The canon

moment · 43

Something that happened and changed what people expected next.

• The annus mirabilis papersAlbert Einstein · 1905
• UNIVAC on election night, CBS, 4 November 1952Remington Rand's Eckert–Mauchly Division in Philadelphia, which built the machine and ran the forecast — Max Woodbury of the University of Pennsylvania and Herbert F. Mitchell Jr. of the UNIVAC Applications Department on the method, Herman Lukoff keeping the hardware alive, Arthur F. Draper and Philip Vincent as the executives who decided what left the building; and CBS Television, which put it on the air — Walter Cronkite anchoring his first national election night, Charles Collingwood at a mock-up console in New York talking to a machine ninety miles away · 1952
• The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial IntelligenceProposed by John McCarthy (Dartmouth College), Marvin L. Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM Corporation) and Claude E. Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories); attended by roughly twenty people, of whom three stayed the summer · 1956
• Sputnik 1OKB-1 under Sergei Korolev, from a design pushed by Mikhail Tikhonravov; launched on an R-7, the first ICBM, from the 5th Tyuratam range · 1957
• The roulette computer, and the distance between a proven edge and a working oneEdward O. Thorp and Claude Shannon · 1961
• Beat the Dealer, and sixty years of the house's answerEdward O. Thorp; the answer that occupies most of this entry has no single author, and was written by an industry, two courts and a detective agency · 1962
• The ARPANET's first nodesARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office — Robert W. Taylor, who started it, and Lawrence G. Roberts, who ran it; the subnet built under contract by Bolt Beranek and Newman; the first four sites UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah · 1969
• "Artificial Intelligence: A General Survey"Sir James Lighthill · 1973
• The handheld demonstration — a prototype built to move a regulator, and the beacon written into its patentMartin Cooper, who led the project and made the call; John F. Mitchell, who held that Motorola's answer had to be portable rather than vehicular; the eight names on US 3,906,166 — Cooper, Richard W. Dronsuth, Albert J. Leitich, Charles N. Lynk Jr., James J. Mikulski, Mitchell, Roy A. Richardson and John H. Sangster; Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young at Bell Telephone Laboratories, whose 1947 memorandum is the concept the phone was running on; Joel S. Engel, who took the call and ran AT&T's cellular programme; and the Federal Communications Commission, whose Docket 18262 was the room the demonstration was actually aimed at · 1973
• The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA MoleculesOrganized by Paul Berg (chair) with David Baltimore, Sydney Brenner, Richard Roblin and Maxine Singer, under the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Recombinant DNA Molecules; attended by roughly 140 scientists, 16 journalists and 4 lawyers · 1975
• Merlin ships — a machine opponent in the pocket, and then the best-selling toy in AmericaBob Doyle, with Holly Doyle and Wendl Thomis, at Micro-Cosmos; case by Arthur Venditti and Samuel T. Kjellman; manufactured and marketed by Parker Brothers, a division of the General Mills Fun Group · 1978
• Simon launches at Studio 54 — a machine that takes turns with you, and nothing inside it that playsRalph H. Baer and Howard J. Morrison at Marvin Glass and Associates, programmed by Lenny Cope; housing by Douglas P. Montague; manufactured and marketed by Milton Bradley · 1978
• Speak & Spell ships with the first single-chip LPC speech synthesiserTexas Instruments — Paul Breedlove, Richard Wiggins, Larry Brantingham, Gene Frantz · 1978
• Teddy Ruxpin ships — an animatronic face goes home with the childKen Forsse, with Larry Larsen and John Davies, at Alchemy II; manufactured and marketed by Worlds of Wonder · 1985
• The collapse of the Lisp machine marketNo single actor — the Lisp machine vendors (Symbolics, Lisp Machines Inc., Texas Instruments, Xerox) and the expert-system tool companies (Teknowledge, IntelliCorp, Inference, Carnegie Group) · 1987
• The release of Toy Story, the first feature animated entirely by computerPixar Animation Studios — directed by John Lasseter, produced by Bonnie Arnold and Ralph Guggenheim, released by Walt Disney Pictures through Buena Vista · 1995
• Graffiti ships built into the Pilot 1000 and 5000Palm Computing — Jeff Hawkins, with Joe Sipher and Ron Marianetti; shipped by U.S. Robotics · 1996
• The Office Assistant ships in Microsoft Office 97Microsoft — Office division, on Microsoft Research's Lumière project, character by Kevan J. Atteberry · 1996
• Deep Blue defeats Garry KasparovIBM Research — Feng-hsiung Hsu, Murray Campbell, A. Joseph Hoane Jr., Jerry Brody and C.J. Tan, with grandmaster Joel Benjamin · 1997
• LEGO Mindstorms goes on sale, is reverse engineered inside eight weeks, and the company decides not to sueThe LEGO Group, Billund — Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, who saw the demo in 1984 and funded the lab; the MIT Media Lab's programmable-brick line under Seymour Papert, Mitchel Resnick, Fred Martin and Brian Silverman; Søren Lund, who ran the product; Mads Nipper, the senior vice president who has gone on record about the legal decision; and the four people the entry is really about, none of whom worked for LEGO — Kekoa Proudfoot, who took the brick apart, and Dave Baum, Markus Noga and Ralph Hempel, who replaced what he found · 1998
