For 40 years I've been thinking of this question as technical, in terms of signals and noise, error correction, theoretical limits of precision and so on. Now

For 40 years I've been thinking of this question as technical, in terms of signals and noise, error correction, theoretical limits of precision and so on. Now I think those are the wrong questions. Digital versus analogue, if we approach it as a "conflict" is political, connected to human rights and values around experience, ownership, reproducibility and uniqueness, time, space and reality, and the ephemeral versus the eternal. What would the world be like if we could re-run history and develop analogue technologies on a capability par with our digital ones? Is it unimaginable that picometer scale manufacture, DNA bio-computing and quantum technologies might evolve out of a totally different trajectory than Boolean logic gates, von Neumann/Harvard architectures and packet networks? In such a world, would we still have conceits like Digital Rights Management or massive centralisation into single points of power and potential failure? Would we feel as alienated by/from our technology and need an expert guardian class to manage the masses? Or would powerful analogue computers somehow fee more natural to our analogue brains? More understandable and maintainable by the average person? Would they be mass-producible or remain powerful tools for the few? Would we still rush around like headless chickens, worrying about nanoseconds of efficiency and trying to connect everything to everything else just because we can? Perhaps we would have entirely different problems such as virus-like nanobots that reprogram people or computers that forget important things. Maybe we would have already achieved "artificial intelligence".