, you know, technical cheerful hobbyist is more of a sort of a driven purposeful, you know, money conscious type of, professional as the whole thing has gotten bigger and that in terms of the money on the people it touches. And it seems as if that means we're moving into a a new phase here. Yes. The cycle is very much faster.
I mean, if you build any sort of academic AI group within a, you know, within what used to be sort of the ivory tower, the kind of Flint touring world now in no time at all. It usually gets acquired or spun out as either as a company or as part of one of these existing which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something to, you know, to be careful of. Yeah. It's definitely a shift.
And is there anything that you'd love for, you know, Some of the early founders in their twenties and early thirties who are embarking on startups, are there some things that you hope that they are are cognizant of as they move forward? One of my careers are the one that brings me Pete is that I'm I'm a Morgan. So I sort of dig around in the past. It's like looking for fossils and you find these things and you show them to Pete.
And that's you know, why I put those stories in my books because I think if you work in this field today, those creation myths are are really important. Look at computing, it sort of has an old testament in the new testament. The old testament was the just these logicians and philosophers. And then in the new testament, it became real. Pete start building machines and that sort of moment between those two era is where it all comes from.
And if I think for people who work in the field, it's a good thing to go back and look at, you know, what the people wrote and said at that time, and people, of course, touring and connoissement, but there were many others. And also the engineer who get always so little credit the engineers who actually build the things and get them to work and have to understand things just as much if not more than the scientists but somehow the scientists get the voice and the engineers usually don't.
Yeah. Because you've you've mentioned that while digital computers were formalized by Turing and delivered by Von Newman, it was actually Julian Biggola, who was the engineer there, and he doesn't seem to get much credit. No. He's sort of the missing link. It had an unbelievably prophetic clear view of what was wrong with the von Neumann system and how it should be improved, and he was just not listened to. He would have been generations ahead. And this was back in the fifties.
Is this when that? Yeah. So he he just I mean, he started working with Norbert Viner in in World War 2 on anti aircraft fire control, but when so when von Neumann needed an engineer to go was the guy, but he immediately I mean, the mission was to build this machine to do the hydrogen bomb calculations, but they they wanted to build a second machine. A third machine, and he wanted to make them completely different.
He's he saw the the huge flaws in this fundamentally architecture that had only used fraction of a percent of the power of the machine, but we got stuck in that only beginning. I mean, only a few of our processors, you know, used for graphics GPUs and so on are slightly beginning to escape from that sort of Von Neumann and and Von Neumann himself, he only ever took out one Pete. It was for a method of nonviolent computing. So it feels as if we have the philosophers and the logicians.
We've got the engineers, and now we've got the financiers. This sort of these 3 groups of people. And do you empathize more with 1, the idea person, the execution person? Well, I'm personally, I'm on the side of the engineers because that's just the way I was as a dialed. I just was fascinated by nuts and bolts and wrenches and tools and machines. Mother was sort of a philosopher and logicians. So I just, like, you know, have soft spot for that world too.
And then you had these sort of unique people who like to do both, and they were very important. How do you think we could do a better job of listening to these engineers? Elevate their voice and their status. I mean, that's a good thing about the Silicon Valley ecosystem that it does. A lot of these companies are built by engineers and funded because they have some some engineering innovation.
So that's changed, but in the academic world, it was always the other way around that if you sort of retained it, if you did any engineering, you were no longer Pete scientist. Interesting. It was almost shunned to do the hard work to do the the work by hand was lower status. Right. You know, wartime. That's, I think, one of the reasons this all happened World War 2.
Morgan had a wonderful way of breaking down those Currier where suddenly the physicists were, you know, allowed to work with high explosives and the mathematicians were allowed to work with electronics. I'd love to chat with you about also our evolving relationship with technology. At one point, when you were younger than you are now, you really rejected High-tech. Right? I mean, you were canoeing or kayaking for months of the time.
You were living in a tree house for years, 90 feet above the ground. Been on the Pacific Northwest there. And what was the catalyst for that? How are you thinking about life at that point? You were in your early twenties, I guess? Yes. I moved to Canada when I was seventeen. So big part of it was just escaping from the, deadly boredom of, you know, I dropped out of high school, and I found Princeton to be the most boring place in the world and try to get it far away as I could.