• Long-Term Capital Management — the fund that was diversified until it turned out everyone owned the same bookJohn Meriwether and the sixteen partners of Long-Term Capital Management, among them Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes, who had shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences eleven months earlier, and David W. Mullins Jr., a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; the fourteen banks and securities firms that recapitalised the fund; William J. McDonough of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who provided the room; and — for the part of this entry that matters most, the account of *why* — Donald MacKenzie, whose interviews with LTCM's principals and with their competitors produced the imitation explanation, and the United States General Accounting Office under Thomas J. McCool and the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, who established the record everything else is checked against · 1998
• ASIMO — thirty-six years of a humanoid programme, and what it was forHonda R&D, Wako Fundamental Technical Research Center, Saitama — the programme begun in 1986 under a secrecy order that held for ten years; Kazuo Hirai and Masato Hirose, authors of the first papers Honda published on it; Satoshi Shigemi, who led ASIMO development and wrote the programme's own account of itself; and Miraikan, the national museum that gave the machine a job title and kept it for twenty years · 2000
• The Year 2000 problem — the catastrophe that did not arrive, and why that settles nothingNo single actor. The people who make the record checkable are — on the warning side, Peter de Jager, whose September 1993 Computerworld piece is the usual origin point, and Edward Yardeni, the most credentialled of the economic forecasters; on the institutional side, the U.S. Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem under Robert F. Bennett and Christopher J. Dodd, the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion under John Koskinen, the General Accounting Office, and the UN-sponsored International Y2K Cooperation Center; on the practitioner side, Martyn Thomas, who ran Deloitte & Touche's international Y2K services and audited the programme for UK National Air Traffic Services; and on the sceptical side, Anthony Finkelstein and John Quiggin, who wrote the two retrospectives that the defenders still have to answer · 2000
• The Human Genome Project declared complete — the capability that came in early and the medicine that did not comeThe International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium — twenty sequencing centres across the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China. Begun 1 October 1990 under James Watson at the NIH National Center for Human Genome Research and co-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy; led from 1993 by Francis Collins; the largest producing centres run by Eric Lander (Whitehead Institute/MIT), John Sulston (Sanger Centre, funded by the Wellcome Trust), Robert Waterston (Washington University in St. Louis) and Richard Gibbs (Baylor College of Medicine). Raced from May 1998 by Celera Genomics under J. Craig Venter · 2003
• The DARPA Grand ChallengeDARPA, under director Tony Tether — won by the Stanford Racing Team, led by Sebastian Thrun · 2005
• Filtering at national scale — the largest content-classification systems ever deployed, and what they cost to runThe Ministry of Public Security, which began the Golden Shield in 1998; British Telecom and the Internet Watch Foundation, whose CleanFeed went live in June 2004 and became the template every democracy copied; and the measurement community without which none of it would be knowable — Richard Clayton, Steven J. Murdoch and Robert N. M. Watson, who took the Great Firewall apart in 2006; Tao Zhu, David Phipps, Adam Pridgen, Jedidiah R. Crandall and Dan S. Wallach, who timed it in 2013; Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts, who established what it is for; and the Citizen Lab, the Great Firewall Report and Censored Planet, who have kept measuring it for twenty years · 2009
• Iron Dome — the machine that decides which rockets are not worth shootingRafael Advanced Defense Systems, which built the Tamir interceptor and integrated the system; Elta Systems of Israel Aerospace Industries, which supplied the EL/M-2084 multi-mission radar; mPrest Systems, which wrote the battle-management and weapon-control software; Brig. Gen. Daniel Gold, who committed MAFAT to the programme in 2004–2005 before it was formally approved and was criticised by the State Comptroller for the way he did it; and Defence Minister Amir Peretz, who approved it in 2007 over his own generals' objections and demanded it in three years · 2011
• Siri ships built into the iPhone 4SApple, on Siri, Inc. (Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer, Tom Gruber), out of SRI International's CALO project · 2011
