Xenoarchitecture

The myth of the Golem

The myth of the Golem, attributed to Rabbi Löw, emerged in Prague in the 16th century. It is an animated being made from inanimate matter (usually mud, clay or a similar material). The golem is strong but not intelligent. If ordered to perform a task, it will carry it out systematically and slowly, following instructions literally, without any questioning. This concept links it to the notion of an automated entity, or what would later be called a robot.

Looms operated by punched tape

Basile Bouchon uses a punched tape to program a loom. In doing so, he adapts the concept of the clockwork mechanisms used in music boxes to the repetitive task of a loom.

Le Canard digérateur, by Jacques de Vaucanson

The Digesting Duck (Le Canard digérateur) was an automaton created in 1738 by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson. Today it is considered the first robotic pet in history. The duck carried out the entire metabolic process, from ingestion to defecation, which made it Vaucanson’s most successful automaton.

Jacques de Vaucanson proposes the first automatic loom

Vaucanson created the world’s first fully automatic loom.

Creation of the automaton known as the Chess Player, or the Turk

Wolfgang von Kempelen designed an anthropomorphic structure capable of playing chess. Although it was later revealed to be a hoax, it was the first time a structure was created capable of simulating a machine that, in turn, simulated a human mind.

The Luddite movement begins to emerge in the south of England

Luddism (after Ned Ludd) arose as a movement against the new job-destroying machines born of the Industrial Revolution. Looms and industrial spinning machines threatened to replace artisans with less-skilled workers who earned lower wages.

First version of Babbage’s machine

The first machine Babbage designed was the difference engine, a computer conceived specifically to build tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions by evaluating polynomials through approximation. Although this project never came to fruition for financial and personal reasons, Babbage realized that part of his work could be used in the design of a general-purpose computer, and so he began designing the analytical engine.

The first algorithm in history

Ada Byron argued that the analytical engine could only provide previously known information: she clearly understood that it could not originate new knowledge. Her work was forgotten for many years, and she was regarded merely as the transcriber of Babbage’s notes. Today, however, she is recognized as the creator of the first algorithm for a computer.

Ada Byron publishes Sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage

In 1842, the Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea published a description of Babbage’s machine based on a lecture the inventor had given in French. In 1843, the description was translated into English and expanded by Ada Lovelace, who had become interested in the machine eight years earlier. In recognition of her additions to Menabrea’s publication, which included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the machine, she has been recognized as the first programmer.

“Fragment on Machines”, by Karl Marx

The “Fragment on Machines” is included in Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse) 1857-1858. Here Karl Marx builds a discourse of emancipation through control of the machines of production, which some theorists such as Nick Land regard as a possible genesis of the philosophy of accelerationism.

Frederick John Kiesler is born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Punched cards

Herman Hollerith develops punched-card technology and founds the Tabulating Machine Company, the seed of what would later become IBM.

The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells

A pioneering science fiction novel which, through a journey in time, reveals a dystopian future in which humanity has evolved into two groups: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The former lead a hedonistic life, free of needs and full of amusement. The latter are fierce creatures of the depths, associated with darkness. Moreover, unlike the Eloi, they are carnivorous.

Valdemar Poulsen patents the telegraphone, the first magnetic recording

Valdemar Poulsen invented the telegraphone, the first machine to record sound magnetically. He named it so because he intended it to record a voice message when a telephone call came in while the user was away. The telegraphone consisted of a microphone (an electroacoustic transducer) that converted incoming sound waves into voltage variations (electrical signals). These electrical signals turned a cylinder around which a steel wire was helically wound. The cylindrical spool rotated beneath an electromagnet. In the process, it recorded the variation in the intensity of a magnetic field on the steel wire, leaving zones of different magnetization. Then, by reversing the process, those magnetic variations were converted back into electrical signals, which were in turn transformed back into sound through a loudspeaker.

The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells

A science fiction novel that depicts, for the first time, an alien invasion of Earth. This work would influence much of the science fiction that followed.

First transatlantic radio transmission and, therefore, the first wireless communication in history

On December 12, 1901, the Italian inventor and electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi, a pioneer of long-distance communications, received the first transatlantic radio signal at Signal Hill, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. The transmission was the letter s in Morse code.

Disciples of Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov publish The Philosophy of the Common Task, the masterpiece of Russian cosmism

After Fyodorov’s death, his writings were collected in two volumes and first published in 1906 under the title The Philosophy of the Common Task. His ideas form an all-encompassing philosophical system in which humankind, the Earth and the cosmos are understood as interrelated and interdependent.