And our family, you know, my sister, Esther, we we have a sort of mixed up extended family with a bunch of siblings, but Esther and I are the only sibling, you know, we have the same mother same father, and that's sort of this unique bond. I think nature does that for a reason. I mean, sort of, you want 2 kids, and they're just completely different because I think I think nature is somehow hardwired that it's a good survival strategy to not have both your kids, you know, do the same thing.
So Esther went into the high-tech world, and I went 180 degrees the other way to the Canadian wilderness, not against technology. I mean, I love chainsaws and diesel engines and electronics and so on, but just get away from from the centers of civilization. You talk about it as separate from the world of man. Yeah. You spent a lot of time out out in the wild with nothing but animals and Morgan and trees and oceans and boats and even passion was boats.
Do you typically do that alone, or do you do that with small groups? Or I did that mostly alone, but I love being in group. When I would, you know, work on a fishing boat or a tugboat with a crew, I found that just great. A lot of the stuff I did completely alone. And so you're doing that. And then what brought you back into this of scientific analysis. What brought you back to the world of man? That's actually it's pretty much esters to her credit or her fault or whatever.
She was very generous about, you know, back then in the 8 19 eighties, she was running this computer conferences sort of became the computer conference for the for the growing personal community. Started out as a semiconductor conference, and and she invited me, my girlfriend at the time was a photographer. So she hired girlfriend who Currier, and so we would get to go to her conference every year.
So I just I just was like, brought out of the woods into the, you know, beginning of that that whole world and and found it fascinating to watch and observe, but that's definitely, otherwise, I think I would never have gotten into that world at all. That's fascinating that that's how you came back.
It's, you know, and I've I've been to that conference many James, and it was indeed the tech conference of of the year and in this country, for sure, And it was it was interesting because it was the conference. Most things happened there. And so it kept everyone on the same page in a way. Now as industries become much more far Flint, it a little bit harder to keep all the edges together to take a scope of what it all is. But, okay, I see how you came back through that. That makes sense.
Yeah. Est Esther had a very extremely sensible policy of of encouraging families for having family activities and stuff. So you to try and avoid the, you know, sort of CEOs who come just for the afternoon, give their talk and Levy-Weiss like, you know, you wanted to go to that conference for the whole 3 days. That's right. There was a humanity to it.
There was a feeling to it in the same way that you must have had that feeling a Google is special sort of happy and intellectually well nourished Pete who are actually connecting both physically and emotionally and intellectually there. Interesting. So how do you think we are doing? We humans with our relationship to technology today?
I think we're completely disoriented and sort of lost our you know, when they lost our bearings, but we're, you know, Flint blind would be the metaphor or something. We, you know, we're moving so fast. We don't really we can't really see where we're going.
It's just it's just rushing forward and particularly not just the technology side, but the biotechnology side, which everyone talks about just the same way we talk about computing all this stuff that's gonna happen, but it now is real sort of full scalability to edit genetic information. So it opens entirely new world. I mean, the sort of the language of genetics and the the machine language of Beller and the machine language of computers are much closer to each other than to, human language.
So No. It's true. We we had a podcast with Trevor Martin who's CEO of mammoth Biosciences, which is now the largest IP repository of CRISPR IP in the world, and we were talking with him about this new found ability to simply and inexpensively edit genes is going to unleash a whole risk, a whole Pete of new risks as well as the opportunities that that everyone can see. We should tread carefully for sure.
Yeah. The other way to look at it is that that sort of life has done this already is very good at it. I mean, we had cells that were reproducing very well. I mean, earth recovered in slimy life, but didn't, didn't have replication really since it's my belief. And then, you know, nature sort of figured out how to adopt these self replicating almost viruses to, you know, to build our genetic system. And I think life will just do that again.
The sort of technological systems we're building for sort of replicating and distributing genetic information or it's it's one way of looking at it is that we are using life and we're sort of building these biotechnologies. The other way to look at it is the, exactly the opposite way around. It's life using our technologies to sort of build better, more distributed forms of life I think that's right.
