How Did Claude Shannon Build the Digital World?

David Senra, reading the book's account, says Claude Shannon muted the world, built his own, and in turn built the foundation of the digital world. All the advanced signal processing that sends high-speed data grew as an outgrowth of Claude Shannon's work on information theory.

Shannon was immune to scientific fashion and insulated from opinions of all kinds. He kept closed doors and long silences, and thought his best thoughts in Spartan apartments and empty office buildings. A history defined by self-promoters almost entirely wrote him out. His life was spent in the pursuit of curious, serious play. He followed his own curiosity and worked only on what interested him. He was as content rigging up a juggling robot or a flame throwing trumpet, both things he actually made, as he was pioneering digital circuits. He worked with levity and played with gravity, and never acknowledged a distinction between the two.

A line in the book calls geniuses the luckiest of mortals because what they do is the same as what they most want to do. What Shannon did was what he was most interested in doing. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s he said it is inevitable that people will build machines that can think and that will be smarter than humans. He made no distinction between work and play.