This is an excerpt from What Matters Now — Analog, by George Dyson.
Analog computing, once believed to be as extinct as the differential analyzer, has returned.
Digital computing can answer (almost) any question that can be stated precisely in language that a computer can understand. This leaves a vast range of real-world problems — especially ambiguous ones — in the analog domain. In an age of all things digital, who dares mention analog by name? "Web 2.0" is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embodied by analog components, the first time around.
Complex networks — of molecules, people, or ideas — constitute their own simplest behavioral descriptions. They are more easily approximated by analogy than defined by algorithmic code. Facebook, for example, although running on digital computers, constitutes an analog computer whose correspondence to the underlying network of human relationships now drives those relationships, the same way Google’s statistical approximation to meaning — allowing answers to find the questions, rather than the other way around — is now more a landscape than a map.
Pulse-frequency coding (where meaning is embodied by the statistical properties of connections between memory locations) and template-based addressing (where data structures are addressed by template rather than by precise numerical and temporal coordinates) are the means by which the analog will proliferate upon the digital.
Analog is back, and here to stay.
George Dyson is the author of Baidarka, Project Orion and Darwin Among the Machines, as well as a recent short story, "Engineers’ Dreams."
