Description

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020

How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand?

George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead.

From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit – and cost – of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

Publisher Review

This book pierces through the fog of everyday life. Read and you will become aware of history you need to know, and of how the last few centuries of the human story sit within a much larger, epochal frame. An extra treat is insight into the remarkable Dyson family -- Jaron Lanier * Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now * The most delightfully peculiar book I've ever read. It's grand and intimate, personal and cosmic, and about digital computing and archaic hunter gatherers. Every paragraph is a surprise -- Kevin Kelly * Wired * An odyssey of discovery ... part autobiography, part science manual, part history book -- Izabella Kaminska * Financial Times * Few writers could string together a coherent and compelling tale out of elements as varied as the Bering-Chirikov expedition to Siberia in 1741, the construction of a US heliograph intelligence network, tree houses, kayak designs and the future of artificial intelligence. Dyson is one in this quirky personal history of technology. -- John Tothill * Financial Times * Brilliant ... idiosyncratic ... to read him is to be led on the strangest of adventures, on paths untread, up and down trees, and through rivers of time -- Jason Kehe * WIRED *