Publication details
An Afterword to "Rise of the Self-Replicators": Placing John A. Etzler, Frigyes Karinthy, Fred Stahl, and Others in the Early History of Thought About Self-Reproducing Machines
Tim Taylor
2024
Abstract
This article is an afterword to the book "Rise of the Self-Replicators: Early Visions of Machines, AI and Robots That Can Reproduce and Evolve", coauthored by Tim Taylor and Alan Dorin (2020). The book covered the early history of thought about self-reproducing and evolving machines, from initial speculations in the 17th century up to the early 1960s (from which point onward the more recent history is already well covered elsewhere). This article supplements the material discussed in the book by presenting several relevant sources that have come to the author’s attention since the book was published. The most significant additions to the history are from the German-born, 19th-century inventor and utopian John Adolphus Etzler in the 1830s-1840s, the Hungarian author and satirist Frigyes Karinthy in 1916, and the U.S. mathematician and computer scientist Fred Stahl in 1960.
Reference
Taylor, T. (2024). An Afterword to "Rise of the Self-Replicators": Placing John A. Etzler, Frigyes Karinthy, Fred Stahl, and Others in the Early History of Thought About Self-Reproducing Machines. Artificial Life, 30(1), 91–105. https://doi.org/10.1162/artl_a_00424
BibTeX
@article{taylor2024afterword,
author = {Taylor, Tim},
title = {An Afterword to "Rise of the Self-Replicators": Placing John A. Etzler, Frigyes Karinthy, Fred Stahl, and Others in the Early History of Thought About Self-Reproducing Machines},
journal = {Artificial Life},
year = {2024},
volume = {30},
number = {1},
pages = {91-105},
publisher = {{MIT} Press Journals},
doi = {10.1162/artl_a_00424},
issn = {1530-9185},
category = {journal},
keywords = {history, selfrep}
}
Notes
Slides from a presentation about this paper, to be presented at the ALIFE 2024 conference in Copenhagen, are available here.