Turing’s body and mind had been effectively neutered. ibid.
Alan Turing’s body was found on 7th June 1954 by his housekeeper: he was 41. ibid.
In September 2009 the British Government apologised for the way Alan Turing was treated: ‘We’re sorry. You deserved so much better’. ibid.
The device I’m about to introduce to you is gonna revolutionise an entire industry ... I’d like to introduce you to the iPod. Jobs 2013 starring Ashton Kutcher & Josh Gad & Dermot Mulroney & Lukas Haas & Victor Rasuk & Eddie Hassell & Ron Eldard & Nelson Franklin & Elden Henson & Lenny Jacobson & James Woods & David Denman & John Getz & Lesley Ann Warren & Abby Brammell et al, director Joshua Michael Stern, Jobs to staff meeting
The Apple II – it’s the first ever all in one personal home computer. ibid.
Welcome IBM. Seriously. ibid. Jobs’ full-page advertisement
It’s my project. It’s – mine. And they’re taking it away from me? ibid. Jobs
You stole my software – and I can prove it in court. ibid. Jobs to Gates
Hiring you was the worst mistake I have ever made. ibid. Jobs to CEO
Because the people who are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do. ibid. Jobs
In September of 2012, Apple became the most valuable company in the world. ibid. caption
I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. Alan Turing
Nanotechnology will let us build computers that are incredibly powerful. We’ll have more power in the volume of a sugar cube than exists in the entire world today. Ralph Merkle
One of the world’s greatest unsung heroes – ‘Boole is the father of information technology’ … and he would do this against a backdrop of Ireland’s darkest days. The Genius of George Boole, 2015
Nearly two hundred years ago George Boole made a revolutionary discovery … Boole argued that almost every value or question could be reduced to either true or false. A simplification of our would as a basic statement. ibid.
He dedicates every breathing moment to mathematics and in particular to a branch of maths known as calculus. ibid.
And then Boole develops a new branch of mathematics – invariant theory. ibid.
To prove the existence of God … He seeks to prove this by applying to the Bible the process of logical analysis. ibid.
Boole publishes his masterpiece – The Laws of Thought. ibid.
It is a strange story and it begins with a strange woman in the 1950s of New York. Ayn Rand had left Russia in the 1920s and gone to live in California … Human beings, Rand said, were alone in the universe. They must free themselves from all forms of political and religious control, and live their lives guided only by their selfish desires. If they did this, they would become heroic figures. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace I: Love and Power, BBC 2011
Rand’s ideas were seen as mad and dangerous … but Rand continued to write. ibid.
‘We are heroic. We can know the world. We contain nature. We can achieve our goals. We can do what we want. What does it matter that we are alone? Who do we need? Why do we need anyone? We have ourselves.’ ibid. Barbara Branden, 1950s Randian
The group most inspired by her were the new entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley … They saw themselves as Randian heroes. ibid.
The new computer technology could turn everyone into Randian heroes. It was a vision of a society where the old forms of political control would be unnecessary. ibid.
Together they could create their own kind of order. It was a cybernetic dream which said that the feedback of information between all the individuals connected as nodes in the network would work to create a self-stabalising system. The world would be stable if everyone would be heroic Randian beings completely free to follow their desires. ibid.
‘I’m challenging the moral code of altruism.’ ibid. Rand
The computers allowed the banks to create complex mathematical models that could predict the risk of making any loan or investment. ibid.
The computer networks and the global systems they had created hadn’t distributed power; they had just shifted it and if anything had concentrated it in new forms … Power was exercised over the individual in new and surprising ways. ibid.
This is a story about the rise of machines. And our belief in the balance of nature. How the idea of the ecosystem was invented. How it inspired us. And how it wasn’t even true. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace II: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Networks
In the mass democracies of the west a new ideology has risen up. We have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be replaced by self-organising networks. ibid.
This is the story of the rise of the dream of the self-organising system. And the strange machine fantasy of nature that underpins it. ibid.
It was part of what [Arthur] Tansley called, ‘the great universal law of equilibrium’. All these systems, he wrote, are constantly tending towards positions of balance or equilibrium … There was an underlying mechanism that regulated nature as if it were a machine. But it was only an hypothesis ibid.
Cybernetics saw human beings not as individuals in charge of their own destiny but as components in systems. At its heart, Cybernetics was a computer’s idea of the world. And from that perspective there was no difference between human beings and machines. They were just nodes in networks acting and reacting to flows in information. ibid.
Cybernetics transformed the idea of the eco-system because it seemed to explain how the system stablises. ibid.
‘I will make my life an experiment to search for the principles that govern the universe.’ ibid. Buckminster Fuller
What began to rise up in the 1970s was the idea that we and everything else on the planet are connected together in complex webs and networks. Out of that were going to come epic visions of connectivity. ibid.
Eco-systems did not tend towards stability but the very opposite was true. That nature far from seeking equilibrium was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change. ibid.
This is a story about the rise of machines. And why no-one believes you can change the world for the better any more. Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace III: The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey
Bill Hamilton: Genes were not like people; they were like machines, tiny calculating engines, that could work out the mathematical best outcome. And that explained altruism. ibid.
Gibson gave this new world a name: he called it cyberspace. And his novels described a future that was dangerous and frightening … In cyberspace there were no laws, no politician to protect you. Just raw corporate power. Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation 2016
Phiber Optik: two young hackers … were cult figures in the early on-line scene … breaking in to giant computer networks. ibid.
A new and growing power that was way beyond politics. ibid.
How do we keep it running? How do we guard it? … The directory might be some 72 miles thick. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, 2017
Today the sheer numbers of unpredictable players on the internet has led to some of its greatest glories. ibid.
In South Korea teenage video-gamers put on diapers; this way they avoid losing points by going to the bathroom. ibid.
So this is it: Silicon Valley … There’s Goggle just down here, Tesla, Apple’s headquarters, Facebook, and over there in the distance you’ve got San Francisco … The tech gods here are selling us all a brighter future. But Silicon Valley’s promise to build a better world relies on tearing up the world as it is: they call it disruption. Secrets of Silicon Valley I: The Disruptors, BBC 2017
Start-ups are drawn to Silicon Valley because of another vast industry: venture capital. ibid.
Disruption mean what it says. Around the world traditional taxi drivers have protested about Uber undercutting their prices … The reality has been far less liberating. ibid.
There’s a quite brutal form of capitalism unfolding. ibid.
The constant hum of mild paranoia is never far away in Silicon Valley. ibid.
Apple Park will be a modern-day Coliseum … more than $5 billion. ibid.
This is the story of how Silicon Valley’s mission to connect all of us is disrupting politics, plunging us into a world of political turbulence that no-one can control. Secrets of Silicon Valley II
Section 230: ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’ ibid.