Speaking on von Neumann and the first generations of digital computers, I recently finished 'Turing's Cathedral' about that very subject. It was also a fantastic companion piece to 'Oppenheimer' - many of the names crossed over, like Oppenheimer himself, Lewis Strauss, Edward Teller, Vannevar Bush, etc. It's a dense but enjoyable book.
I knew Bateson very well in the last decade of his life, and it really irritated him whenever anyone compared the human brain to a computer. It just did not compute, so to speak.
I recently re-read the famous Turing's paper and I was similarly shocked how advanced their thinking about the capabilities of computers were. They were just proving that the theoretical machines are universal in the computational sense, yet they already understood the broad implications of what this means. At the time when the were used to "just" speed up some algorithmic computations. Really put some things into perspective.
Speaking on von Neumann and the first generations of digital computers, I recently finished 'Turing's Cathedral' about that very subject. It was also a fantastic companion piece to 'Oppenheimer' - many of the names crossed over, like Oppenheimer himself, Lewis Strauss, Edward Teller, Vannevar Bush, etc. It's a dense but enjoyable book.
I knew Bateson very well in the last decade of his life, and it really irritated him whenever anyone compared the human brain to a computer. It just did not compute, so to speak.
I recently re-read the famous Turing's paper and I was similarly shocked how advanced their thinking about the capabilities of computers were. They were just proving that the theoretical machines are universal in the computational sense, yet they already understood the broad implications of what this means. At the time when the were used to "just" speed up some algorithmic computations. Really put some things into perspective.
Thanks for the write-up! Mead's perspective on AI is interesting, as is her daughter's:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/mary_catherine_bateson-how-to-be-a-systems-thinker
Smoko means smoking break in australian. There's a fun punk song about it by The Chats.
Congratulations to all four of you! Good luck too!