George Dyson, historian, boat maker, master human technologist, and friend of friends discusses the totally wild The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, which Dyson read when it was given to him by Szilard’s wife when Dyson was 11 years old. We talk about AI, geopolitics, alignment (lol), and humanity.

A few notes and links:

• George Dyson on Wikipedia
• Leo Szilard on Wikipedia
• The Voice of the Dolphins on archive.org.
• George’s book Analogia
• Kontiki – the book that got George into lashing.
• The Valencia Hotel in La Jolla, where George and Trude Szilard would hang out.
• Walter Munk, legendary Austrian oceanographic data pioneer.
• Carrying Google Street View cameras into the Grand Canyon in 2012. Who’s in charge?
• Bin Laden stans on TikTok
• Extreme ultraviolet lithography – the thing I refer to when trying to explain nanometer scale transistor production.
• Dana Gould on Pete Holmes’s podcast talking about how a dog can’t conceive of a computer, which may be a way to understand our capacity to conceive of other intelligences (i.e. gods)
• Neils Barichelli and George’s TED talk about Barichelli from 2003
• Quote from Samuel Butler marveling at the installation of the first telegraph line connecting Christchurch to Lyttelton in New Zealand sometime in the 19th century, as recounted in Analogia: “We will say then that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development, when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself – may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in gypt at Exeter Hall – may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent garden. Multiply instance ad libitum – this is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised.”
• All the books George suggested we read when I asked him to be on the podcast:
  • The Black Cloud (by astronomer Fred Hoyle)
  • The Tale of the Big Computer (by magnetohydrodynamicist Hannes Alfveen, under pseudonym Olof Johannsen)
  • The Voice of the Dolphins (by physicist Leo Szilard)
  • On the Beach (by Nevil Shute, aeronautical engineer, but that’s science in my book)
  • Childhood’s End (by Arthur Clarke, pioneer of satellite telecommunication)
  • The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas (by I.J. Good, Turing’s cryptological assistant and pioneer of Bayesian network theory, who assembled this extraordinary collection by asking scientists to submit their wildest, craziest ideas–so it’s not strictly fiction, but close)