• The H5N1 transmissibility papers and the fight over publishing themRon Fouchier's group at Erasmus MC Rotterdam (Sander Herfst first author) and Yoshihiro Kawaoka's at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Tokyo (Masaki Imai first author); the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity under acting chair Paul Keim, which asked for redaction on 20 December 2011 and withdrew the request on 30 March 2012; and the World Health Organization consultation of 16–17 February 2012, which decided the redaction could not be built · 2011
• Watson defeats Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy!IBM Research — David Ferrucci and the DeepQA team · 2011
• SuperVision wins the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition ChallengeAlex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey E. Hinton, University of Toronto — entered under the team name SuperVision · 2012
• APT1 — Exposing One of China's Cyber Espionage UnitsMandiant — the report carries no bylines and is issued by "The Mandiant Intelligence Center"; later interviews credit the work to a small team led by Visi Stark, under founder Kevin Mandia and president Travis Reese · 2013
• The Snowden disclosures — the scale of automated collection becomes a public factEdward Snowden, who took the documents and chose the journalists; Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, who reported the first Guardian stories; Barton Gellman, who reported the Washington Post's; and the two newspapers, which decided what to publish and what to hold · 2013
• AlphaGo's move 37, game two against Lee SedolGoogle DeepMind — David Silver, Aja Huang, Demis Hassabis and the AlphaGo team · 2016
• Flight-proven — the first reflight of an orbital-class booster, and the cost curve that did not followSpaceX; Elon Musk set the goal, the schedule and the hundred-fold cost claim; Lars Blackmore ran entry, descent and landing for Falcon 9 from 2011 to 2018 and co-invented the G-FOLD powered-descent algorithm with Behçet Açıkmeşe, Jordi Casoliva and a third JPL co-author, whose surname is redacted here and named in Sources; Gwynne Shotwell set the commercial terms and the 30% figure; Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer of SES, was the first customer willing to put a satellite on a rocket that had already flown · 2017
• Cambridge Analytica — the harvest is documented, the persuasion never wasChristopher Wylie, who took the documents out; Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison, who published them in the Observer on 17 March 2018 alongside Matthew Rosenberg and Nicholas Confessore in the New York Times the same day; the Channel 4 News undercover team, who filmed the sales pitch; and the four bodies whose findings are the part that survives — the UK Information Commissioner's Office under Elizabeth Denham, the US Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Insolvency Service · 2018
• Reaching volume — the American car startup that got there, years late, by taking the robots outTesla, Inc. — founded 1 July 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; Elon Musk, who led the Series A in February 2004, became chief executive in October 2008, set the factory-automation strategy in 2016 and publicly reversed it on 13 April 2018; JB Straubel, chief technology officer from 2005 to 2019 and the continuity across every ramp; and the Fremont and Sparks production workforce, who assembled by hand the work the robots had been bought to do · 2018
• AlphaFold2 at CASP14DeepMind — John Jumper, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, Tim Green, Michael Figurnov and the AlphaFold team, with Demis Hassabis · 2020
• March 2020 — the week the platforms told the world their machines would be doing the judgingThe seven companies that issued a joint statement on 16 March 2020 — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube; YouTube and Twitter, whose posts the same day said in advance what the swap would cost; the Google and Meta transparency reports that later measured it; the Oversight Board, which asked Meta for an error rate in 2023 and was not given one; Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for six in Murthy v. Missouri on 26 June 2024, and Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting for three; David A. Broniatowski, Joseph R. Simons, Jiayan Gu, Amelia M. Jamison and Lorien C. Abroms, who measured whether any of it worked; and Chris Wymant and the Oxford/Turing group, who measured the other half · 2020
• The Twitter acquisition — the ownership change that closed the most-studied corpus of public speechElon Musk, who bid, tried to withdraw, and closed; the Twitter board and CEO Parag Agrawal, who signed the agreement and then sued to enforce it; Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery, whose expedited trial date ended the withdrawal; and — for the part of this entry that matters most — the unnamed people at the company who priced the API in February and March 2023 · 2022
• The launch of ChatGPTOpenAI (the launch announcement is unsigned) · 2022
• The Bletchley Declaration and the AI Safety SummitSigned by 28 countries and the European Union attending the AI Safety Summit; convened and chaired by the United Kingdom government under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, at Bletchley Park, 1–2 November 2023 · 2023
• The LLaMA leak and the Llama 2 releaseMeta AI — Hugo Touvron, Guillaume Lample and the LLaMA team; the leak's uploader is anonymous · 2023

