George Dyson

George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests and books have included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines), and a path not taken into space (Project Orion).

His most recent book, Turing's Cathedral is, as he describes it, "a creation myth for the digital universe" that illuminates the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things in the aftermath of World War II.

A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Dyson lives in Bellingham, Washington, and has lectured widely as well as contributing articles to Scientific American, Nature, Forbes, Discover, Wired, and Make magazines.

His early adventures, contrasted with those of his father, physicist Freeman Dyson, were the subject of Kenneth Brower's classic 1978 dual biography The Starship and the Canoe. Dyson's career (he never finished high school yet has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Victoria) has proved as impossible to classify as his books.

Dyson is currently returning to his deep interest in the history and prehistory of the Aleutian Islands and beginning an unfettered literary exploration of a possible future, permeated (with only a few remote island sanctuaries) by a true artificial intelligence that may not be as far off as we think.