Technical Innovation
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Social Influences
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1900 Peter Kropotkin: Cooperation is a
natural survival strategy. |
Anarchists opposed to both the social Darwinists
and Marxists |
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1920 Lewis Fry Richardson: Parallel computing for
weather prediction. Non-ergodic characterization of fluid turbulence and
coastlines |
Quaker pacifist. Burned his papers when military
used his work on turbulence to improve methods to spread poison gas. |
|
1930 E.E. Just: Black biologist opposed to “master-slave”
model of cell nucleus; investigated self-propagating waves in cytoplasm. |
Anti-racist. |
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1947 Macy conference: neural nets (McCollugh,
Maturana, Varela, etc). Wiener on turbulence in nature. |
a. Self-described “anarchists” looking for
mechanisms for diversity and unpredictability in behaviors. |
|
1947 Macy conference: von Neumann invents
cellular automata. |
b. Gave up on people as too unreliable; saw
self-reproducing machines as logical. Predictable and perfect. |