idea · 28

A framing later work is built out of rather than argued about. Cited when the thing being watched descends from it and the descent explains its shape.

• The Analytical EngineCharles Babbage · 1837
• A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic FieldJames Clerk Maxwell · 1865
• The Hollerith electric tabulating system, and the 1890 censusHerman Hollerith, who built it; John Shaw Billings, who suggested at the Census Office in 1882 that there ought to be a machine and afterwards declined the credit; and the United States Census Office under Superintendent Robert P. Porter, which set the competition, wrote the contract, and owned the population being counted · 1890
• The Turing–Welchman Bombe, and industrial cryptanalysis at Bletchley ParkAlan Turing, who saw that the machine had to be driven by guessed plaintext rather than by the enemy's indicator system, and specified it; Gordon Welchman, whose diagonal board turned a design that mostly produced false stops into one that worked; Harold "Doc" Keen and the British Tabulating Machine Company at Letchworth, who engineered it into something manufacturable and then manufactured it; Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski of the Polish Cipher Bureau, whose bomba came first and whose handover in July 1939 is the reason there was anything to start from; and the 1,676 Wrens and 263 RAF men who were running 211 of them by the end · 1940
• The Three Laws of RoboticsIsaac Asimov, with John W. Campbell Jr. · 1942
• The Doomsday ClockConceived and drawn by Martyl Langsdorf for the June 1947 cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; set by editor Eugene Rabinowitch until his death in 1973, and by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board since · 1947
• Programming a Computer for Playing ChessClaude Shannon · 1950
• The Logic Theory MachineAllen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and J. C. Shaw, at the RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology · 1956
• "The Perceptron: A Probabilistic Model for Information Storage and Organization in the Brain"Frank Rosenblatt, at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory · 1958
• A Note on Two Problems in Connexion with GraphsEdsger W. Dijkstra · 1959
• Some Studies in Machine Learning Using the Game of CheckersA. L. Samuel, at the IBM Corporation · 1959
• ELIZA—A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language Communication Between Man And MachineJoseph Weizenbaum · 1966
• A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data BanksE. F. Codd, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose · 1970
• The fixed-code garage door remoteNo single inventor — the coded remote came out of the garage-door trade in the 1970s (Multi-Elmac/Multi-Code, Alliance/Genie and others) and was commoditised by fixed-address encoder ICs, of which the PT2262/PT2272 pair is the one still named in the literature · 1970s
• Minimax on game trees, and alpha-beta pruningBackward induction on game trees — László Kalmár (1928), after Zermelo (1913); alpha-beta pruning — John McCarthy (1956) and at least four independent rediscoverers; proved correct and analysed by Donald E. Knuth and Ronald W. Moore (1975) · 1975
• "Computer-Based Medical Consultations: MYCIN"Edward H. Shortliffe, with Bruce G. Buchanan and Stanley N. Cohen, Stanford University · 1976
• The IBM PC — publishing an interface is not granting a right, and it did not matterIBM's Entry Systems Division, Boca Raton — William C. Lowe, who got the machine approved, and Philip Don Estridge, who built it and ran it until he was killed in 1985; Intel, whose 8088 IBM bought rather than designed around; Microsoft, to whom IBM licensed the operating system on terms that let Microsoft license it to everyone else; and the half the name always leaves out — the engineers at Compaq, Phoenix Technologies, AMI and Award who reimplemented, legally, what IBM had printed · 1981
• Kids Can't Wait — the Apple IIe into 9,250 schools, and the tax code as a distribution channelSteve Jobs, who found the provision and walked it through Congress himself; Michael Rashkin, Apple's director of taxes, who drafted the bill; Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark, who introduced it, and Sen. John Danforth, who carried the Senate version that never moved; Assemblyman Charles Imbrecht and Governor Jerry Brown, who between them passed the state law that actually worked; Stephen Scheier, who ran the giveaway with four people; House Majority Leader Jim Wright, who wrote the rival bill that killed it; and the two researchers who measured what arrived — Henry Jay Becker at Johns Hopkins and Robert Kominski at the Census Bureau · 1983
• The TCP/IP cutover — federation without a centreVinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, who designed the protocol; Jon Postel, who wrote the transition plan and held the numbers; DARPA and the Defense Communications Agency, who mandated the change and enforced the date; and the several hundred host administrators who did the work · 1983
• The Macintosh — putting the interface in ROM, and making conformance cheaper than divergenceJef Raskin, who started the project in 1979 and named it, and whose "Computers by the Millions" argued the machine into existence before Steve Jobs took it over in 1981; Burrell C. Smith, who got the board down to about fifty chips; Bill Atkinson, who spent three and a half years on QuickDraw and invented the region so that windows could overlap; Andy Hertzfeld, who wrote the system software and said out loud why it went in ROM; Susan Kare, who drew what the metaphor looked like; John Sculley, who signed the 1985 licence that gave the interface away; and the parties who actually distributed it — Adobe's John Warnock, Aldus's Paul Brainerd, and, in the end, Microsoft · 1984
• Unix and Linux — capability from composable parts, and the open substrateUnix — Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie, with M. D. McIlroy, J. F. Ossanna and R. H. Canaday, Bell Telephone Laboratories, from 1969; Linux — Linus Torvalds, University of Helsinki, from 1991, under Richard Stallman's GNU General Public License (1989/1991) · 1991
• "Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not"William D. Nordhaus · 1994
• PageRank and the crawl — ranking the web by its own link graphSergey Brin and Lawrence Page, Computer Science Department, Stanford University; with Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd on the PageRank report, and Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg on the system. Built inside the Stanford Integrated Digital Library Project under NSF Cooperative Agreement IRI-9411306, with funding from DARPA, NASA and Interval Research · 1998
• Attention Is All You NeedAshish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin — Google Brain, Google Research and the University of Toronto · 2017
• Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human PreferencesPaul F. Christiano, Jan Leike, Tom B. Brown, Miljan Martic, Shane Legg and Dario Amodei — OpenAI and DeepMind, jointly · 2017
• Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts LayerNoam Shazeer, Azalia Mirhoseini, Krzysztof Maziarz, Andy Davis, Quoc V. Le, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Jeff Dean, Google Brain — extending Jacobs, Jordan, Nowlan and Hinton (1991) · 2017
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language ModelsJared Kaplan (Johns Hopkins and OpenAI), Sam McCandlish, Tom Henighan, Tom B. Brown, Benjamin Chess, Rewon Child, Scott Gray, Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu and Dario Amodei — OpenAI · 2020
• Picking on the Same Person: Does Algorithmic Monoculture lead to Outcome Homogenization?Rishi Bommasani, Kathleen A. Creel, Ananya Kumar, Dan Jurafsky and Percy Liang — Stanford University and Northeastern University · 2022