Futurist Manifesto. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

The Futurist Manifesto is the text that laid the foundations of the Futurist movement. Written by the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at the end of 1908 and published in 1909, it marked the launch of the Futurist movement and set a precedent for other avant-gardes. The cult of the machine and the glorification of speed are among its main features.

Frederick W. Taylor puts forward a new paradigm of rationalized production, based on adapting workers to the pace of machines

Taylorism refers to the division of the various tasks in the production process. It was a method of industrial organization aimed at increasing productivity and preventing workers from controlling production times. It is related to assembly-line production.

Henry Ford introduces his assembly-line system at the Ford Motor Company

This system, developed between the late 1930s and the early 1970s, combines assembly lines, specialized machinery, high wages and a large permanent workforce. This mode of production is profitable as long as the product can be sold at a low price in a developed economy.

The Città Nuova project, by Antonio Sant’Elia

A utopian project for a global city that appears in the Futurist Manifesto. It envisions a large communications hub with an airport forty years before the commercial use of aircraft, and deems wireless telegraphy antennas indispensable, anticipating today’s telecommunications.

The Enigma machine, with its sophisticated encryption system, is patented

Enigma is the name of a rotor machine that could be used both to encrypt and decrypt messages. It was patented in 1918 by the German company Scherbius & Ritter and put on sale for commercial use in 1923. In 1926 the German Navy adopted it for military purposes, and its use soon spread to the country’s other armed forces, remaining in service before and during the Second World War.

The Czech playwright introduces the word robot for the first time in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots

The word robot is used for the first time. It appears in the play R.U.R. (Rossumovi univerzální roboti), by the Czech author Karel Čapek. The word had been coined by the author’s brother, Josef Čapek, from the Czech word robota, meaning ‘slave’. This term would replace automat, which the same author had used in his 1917 short story Opilec.

R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). A science fiction play by Karel Čapek.

The play premiered in 1920 at the National Theatre in Prague and later in New York in 1922.

Reyner Banham is born in Norwich, United Kingdom.

J.B.S. Haldane publishes Daedalus, or Science and the Future, launching the paradigm of applying science to human enhancement

John B. S. Haldane gathers here his reflections on the value of science and technology applied to the development of society. The work addresses topics such as the relationship between art and science, or between morality and progress, with major epistemological implications. Even today, the debate is revisited on highly topical issues such as genetic engineering and biomedicine.

IBM is born

In February 1924, CTR officially changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to more accurately reflect the company’s aspirations and mission. The name had first been used by the company’s Canadian subsidiary in 1917.

Project for the Endless House, by Frederick Kiesler.

Elton Mayo proposes the concept of the Hawthorne effect and shifts the paradigm of human relations and motivation

The aim of this study was to test whether workers’ productivity could be increased by modifying ambient lighting conditions. Productivity seemed to rise as soon as the changes were introduced. When the study ended, productivity returned to normal levels. The suggested explanation was that the improvement was not due to the changes in lighting, but to the motivating effect on the workers of knowing that they were being studied.

Marvin Minsky is born in New York, United States.

Gordon Pask is born in the United Kingdom

“The Jameson Satellite”, a short story by Neil R. Jones

This story proposes the fusion of the biological and the technological as a support for life, through the creation of life from a human brain and a cybernetic body.

Dymaxion House, by Buckminster Fuller

The Dymaxion House was developed by the American inventor Buckminster Fuller in the 1930s to correct many of the flaws he had found in the building techniques of the time. Fuller designed many different versions of the house at different times; there were prefabricated kits assembled in situ, designed to suit any place or environment and to use resources efficiently. An important consideration in its design was ease of transport and assembly. The word Dymaxion is a trademark Fuller used for many of his inventions.

Cedric Price is born in Staffordshire.

Christopher Alexander is born in Vienna.

The Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer appears, the first device for measuring mood

Lazarsfeld was one of the lead researchers in a pre-election study to determine to what extent voters’ opinions could be changed. His work was based on quantitative research into radio audiences through opinion polls. Criticism of his work, owing to its predominantly empirical nature, set him against other theoretical approaches.

Walter Benjamin publishes The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

In this work, the author identifies the aura with uniqueness, that is, with the experience of the unrepeatable. Technical reproduction destroys this originality, since the ritual value of an object can only be gauged from its exhibition value. With multiple reproductions, originality is lost and, consequently, art becomes an object whose value cannot be established in relation to its function within tradition.