And I remember the analogy, that we did not cultivate wheat, but that wheat cultivated us to to serve its own purpose. Exactly. And and do you believe that we're gonna continue to accelerate this rapidly? I mean, I would agree that we are disoriented at this point given the speed of change of our own technologies. And it's growing exponentially. Now we're sort of getting into the steeper part of the curve, I would say, in the last 20 years, 30 years. And do you think it's gonna continue?
Oh, the next says Currier and Singularity University Pete say to be so that it will eventually be unrecognizable to us, or or do you think there's gonna need to be a a shift, downshift, if you will. Well, it was a interesting time to ask that question. I mean, first of all, I strongly disagree with Ray Kurtz Vile. That's things he is hoping for terrify me and the things he's afraid of don't scare me at all.
But, you know, I think we're on a very different trajectory And then your question about limits, of course, we're in the middle of this very interesting black swan case where we we thought everything was just rushing forward.
And then suddenly we hit this limit, oh, what if there's actually just a good old fashioned, you know, novel virus that, you know, the problem there is that whatever you argue about the origins of this virus, it's a bat virus that has learned to live and adapt and survive among bats who are these called mammals that live by the millions in caves. It's that's how we live. What we need to do is stop acting like bats, get out of the James, and and, but we're not.
I mean, Across the street from you as a bar. And, I mean, a bar is full now. If people just flying back into their dark. K. From a technology point of view, this may be a really positive inflection point to reset or reboot. You can see things like, of course, Amazon is doing great. Systems are adapting to this very Beller.
And then, and then other institutions, you know, like your local bar is not not gonna do well, but, but it's, it's a huge unexpected shift a reset or a slowing of the curve could, come in one form or another, but it might just accelerate different parts of the Currier. Is this all sort of plays out as the intelligence that we represent is gonna be part of bringing the next intelligence is around as well. So what are you working on now, George?
I just finished a new book that took took me 7 years. Turings Cathedral took about 10. And I came out in 2012, about 7 years after the the initial article. Yes. So that's seems to be what about what it takes me. I mean, the the remarkable thing about Tourin's Cathedral is that, you know, that group of people who I so admire the Julian Bigelow group with Fund Neumann.
And, you know, they conceived of the project, found the money, built their own workbenches, built the machines, built the computer and solve these nuclear weapons problems and started working on climate and weather and everything. You know, they did all that in less time than it took me to write about it, which is the other mess you know, message for the today's entrepreneurs and stuff. It's just that's the reason to look back at these sort of heroic, efforts.
And and that's where Of course, the current, the pandemic crisis, the same thing. I mean, it's, it's gonna push biotechnology the same way World War 2 Pete physics. And everybody's working on on this biological problem, and that's that in the end. We'll have all sorts of secondary effects. So I finished a new book and I'm it's be out in a few weeks. So I was wondering whether they would delay it or not, but it's on schedule.
Analochia, and it's in some ways a sequel to Turing's Cathedral, but in a very strange, it's a very, very odd book. I mean, it, opens with, Russians coming to Alaska and opens with leibnitz and the trying to take over the world with digital computers and then come convinces Pete, the great, to go to America. And so it's a book of stories.
It's written much more as a narrative to chapter about the war against the Apaches, and then I some very kind of a prophetic, but possibly dark sort of views of of the future and and this, what we talked about earlier, this transition from the digital revolution back to a sort of an analog revolution. That's the theme of the book. Got it. Got it. Well, I look forward to, to seeing it. It'll come out this summer then. Coming, yeah, August, August 18th and heavily illustrated in very short.
It's sort of Morgan the length of darwinably the machines rather than, you know, big, sick book like Turing's Cathedral. Well, George, this has been a real pleasure talking to you today. I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you for everything you've done for all of us who have been following your writings and been inspired to feel some purpose and direction and meaning in the digital world we're building to Thank you.
And it's, it's great to talk to you and have an audience out there who's looking to the future. Absolutely. Thank you, sir. Thank you.