Michael Nielsen has a very interesting essay about visionary papers, Working notes on the role of vision papers in basic science. Here's his initial list:
- Alan Turing's paper, crucial for modern computer science. Turing also wrote important vision papers on morphogenesis and artificial intelligence;
- Alan Kay's paper, crucial for modern interactive personal computing;
- Alexei Kitaev's paper, which founded the field of topological quantum computing;
- Alexander Rich's paper, on the RNA world as a precursor to modern biology;
- Eric Drexler's book, Engines of Creation, on molecular nanotechnology; and
- John Wheeler's paper on the idea, increasingly influential in modern physics, that information may be at the basis of reality.
He lists more visionary papers in a footnote:
A few vision papers I very much like: Gordon Moore's 1965 paper on his now-eponymous law; Doug Engelbart's 1962 paper on augmenting human intelligence; Rainer Weiss's early work on gravitational wave detection (and some followups, e.g., the 1983 NSF report on LIGO – many megaprojects presumably start out with visionary grant proposals); Lynn Margulis on endosymbiosis, and her collaboration with Lovelock on Gaia; the early papers on connectomics, circa the early 2000s; Alan Turing's 1950 paper on artificial intelligence and his 1952 paper on morphogenesis; David Deutsch's 1980s papers on quantum computing; Ted Nelson and Bret Victor's many wonderful imaginings about the future of media, thinking, and computers; Claude Shannon's 1940s papers on information theory; Neal Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age"; parts of Vernor Vinge's work; Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the web; Adam Marblestone's proposals, many of which involve mapping or interfacing with the brain in some way, but which also branch out into other areas; Richard Feynman's papers on quantum computing and molecular nanotechnology; Freeman Dyson's multiple visions of future technology. Curiously, all but one of these people are men. In part this is because most of the papers have been around for quite some time, and science used to be more male-dominated. It's partly because I'm most familiar with physics and adjacent fields, which are also more male-dominated than most sciences. Still, I'd be curious to hear of more vision papers from women.
Here's a visionary paper by a woman:
Miriam Lipschutz Yevick, Holographic or fourier logic, Pattern Recognition, Volume 7, Issue 4, December 1975, Pages 197-213, https://doi.org/10.1016/0031-3203(75)90005-9
I learned about it in Karl Pribram's 1971 Languages of the Brain. It should be front and center in current discussions of symbols and neural nets in the creation of artificial minds.
I give Nielsen's paper my highest recommendation.
Addendum, 6.1.22: You know, it just hit me. I said I found out about a 1975 article by Yevick in a book published in 1971. That's obviously impossible. But I strongly associate her with Pribram. So I did a little digging. John Haugeland published an article, The nature and plausibility of Cognitivism, in the second issue of Brain and Behavior Science. Haugeland mentions Yevick's article. Pribram comments on Haugeland's article and mentions Yevick. And Yevick herself comments. That's where I found out about her article. Interestingly enough, in her comment she mentions von Neumann's 1966 Theory of Self Reproducing Automata, where he mentions that "certain objects are such that their description is more complex than the object itself."
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