Zeros and Ones: Cloning the Analog Human into Digital

February 14, 1946. The Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

In a space the size of a great auditorium sat an enormous machine. It stood three meters tall and stretched thirty meters long. It weighed more than thirty tons. Tens of thousands of vacuum tubes covered the walls, glowing orange and giving off heat. The room was as hot as a sauna, and the machine's droning hum throbbed inside your skull even if you covered your ears.

This was ENIAC. The first general-purpose electronic computer ever built by humans.

A few women stood in front of the machine. They were programmers. Back then, the very word "computer" referred to a profession. One by one, they pulled out thousands of cables plugged into the massive panels and plugged them back in. They flipped switches up and down, over and over. Just reconfiguring the machine for a single calculation took hours. If even one cable was plugged in wrong, the whole calculation came out wrong.

Their eyes were bloodshot with fatigue, but their fingertips never stopped. What they were doing was not mere operation. It was the work of transplanting the human thought process—and above all its most logical part—into a machine.

Up through the Industrial Revolution, humans had externalized energy. The steam engine and electricity extended human muscle and nerve. But calculation still happened inside the human head. Computing the trajectory of an artillery shell, forecasting the weather, breaking codes—humans did all of it with pen on paper. Mistakes were inevitable, and speed was bounded by the processing power of the human brain.

The analog world is continuous. The signal flows without breaks. But a continuous signal is vulnerable to noise. A little noise on the wire distorts the information. The more you copy it, the more the quality degrades. Copy a tape and the sound deteriorates; copy a photograph and the sharpness fades. In the analog world, perfect replication was impossible.

ENIAC, however, took a different approach. It broke all information down into zeros and ones. Current flowing meant one; no current meant zero. There was no in-between. On or off. True or false. In the binary world, there was no crack for noise to slip through. A little noise was simply ignored. As long as the signal stayed clearly distinguishable, the information was preserved perfectly.

This meant the immortality of information.

Digital information did not degrade when copied. The distinction between original and copy disappeared. Once you converted a lifetime of accumulated human knowledge and experience—the analog human—into a string of zeros and ones, it became something that could be stored permanently and copied infinitely.

Humans die, but the data remains. Human thought vanishes, but the algorithm persists. This was the first crack to begin splitting open the very definition of human existence.

Alan Turing had already proven this concept during the war. He broke the human process of calculation into discrete steps. He showed that even a complex formula is, in the end, a sequence of simple logical operations. And he argued that those logical operations could be replaced by a machine. The Turing machine—an imaginary device—read, erased, wrote, and moved symbols on a strip of paper tape. This became the logical foundation of the modern computer.

The moment human thought was interpreted as an algorithm, thinking descended from the mysterious realm of the soul into the realm of engineering. It became possible to say: we no longer think; we process information.

After ENIAC, computers evolved fast. Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, and transistors shrank into integrated circuits. A machine the size of a room moved onto the desk, and later into the pocket. But the essence never changed. Everything was a flow of zeros and ones.

This was also a decisive turning point in the externalization of the human brain's functions. If the printing press externalized memory, the computer externalized logic and calculation. Humans no longer needed to memorize complex formulas. Multiplication, division, even calculus—the machine did it all in an instant. The human brain was freed from its slavery to calculation and could now focus on framing higher-order problems and on creative thought.

But the early computers were isolated.

ENIAC performed vast calculations, but it did so alone. Machine could not talk to machine. To move a result produced on one computer to another, you still had to physically carry punch cards or tape. The speed of generating information had risen, but the speed of sharing it remained stuck at the level of the Industrial Revolution.

Intelligence had expanded, but those intelligences were scattered like islands.

Once again, humans asked the question. Why, with all these computers, can we still not connect to one another? Why, having made our calculations so fast, does it still take so long to share the results?

After the liberation of calculation came the liberation of the network. Information converted into zeros and ones now began to travel down copper wires in search of one another. Isolated intelligences were getting ready to be wired together into one enormous brain.

Having gained the common language of the digital, the machines were now ready to begin their conversation.

Next: Chapter 3, The Acceleration of Connection — The Information Revolution | The Internet, the Birth of a Global Neural Network.