fiction · 26

A story the culture argues through. Carried graded — what it got right and what it got wrong, against dates.

• "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"Mary Shelley · 1818
• The Time MachineH. G. Wells · 1895
• Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon)Georges Méliès — written, designed, directed by and starring; produced and sold by Star Film · 1902
• "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)"Karel Čapek · 1920
• MetropolisFritz Lang (director) and Thea von Harbou (novel, 1925, and screenplay) · 1927
• Nineteen Eighty-FourGeorge Orwell · 1949
• The Day the Earth Stood StillRobert Wise and Edmund H. North, after Harry Bates · 1951
• AutofacPhilip K. Dick · 1955
• Forbidden PlanetFred M. Wilcox, Cyril Hume, Irving Block and Allen Adler · 1956
• The BlobIrvin S. Yeaworth Jr., Theodore Simonson and Kate Phillips · 1958
• Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy CautionJean-Luc Godard · 1965
• "2001: A Space Odyssey"Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke · 1968
• Soylent GreenRichard Fleischer, from a screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg · 1973
• Star WarsGeorge Lucas · 1977
• The Running ManStephen King, writing as Richard Bachman; film (1987) directed by Paul Michael Glaser, screenplay by Steven E. de Souza · 1982
• WarGamesJohn Badham, from a screenplay by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes · 1983
• NeuromancerWilliam Gibson · 1984
• The TerminatorJames Cameron, with Gale Anne Hurd · 1984
• ContactCarl Sagan (novel, 1985); Robert Zemeckis, from a screenplay by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg and a story by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (film, 1997) · 1985
• Short CircuitJohn Badham, S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock · 1986
• Consider Phlebas and the Culture novelsIain M. Banks · 1987
• Back to the Future Part IIRobert Zemeckis, from a screenplay by Bob Gale · 1989
• The Difference EngineWilliam Gibson and Bruce Sterling · 1990
• Total RecallPaul Verhoeven, from a screenplay by Ronald Shusett, Dan O'Bannon and Gary Goldman, after Philip K. Dick · 1990
• HerSpike Jonze · 2013
• Ex MachinaAlex Garland · 2014

