George Dyson started out as a boat builder and designer, and still constructs great sea-going kayaks to Aleutian designs that are thousands of years old. His 1997 book, Darwin Among the Machines, seemed to come out of nowhere. It is a history of computers, written from the machines’ point of view. George’s new book, Project Orion, is stirring public interest in a project whose longest-lasting legacy has been the technology for making small nuclear bombs.
Has your research into Project Orion altered or deepened your relationship with your father?
Not at all. Kenneth Brouwer’s dual biography The Starship and the Canoe had pretty much brought our differences out into the open. “The physicist’s son who lives in a tree house!” – all that stuff was pretty much resolved. What brought us close again was Darwin Among the Machines. That’s my book about how machines are coming to life. Freeman was painfully aware of the possibilities for failure. He was discouraging. His concern was that I was giving up a successful career and reputation as a boatbuilder for the exceedingly slim chance of writing a successful book in an overwritten field. I had happened upon the work of Samuel Butler, the Victorian writer, iconoclast and Darwin enthusiast, whose title I borrowed for my own book. Much of Darwin became a study of Butler’s thought about the nature of life and evolution. I had no idea of this at the time, and Freeman had half-forgotten it, but his father – my grandfather – adored Butler’s work. It was as if a fascination with Butler had skipped a generation. Freeman was fascinated by this. With the success of Darwin, two things happened: I acquired my own reputation and independent academic standing. It changed our relationship for the better.
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Project Orion is a sharply focused account of one project. Darwin Among the Machines is a more sprawling, contemplative affair – an idiosyncratic history of machines. Do these projects have a common source?
I cannot bear to see things forgotten. Darwin came out of a realisation that the computer industry has no sense of history. My sister Esther is a computer industry pundit of about 30 years’ standing, and she runs rings round the competition because she alone, it seems, takes the trouble to remember what happened last year. Project Orion was a story I grew up with, and it’s been preying on me. I’m very aware that the Orion team are of an age now. They are beginning to die.
Your first book was Baidarka, about the Aleut kayak. Again, it’s something of a salvage job, in that it celebrates an almost forgotten craft, and a forgotten way of life.
This is one of the reasons I’m not sure I want to write another book. I feel as though I’ve been representing the interests of dead times and forgotten people. I was fascinated by kayaks. I wanted to know where they came from. I spent two winters in my tree house reading every word of Captain Cook’s journals, and everything about the sea. The Aleut people of what is now British Columbia built seagoing kayaks – huge boats to a design that’s thousands of years old. To find out anything about them, I had to search journals. The popular sources were worse than useless. They gave you the impression that kayaking had been invented 20 years ago in Seattle. Darwin Among the Machines happened because I realised that computers were going the way of kayaks: no one was according them any history. In the IT business. Everybody has to be a pioneer.
What were you doing in British Columbia?
Everybody has an urge to explore, but most people have it beaten out of them in childhood. I think Freeman and I were both lucky, in that we grew up with the idea that escape was possible and natural. Freeman found his way to the California corporation General Atomics, with its reactors, its spaceship projects and its plans for a future that didn’t, in the end, work out the way it was meant to. I dropped out of school and found British Columbia, one of the world’s last great wildernesses. I wanted to heal the rift in me that my schooling had made. I wanted to make a connection again between working with my hands and working with my head. British Columbia has since suffered the fate of all the other wildernesses, in that it’s been turned into a park. The thing about wilderness is that you go and live there. You work, and the work gives you time to think. Once a place is turned into a park, trade craft dies, and a very dry, cerebral and disconnected experience is all that’s left.
Escape is something you would recommend?
Well, for myself, I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I’d not dropped out of school. My father’s shadow was so long, I had no choice but to get out from under it. A career in academia as “my father’s son” – some wag the other day called me “Son of Doctor Strangelove”, so you get a measure of what it would have been like – would have been so unhealthy. Far better that I establish myself as a boat designer who, if he ever returned to academia, would enter it at an odd and original angle.
Project Orion tells the story of a secret US government-sponsored attempt to build a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs. This is a sensitive area to research.
That’s true, but I was in the perfect place at the perfect time to do the work. It was easy for me to capture the atmosphere of the project. My father worked on it, and I grew up with it. Obviously, how to design small nuclear devices is not something you want to make public. My attitude was, I should be able to get hold of everything else, if I only kick up enough dust. It didn’t happen, and now, in a way, I’m glad. Project Orion retains an aura of mystery – and when it’s dispelled, I hope it will not be too much of a let-down.
