Science historian George Dyson: Unravelling the digital code
George Dyson (Photo: Wired) “It was not made for those who sell
oil or sardines.” — G. W. Leibniz, ca. 1674, on his calculating
machine A universe of self-replicating code “Digital organisms,
while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are
strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital
codes are strings of binary digits — bits. Google is a
fantastically large number, so large it is almost beyond
comprehension, distributed and replicated across all kinds of
hosts. When you click on a link, you are replicating the string
of code that it links to. Replication of code sequences isn’t
life, any more than replication of nucleotide sequences is, but
we know that it sometimes leads to life. Q [Kevin Kelly]: Are we
in that digital universe right now, as we talk on the phone?
George Dyson: Sure. You’re recording this conversation using a
digital recorder — into an empty matrix of addresses on a
microchip that is being filled up at 44