limit · 4

A result about what cannot be done, carried together with what it is repeatedly made to say instead.

• On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems IKurt Gödel · 1931
• On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the EntscheidungsproblemAlan Turing · 1936
• A Mathematical Theory of CommunicationClaude E. Shannon · 1948
• "Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry"Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert · 1969

interpretation · 24

A reading of events that a reading may need to name.

• Gutenberg's press, and the analogy built on itJohannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg, in Mainz, on money from the Mainz merchant Johann Fust; the surviving business was Fust's and Peter Schöffer's, and no book Gutenberg printed carries his name · 1440
• Notes by the Translator, appended to Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles BabbageAda Lovelace · 1843
• Computing Machinery and IntelligenceAlan Turing · 1950
• The essential singularity passage in Ulam's memorial to von NeumannStanisław Ulam, summarising an undated conversation with John von Neumann · 1958
• Some Moral and Technical Consequences of AutomationNorbert Wiener · 1960
• The occupation called computer, held by people, and its disappearanceThe occupation had no author. The reading carried here is chiefly David Alan Grier's, in When Computers Were Human (2005), built on Jennifer S. Light's "When Computers Were Women" (1999) and joined since by Margot Lee Shetterly, Nathalia Holt and Marie Hicks; the counter-reading, which this entry also carries, is Thomas J. Misa's · 1964
• Goodhart's lawCharles A. E. Goodhart · 1975
• "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation"Joseph Weizenbaum · 1976
• "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979
• The capability approach — poverty as capability deprivationAmartya Sen · 1979
• Moravec's paradoxHans Moravec · 1988
• "The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox"Paul A. David · 1990
• "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"Carl Sagan (four of the twenty-five chapters co-written with Ann Druyan); the spoken version of the central claim from The Charlie Rose Show, 27 May 1996 · 1996
• Model laundering — the correlation assumption that became a triple-A, and what the triple-A was doingThe phrase is this canon's label and not the record's. The reading it names was assembled by Donald MacKenzie, whose 2011 sociology of the crisis established the mechanism from 87 interviews and whose 2014 article with Taylor Spears qualified the popular account of it; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission under Phil Angelides, whose January 2011 report made the ratings finding official and whose four dissenting commissioners recorded the same finding in their own list of causes; Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which released the internal documents on 22 October 2008, and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations under Carl Levin and Tom Coburn, which put more of them on the record in April 2010; Joshua Coval, Jakub Jurek and Erik Stafford, who showed why the tranches were fragile; Mark Whitehouse, who printed the model's own author's warning in the Wall Street Journal in September 2005; and Felix Salmon, whose February 2009 Wired cover made the episode famous in a form that is partly wrong · 2008
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of DataAlon Halevy, Peter Norvig and Fernando Pereira — Google · 2009
• "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies"Nick Bostrom · 2014
• Ransomware and the rail — the payment channel that scaled the crime, and the capability that did notEuropol's European Cybercrime Centre with the Dutch National High Tech Crime Unit, which stated the claim institutionally in February 2014; Nicholas Weaver, who put it in its strongest and most quoted form on 27 May 2021; and Peter Van Valkenburgh of Coin Center, who published the standing rebuttal on 3 March 2016 · 2014
• Concrete Problems in AI SafetyDario Amodei and Chris Olah (equal first authors, Google Brain), Jacob Steinhardt (Stanford), Paul Christiano (UC Berkeley), John Schulman (OpenAI) and Dan Mané (Google Brain) · 2016
• Veles and the Internet Research Agency — same page, different machine, opposite remediesCraig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, who found the Veles cluster on 3 November 2016; Samanth Subramanian, who documented how it worked and how it died, 15 February 2017; the federal grand jury of the District of Columbia, which documented the other machine on 16 February 2018; Saska Cvetkovska, Aubrey Belford, Craig Silverman and J. Lester Feder, who complicated the first account on 18 July 2018; and Heather C. Hughes and Israel Waismel-Manor, whose 2018 fieldwork in Veles is the only ethnography of it · 2016
• The social credit narrative — a real blacklist, an invented score, and a law written against the inventionThe State Council, which issued the 2014 planning outline on 14 June 2014; Rachel Botsman, whose Wired extract of 21 October 2017 is the popular account's most-quoted statement; Mike Pence, who put that account in a government's mouth on 4 October 2018; and the specialists who documented the gap — Rogier Creemers (2018), Jamie Horsley (16 November 2018), Jeremy Daum (2019), Shazeda Ahmed (2019), Kendra Schaefer for Trivium China and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (16 November 2020), Genia Kostka (2019) and Vincent Brussee (2022, 2023) · 2017
• Financing a state by theft — the DPRK cryptocurrency programme, and the number that carries the claimThe UN Panel of Experts of the 1718 Committee, which first put a total on it in August 2019 and last reported in March 2024 before Russia's veto ended it; the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team of eleven states, which replaced it in October 2024 and published the current figures on 22 October 2025; and the blockchain-analytics firms — Chainalysis, TRM Labs, Elliptic, CertiK — who produce the underlying attributions and the annual totals everyone quotes · 2019
• The Bitter LessonRichard S. Sutton · 2019
• Ukraine — the iteration loop that set the tempo, and the capital that set the ceilingNo single author. The mechanism was built by Ukraine's volunteer drone workshops and by the Army of Drones programme Mykhailo Fedorov ran out of the Ministry of Digital Transformation from 2022, later Brave1 (April 2023) and Brave1 Market (April 2025); the doctrine was stated by Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief, in "Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win in It" on 1 November 2023, which calls for "creation of an asymmetric arsenal of weapons and equipment in Ukraine"; the numbers that contradict the popular version of it were collected by Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds of RUSI across four years of fieldwork; and the standing correction on how much of it is AI was written by Kateryna Bondar of CSIS on 6 March 2025 · 2022
• Pre-positioning — reading intent from an intrusion that does nothingMicrosoft Threat Intelligence, which named the actor and stated the disruption reading at moderate confidence on 24 May 2023; and CISA, NSA and the FBI, with DOE, EPA, TSA and the Australian, Canadian, British and New Zealand cyber centres, who raised it to high confidence in the joint advisory of 7 February 2024 · 2024