New York World’s Fair, with the motto “Building the World of Tomorrow”

This fair set out to bring together a series of scientific and technological advances. One of the exhibits that drew the most visitors was the time capsule, which will not be opened until the year 6939. It contains manuscripts by Einstein and Mann, several issues of Life magazine, a doll, a US dollar, a pack of Camel cigarettes, millions of pages of text on microfilm, and seeds of various species. The robot Elektro was also on display.

At the New York World’s Fair, Elektro is presented, an automaton that interacts with humans

Elektro was a robot just over two meters tall, weighing 120 kilos and capable of up to 26 different movements. This humanoid could also speak: it had around 700 words recorded on a 78 rpm record player. Among its other abilities, it could smoke cigarettes, blow up balloons, walk, and move its head and arms. Its photoelectric eyes could tell red light from green. It ran on a series of record players, photovoltaic cells, motors and telephone relays.

Vannevar Bush publishes Mechanization and the Record

In this text, the author describes a machine capable of combining low-level technologies to achieve higher functions, similar to the processes of the human brain.

Joseph Schumpeter publishes Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

The core of this work is that economic cycles are the essence of capitalism, the fruit of innovation and the creative destruction that replaces the old and obsolete with the new and efficient. The author moves away from all dogma and glimpses the viability of democratic socialism.

Nicholas Negroponte is born in New York

William J. Mitchell is born in Victoria, Australia

The Trinity test at Alamogordo and the dropping of the first atomic bombs as a mass attack, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

This “test” consisted of the detonation of the first atomic bomb in history. The scientists of the Manhattan Project had doubts about the effectiveness of the nuclear weapon they were developing, as well as the amount of energy it would release. A remote site on the Alamogordo test range in New Mexico was therefore chosen, and the detonation was carried out. Its consequences endure to this day.

Konrad Zuse presents the Z4, one of the first three digital computers, along with the Mark I and the Univac

The Z4 was completed in 1944, although it was later modified many times, including the addition of a punched-card reader. The machine could reproduce punched cards through instructions from the Z4 itself, which made it easier to program. This was a major advantage, since it allowed copies of programs to be made in order to correct them. It could perform an average of 1,000 floating-point operations per hour and weighed about 1,000 kilograms.

Friedrich Hayek publishes “The Use of Knowledge in Society”

In this article, the author argues against the creation of a Central Pricing Board (as proposed by Lange), stressing the dynamic and organic nature of market price fluctuations and the benefits of this phenomenon. According to Hayek, a centrally planned market could never match the efficiency of an open market, because each individual knows only a very small part of all that is collectively known.

Vannevar Bush publishes “As We May Think”

This article by Bush is an expanded version of his 1939 text and describes a machine that would combine technologies to organize complex knowledge. It describes a technological proposal, the memex, aimed at highlighting the importance of organizing information in an era of abundance. The memex is an imaginary personal information management system, designed as a sophisticated microfilm reader with functions no reader of its time had.

Grace Murray Hopper coins the term debug

Although Hopper has been credited with the first use of the term bug, it had in fact already been used in Edison’s time. Hopper may, however, have been the first to associate it with computing, in this case in connection with a real insect. Hopper also used the English term debug when talking about removing errors from program code, and it is still used today.

Invention of the transistor, by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley

The invention of the transistor by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley revolutionized modern electronics. This technological breakthrough made it possible to miniaturize devices, drive the growth of computing and mark the beginning of the digital age, radically transforming contemporary society worldwide.

Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver propose information theory

This theory concerns the mathematical laws that govern the transmission and processing of data. It deals with measuring and representing information, and with analyzing the capacity of communication systems to transmit and process information. Information theory is a branch of probability theory that studies aspects such as transmission channels, data compression, cryptography and other phenomena.

Frederic Calland Williams and Alan Turing. The principle of the Turing machine is put forward

In 1948, with the help of Frederic Calland Williams, the principle of the machine was demonstrated for the first time. While at Cambridge, Alan Turing continued building the Pilot ACE prototype, which ran its first program in May 1950. Although the full version of Turing’s ACE was never built, the design of other computers around the world owed a great deal to his conception.

The Von Neumann architecture is born

The Von Neumann architecture is a computer architecture describing a design for an electronic digital computer made up of: a processing unit with an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers; a control unit with an instruction register and a program counter; a shared memory to store both data and instructions; external mass storage devices; and input and output mechanisms.

Manchester Baby, the first stored program in history

The Manchester Baby was the world’s first stored-program computer. It was developed at the University of Manchester and ran its first program on July 21, 1948. The machine was not designed as a practical computer but as a testbed for the Williams tube, one of the first types of computer memory. It was the first working machine to contain all the essential elements of a modern electronic computer.

Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

In this text, Wiener proposes the term cybernetics for the first time and becomes a forerunner of communication theory and cognitive psychology. This work would inspire many later works.

Ray Kurzweil is born

“With Folded Hands”, a short story by Jack Williamson

“With Folded Hands” tells the story of a group of robots arriving from a distant planet. Benevolent robots whose sole purpose is to serve humankind at all times, end wars and illnesses, both physical and spiritual, and free human beings from any harm. But their actions turn people into mere passive spectators of a happy world in whose development they can no longer take part.

The Sentinel, by Arthur C. Clarke

The Sentinel is the story that gave rise to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It revolves around the discovery of an artifact on Earth’s Moon, left there eons ago by ancient aliens.

Martin Heidegger’s lecture in Bremen: “The Question Concerning Technology”

Here Heidegger sets out some fundamental ideas: thinking about the technical makes it difficult to think about the essence of technology. Modern technology is, then, a means to an end. The true can be reached through the correct, which in this case is the instrumentality of technology. This instrumentality can be expressed in terms of the causality of technology, divided into four dimensions: the material cause, the formal cause, the final cause and the efficient cause.

Magnetic tape is used for the first time as a data medium (EDVAC computer)

In 1949, the EDVAC was the first computer to use magnetic tape as a data storage medium; it was also one of the first to process information using the binary system instead of the decimal system, and it included a magnetic tape reader-recorder.

George Orwell publishes the dystopian novel 1984

The novel, which imagines a dystopian future set in the year 1984, builds a paradigm of social control based on every form of manipulation, from behavior to language, weaving a story of remarkable relevance today. Big Brother is the omnipresent power that controls and censors everything. The story exposes the dangers of losing freedom.

First successful kidney transplant, in Illinois

Diners Club is founded

This customer membership system is the closest forerunner of credit cards, which years later would revolutionize consumption.

“The Evitable Conflict”, a short story by Isaac Asimov

In this story, Asimov once again questions the relationship between humans and machines, and the goals of robots, whose development leads to an emancipated artificial intelligence.

“The Last of the Masters”, by Philip K. Dick

“The Last of the Masters” explores the idea of a world without governments, drawing on Thoreau’s view that the best government is the one that does not have to govern at all.

“Marionettes, Inc.”, by Ray Bradbury

“Marionettes, Inc.” draws on the idea of converging phenomena, the human and the robotic, blurring the boundaries between the two.

“Second Variety”, by Philip K. Dick

A story that draws a parallel with the Cold War by addressing the use of automata as weapons.

Limbo, by Bernard Wolfe

Limbo is set in the then-distant year of 1990, in an ultra-pacifist society that emerged after the Third World War and promotes the amputation of limbs as a way of eliminating aggression. The rise of prosthetics turns everyone into cyborgs.

“Progeny”, by Philip K. Dick

A short story that presents the idea of child-rearing in a robotized society dominated by machines, where dehumanization becomes the paradigm.

Katz and Lazarsfeld’s two-step flow theory, the seed of social networks

This is a communication theory that seeks to explain how information is transmitted through the media and how the public reacts to it. It arose as part of a United States government project aimed at measuring the influence of the media on the attitudes of American voters. Its main contribution is the idea of an interrelation between the public and so-called opinion leaders, proposing an indirect system of communication and transmission of information, which contrasts sharply with the theories of public-media interaction that prevailed until then.

“Autofac” and “Service Call”, by Philip K. Dick

“Autofac” deals with the alarming consumerism that leads to the devastation of natural resources, the conflict between corporations for their control, and humanity’s struggle not to become dependent on them. “Service Call” proposes the existence of an artificial unit of biological composition, capable of controlling people’s emotions.

First transatlantic cable, initially designed for 36 telephone connections

The first transatlantic submarine telephone cable system, known as TAT-1, is inaugurated. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban (Scotland), and Clarenville, in Newfoundland. The developments that made TAT-1 possible were coaxial cable, highly reliable vacuum tubes for the submerged repeaters, and a general improvement in carrier equipment.

Arthur C. Clarke publishes The City and the Stars

Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The City and the Stars was published in 1954, twenty years before postmodern theory was articulated. In it, Diaspar, the last city on Earth, a billion years old, is a metropolis run by a Central Computer. Not only is the city repaired by machines, but people are also created by them. The computer creates bodies for the people of Diaspar to live in, and at the end of their lives it stores their minds in its memory. Everyone now living in Diaspar has had past “lives” within that city.

