Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Knowledge To Kill For

This is not your average paean to the pioneers of the high-tech industry. Who knew, for example, that Turing’s insight had to overcome two centuries of mathematical obsession with Newton’s (but not Leibniz's) infinitesimal calculus? And who knew that the development of the first digital computers was triggered by the military drive to create the hydrogen bomb? And who knew that the victory of binary arithmetic would be ensured by molecular biology? Certainly not me, and I suspect a number of other ignorant sods who presumed that this industry ‘just happened’, like milk suddenly appearing on the supermarket shelves with no clue about its origins in muck and mud.

Dyson, a son of the manse so to speak (son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson), can be as concise as he is illuminating: “Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.” When these events are considered together rather than as independent strands of modern science, it becomes clear that nothing in our lives almost 70 years later is unconnected to war and the organisation for war provoked directly by the Second World War (and indirectly by the First). The American President Eisenhower’s concerns about the ‘military-industrial complex’ were proven justified not just about the defence industry but also about a new global society built upon inherently lethal knowledge.

The sources of this lethal knowledge were places like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, the Los Alamos compound in New Mexico, and the Institute for Advanced Research In Princeton, New Jersey. These were modern monastic establishments whose existence was justified not by prayer but by thought, largely mathematical, and not by the construction of physical edifices but the creation of weapons of destruction. These were the forerunners of what would later be known as ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works,’ organisational entities devoted exclusively neither to economic success nor industrial productivity but technological innovation that would facilitate mass killing.

These new centres of thought were not isolated academic enclaves. They did assemble and concentrate the best intellects and coordinated their collective efforts in highly abstruse areas. But they also set agendas for university (and even high school) scientific education, successfully lobbied government about the priorities for military research spending, and shaped the interests of the most important private foundations that funded research from medicine to astrophysics.

Because they had no factories, no significant labour force, and no immediately commercial products, these establishments engaged in a sort of parallel politics. Although they were the driving force of the new military industrial complex, they were functionally invisible, in part because their work was confidential, but mostly because no one outside them could really understand what they were up to. They effectively constituted an independent empire of the mind, a Platonic haven of pure rationality, or at least what military requirements implied as rationality.

Most of the men (and they were almost all men) recruited into these establishments as thinkers or administrators were undoubtedly exceptionally clever in their respective fields. However, it is clear from the personal and institutional biographical detail which Dyson provides that very few of them would have achieved their ‘potential’ without this new form of scientific organisation. It is likely that they would have spent their lives in interesting but inconclusive research in dispersed academic institutions, or teaching Latin to high school seniors. The legendary names - Shannon, von Neumann, Ashby, Wiener, Mandelbrot, etc - would probably have been known but not with anything like the cultural force that they now have. These new organisations were intellectual king-makers.

So these military/intellectual enterprises, dedicated to refining the efficiency of human conflict, have transformed scientific culture. The concentration of intellectual talent, money and professional dominance means that there is only one path to scientific innovation - national defence, however widely that might be defined. Subsequent commercialisation, organised on similar lines in the Silicon Valleys and University Science Parks of the world, are functional subsidiaries of an invisible network, which few of us know anything about except when some ‘breakthrough’ (or breakdown) is announced in Wired or featured in Fast Company.

My lifetime is almost exactly contemporaneous with the digital epoch (Von Neumann died on my 10th birthday; Steve Jobs had just turned 2; Gates had just begun to walk). The presumptions, intentions, and fallacies of this epoch are things I share intellectually and emotionally with my generational cohort. This is Turing’s Cathedral, a cultural state of mind rather than a physical edifice. It took substantially less time to build than its medieval version. But its cultural influence is at least as great. Whether it will maintain itself as durably or with continued centrality is an open question, the answer to which seems to depend upon our fundamental but repressed attitude toward the god of war.

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