prediction · 13

A dated claim, carried graded: the claim in its own words, when it was made, when it came due, and what actually happened. Where a predictor graded themselves, their grade and an independent one, saying they differ. The point of the kind is a base rate for how wrong AI forecasting runs.

• "NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser"United Press International, datelined Washington, 7 July 1958; the forecast in the lede is attributed in the article to the Navy, not to Frank Rosenblatt · 1958
• Cramming More Components onto Integrated CircuitsGordon E. Moore · 1965 — the claim; revised downward by Moore himself in 1975
• Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent MachineIrving John Good, then of Trinity College, Oxford and the Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton, Berkshire · 1965 — the volume; the monograph was drafted April 1963 and amended May 1964, from talks given October 1962 and January 1963
• The Shape of Automation for Men and ManagementHerbert A. Simon · 1965 — the book; the sentence is from his 1960 Ford Lectures
• "Meet Shaky, the first electronic person"Brad Darrach, writing in Life; the forecast is attributed in the article to Marvin Minsky, who later denied making it · 1970
• The Kurzweil record, 1990–2024 — thirty-five years of dated claims, and the people who counted themRay Kurzweil · 1990
• "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era"Vernor Vinge · 1993
• "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology"Ray Kurzweil · 2005
• "The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?"Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne · 2013
• "What's Next? The Research Frontier — Geoffrey Hinton on radiologists"Geoffrey Hinton, on a CIFAR panel at the Creative Destruction Lab's "Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence" conference, Rotman School of Management, Toronto, 27 October 2016 · 2016
• Tesla Autonomy Investor DayElon Musk · 2019
• The Neuralink launch presentation — a brain-machine interface offered as the answer to AI riskElon Musk, with Max Hodak (president) and Matthew MacDougall (head neurosurgeon), at the Morrison Planetarium, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, 16 July 2019; the accompanying white paper credited on its title page to "Elon Musk, Neuralink" · 2019
• Machines of Loving GraceDario Amodei · 2024