In the fourth epoch, so gradually that almost no one noticed, machines began taking the side of nature, and nature began taking the side of machines. Humans were still in the loop but no longer in control. Faced with a growing sense of this loss of agency, people began to blame “the algorithm,” or those who controlled “the algorithm,” failing to realize there no longer was any identifiable algorithm at the helm. The day of the algorithm was over. The future belonged to something else.

George Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

In a digital computer, one thing happens at a time. In an analog computer, everything happens at once. Brains process three-dimensional maps continuously, instead of processing one-dimensional algorithms step by step. Information is pulse-frequency coded, embodied in the topology of what connects where, not digitally coded by precise sequences of logical events. “The nervous system of even a very simple animal contains computing paradigms that are orders of magnitude more effective than are those found in systems built by humans,” argued Carver Mead, a pioneer of the digital microprocessor, urging a reinvention of analog processing in 1989. Technology will follow nature’s lead in the evolution of true artificial intelligence and control.

Electronics underwent two critical transitions over the past one hundred years: from analog to digital and from high-voltage, high-temperature vacuum tubes to silicon’s low-voltage, low-temperature solid state. That these transitions occurred together does not imply a necessary link. Just as digital computation was first implemented using vacuum tube components, analog computation can be implemented, from the bottom up, by solid state devices produced the same way we make digital microprocessors today, or from the top down through the assembly of digital processors into analog networks that treat the flow of bits not logically but statistically: the way a vacuum tube treats the flow of electrons, or a neuron treats the flow of pulses in a brain.

George Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.

Paul Valéry, “Letter About Mallarmé”