Really disappointing to see a whole host of inaccuracies in this article, even beyond the artistic license you'd expect for the New Yorker. My own area of knowledge is in neuroscience so I'd focus on this.
For instance, while its somewhat correct that nerve signals are binary, insofar as they are all-or-nothing, and yet activity is highly analogue, with specific groups of neurons firing together in pre-programmed bursts & rhythms. This has been one of the challenges in producing BCIs
The analog nature of neural processing is frustratingly nonanalogous to digital computing. I’d really like to see more oscillatory computing systems built, like the von Neumann harmonic injector or the parametron. Using oscillators like central pattern generators is more common in robotics but there are much more powerful oscillatory computers that have simply never been built. That’s frustrating only because I think we’d learn a lot more about the way oscillations are used for computation in the brain.
I'm curious why you think it is non-analogous to digital computing? I published a manuscript which diagrams the necessity for the applications of electrical engineering scientific theory to electromagnetic brain reflexes which ought to be equivalent to electronic feedback control orders which become digital, i.e. operations which are principally numerically caused.
If you're curious to read the proposition of cellular life evolving electronics please see it posted in the /r/dsp:
Yes, please see Chapter 5 "Human Homeostasis" on page 56. It is principled on the belief that biological tissue is piezoelectrical and forms electrical motion which is patterned - please see Chapter 1 section VII "Piezoelectricity in Biological Physical Matter" page 47:
There is a preponderance of available evidence on the piezoelectric properties of biological matter. According to Chen-Glasser et al, Eiichi Fukada demonstrated piezoelectric effects in major human physiological tissue, such as in bone and muscle.[55][56] Fukada’s biological examination demonstrates the intrinsic nature of piezoelectric effects in the building blocks of cellular life: proteins. Proteins, when considered to be digital control outputs of cellular replication stability, are genome expressions of amino acids –with at least 15 demonstrating piezoelectric properties. It is the reorientation and change in dipole moments in biological macromolecules under stress that causes piezoelectricity, hypothetically as an effect of the dipolebmoments causingbelectromagnetic resonances to naturally occur.[57]
For instance, while its somewhat correct that nerve signals are binary, insofar as they are all-or-nothing, and yet activity is highly analogue, with specific groups of neurons firing together in pre-programmed bursts & rhythms. This has been one of the challenges in producing BCIs