Would you say you were in the business of preserving crafts? You’ve celebrated building canoes, computers, a spaceship…
I think our culture has become “joined up” to the point that craft, in its broadest sense, is being squeezed out. Project Orion was about craft, in that it was about making something. It survived on the goodwill and generosity of General Atomics. Bell and Xerox once showed remarkable latitude in the way they funded innovative and left-field projects. When a creative team needed time and latitude, time and again the accountants turned a blind eye. Now that company accounting is processed more or less in real time, how will new skills be dreamed up?
You seem to be a romantic, trying to relive history.
When I was younger I had a romantic view of history – and everything else. As a professional historian, I have a more realistic view of things. The historian’s job is to go back into the past and take a fresh look around for things that others may have missed. If you discover things – like misunderstood kayak designs, prematurely abandoned computing architectures, or the lost optimism of Project Orion – that might be worth taking another look at, there’s a hope of actually bringing something back to life.
This interest in projects resembles your interest in small communities – and you share both with your father.
The synchronicity of this is strange. I became fascinated with the people of the Aleutian Islands. These islands lie in a regularly spaced chain off the coast of British Columbia. Aleut history is the history of little island communities, just far enough away from each other to develop their own cultures, just near enough to permit trade and foster the occasional conflict. It’s about as perfect a recipe for cultural variety as you can find. In their heyday, the Aleutian Islands were a real, working, earthly equivalent of what Freeman had in mind when he imagined loose, unregulated communities of settlers homesteading on asteroids and comets. The unrealised history of Project Orion, at least from his point of view, is the history of the colonies it was supposed to seed throughout the Solar System.
It’s a curiously old-fashioned idea – that we might homestead our way into space.
And that’s precisely why it’ll work! We tend to get excited about new ways of living which, if they were made real, we wouldn’t enjoy. Writing Darwin Among the Machines, I was struck by how resistant to change individuals are. Take the mobile phone. Here is this pocket-sized device through which you can speak to virtually anyone, anywhere in the world. It’s possible to access every kind of information, everywhere, over the wireless Web. On paper, that device looks as though it’s going to change everything about the way we think and behave towards each other. But most people’s mobile phones have 12 to 18 people on speed-dial, and the vast majority of calls are made to those 12 to 18 people. We might as well be living in caves and going out together to hunt our food, for all the impact technology has had on our individual behaviour.
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
It depends how involved we want to be in the electronic culture we’re building. Maybe it’s time we looked to our own needs and foibles, and accepted that some of our culture’s projects are no longer to do with us, and would progress more smoothly without our interference.
Can you give an example?
Microsoft demonstrates the point perfectly. The corporation has a vision of an open-ended Web-based operating system – something that will evolve only through competition, predation and parasitism. If Microsoft was serious about realising this vision, it would voluntarily split itself into six pieces tomorrow. Unfortunately, Microsoft is a victim of monolithic thinking.
But you can’t deny the visionary quality of its thinking.
Well, here we should distinguish between thinking and talking. The first time I addressed Microsoft, I said that their products were best explained in terms of their own biology. This wasn’t what they wanted to hear. They felt I was nudging the programmers out of the spotlight. Since 1997, however, biological metaphor has become commonplace to the point where it’s just another way of not thinking about the problem. Microsoft concedes that it cannot control every little development of its technology, and says that the relationship between software and hardware is subject to haphazard, evolutionary pressures. In my cynical moods, I consider this to be an adroit piece of public relations. “Don’t blame our business practices for pushing you out of the market: blame natural selection.”
You have to admit it’s a bit daunting for programmers, to be told they’re just part of an evolutionary mechanism.
I am not at all against giving people credit for the development of computers. I am against giving people all the credit. That first time I spoke at Microsoft, I felt like an evolutionist in a room full of creationists. The programmers felt very uncomfortable indeed with my notion that Windows was best understood as an evolutionary product. Their attitude seemed to be: “Windows is so complex, it just has to be an artefact. Nothing that complex could possibly evolve.” To which my response was: “Windows really isn’t that complicated, especially when you consider it took a corporation employing 12,000 people to realise it. If all 12,000 of you were really somehow to get together and really design something, you could surely have come up with something better than Windows.”
This argument suggests that artificial life will take some time to emerge. What about artificial intelligence? Will that emerge, or can it be created?
We know already that life arises. What we don’t know is whether life can be created. The same goes for intelligence. In all these debates, the myth of creation is very powerful. It’s unbelievable, the number of people who are still starting up companies and still attracting investment on the promise that they’re going to make advances in artificial intelligence through programming. It’s simply never going to happen. I blame Ray Kurzweil for a lot of this. He’s convinced the world that artificial intelligences will turn out to be just like us, and when they look female and speak English, then evolution will stop. l
