The Dream Machine: Reading List

I’m reading¹ The Dream Machine. Noting down the interesting books he’s referencing, as well as the other books and papers that come to my mind too:

• Few other books by Waldrop look interesting too
  • Complexity
  • Man-made minds
  • Life on Edge of Chaos
  • Cosmic Origins
• John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener
  • Double biography. I didn’t know this existed. I remember reading somewhere that Prisoner’s Dilemma is the closest thing to a biography of JvN, but clearly not!
• “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Shannon’s paper that everyone raves about
• Origins of Order
  • I started this a long time ago, but I think I’m more ready for it now
  • It’s a pretty dense book. I might need to methodically work through it like I’m doing with this list
• Norbert Wiener
  • Cybernetics
  • “Human Use of Human Beings” : I started this a while ago, without realizing that it was also by Norbert Wiener
• The Cybernetic Brain - Andrew Pickering
  • AI summary: It reframes cybernetics not as a dry science of control, but as a vibrant, experimental tradition. He traces the work of mid-20th-century British thinkers like Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Gregory Bateson, and Gordon Pask, showing how their ideas linked engineering, psychiatry, management, politics, art, and counterculture. At its core, the book argues that cybernetics offered a radical, non-linear way of engaging with the world, emphasizing adaptation, emergence, and participation, whose influence still echoes in fields from robotics to systems theory

It seems like a lot of the decisions that led to the present day computing were historical accidents, even more so than I thought! I asked ChatGPT for book recommendations to understand analog computers better and here is what it suggested:

Essays on “roads not taken” in computing:

• James S. Small – The Analogue Alternative

  • Book page: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203770214/analogue-alternative-james-small
    
  • Preview (limited): https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Analogue_Alternative.html?id=o6Vr_0sPbU4C
    Tip: read the Introduction and Chapter 1 (~25 pages) for the funding/institutions lens.

• Thomas Haigh – Actually, Turing Did Not Invent the Computer

  • Article page: https://cacm.acm.org/opinion/actually-turing-did-not-invent-the-computer/
    
  • Author’s PDF (open): https://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/CACMActuallyTuringDidNotInventTheComputer.pdf
    A crisp myth-bust on inevitability narratives around digital computing.

Out of those books, I think perhaps Analog Computing - Bernd Ulmann is the first I need to read. I came across Analog Computing for the 21st Century, a paper by the same author, which might be a good survey of the landscape. I’ll check out the two essays soon too.