“The Last Question”, a short story by Isaac Asimov

“The Last Question” is a short story built around the idea that human nature and the machine eventually merge into a single consciousness.

“To Serve the Master”, by Philip K. Dick

“To Serve the Master” continues the idea of a war between humans and machines, within a new vision of freedom.

Vulcan’s Hammer, by Philip K. Dick

Vulcan’s Hammer is a paranoid novel in which Philip K. Dick imagines a totalitarian state where freedom is an absurd joke and hammer-shaped robots terrorize the citizens.

The USSR launches Sputnik, the first UAV in space

Putting this artificial satellite into orbit, the first in history, marked the beginning of the space race and the exploration of the Solar System. In the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet device made the US reflect on its own technological capabilities.

Julian Huxley coins the term transhumanism: the improvement of human beings through science and technology, but also through the social environment

Huxley coined the term transhumanism, holding that human beings should improve themselves through science and technology, perhaps including eugenics, but also by improving the social environment.

Von Neumann proposes the idea of the singularity for the first time

The first use of the term singularity is attributed to the Hungarian mathematician and physicist John von Neumann. It refers to the ever-accelerating progress of technology and the changes in the mode of human life. This suggests that an essential singularity in history is approaching, beyond human affairs as we know them.

Jack E. Steele coins the term bionic.

Jack E. Steele argues that once the actual workings of living systems are discovered, they could be embodied in machines. This might suggest that Leonardo da Vinci was the first bionic engineer, since he studied the operating principles of living beings in order to apply them to the design of machines.

John von Neumann publishes The Computer and the Brain

What are the logical components of the processes a computer must carry out? And those of the processes of a human brain? What does the machine need to “remember”? And the brain? Is it possible to produce an automaton that reproduces itself? These are some of the questions Von Neumann raises in this book.

Gilbert Simondon publishes his thesis “Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information”

The term individuation has a long philosophical tradition and refers to what makes an individual absolutely unique. Simondon integrates becoming and singularity into his theory, attending to the conditions under which the individual individuates, observing the full set of relations involved in this process and not only its product. In fact, for him there are no individuals, which would be an interruption of becoming, but rather preindividual, transindividual or interindividual realities, and this is where their singularity lies.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin publishes The Future of Man

Teilhard introduces the concept of the noosphere and, with the future of humanity at the center of his concerns, studies the steps of human beings throughout their evolution. Teilhard rejects all matter-spirit dualism and presents a concept of matter that includes within itself a spiritual dimension.

Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline coin the term cyborg

The scientists Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline created the term cyborg to describe an “enhanced” man who could survive in an extraterrestrial atmosphere thanks to physiological and psychological modifications obtained through drugs and surgery; a process they called “taking an active part in biological evolution”. It is a contraction of cybernetic organism.

Reyner Banham publishes Theory and Design in the First Machine Age

Banham studies the formation of the attitudes, forms and themes characteristic of the European artists and architects who, between 1900 and 1930, saw their work confronted with the new technological advances of the first machine age. Banham’s exhaustive argument, which takes the machine as a metaphorical register, starts from the system set out by the Beaux-Arts school, examines, among others, the contributions of Futurism, De Stijl, Cubism and Expressionism, and ends with the Bauhaus.

“The Machine That Won the War”, by Isaac Asimov

Once again, Asimov turns to the supercomputer Multivac as an artificial intelligence whose decisions are presented as a counterpoint to human decisions.

Bell Dataphone launches the first digital modem, interconnecting equipment over telephone lines

The Bell 101 dataset was not only the first commercial modem but also the first electronic device to use ASCII, which used 8 bits instead of the 6 bits used by Baudot, the predominant 6-bit system used between 1908 and 1962.

Nick Land is born in the United Kingdom

Christopher Alexander publishes “A much asked question about computers and design”, at the BAC

The main point of this essay remains relevant: to fully explore the potential of any computational architecture, the computer must initially be set aside. It argues for the need to think carefully and thoroughly about any design problem before attempting to compute it mechanically.

Sadie Plant is born

Ted Nelson proposes the concept of hypertext

Ted Nelson is the first to use the word hypertext, through his Xanadu proposal, a system that allows the same document to appear in multiple contexts without having to be duplicated.

Moore’s law

Moore’s law is not strictly a law but an empirical observation. It states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor doubles approximately every two years. Although the law was originally formulated to state that the doubling would occur every year, Gordon Moore later redefined it and extended the period to two years.

Eliza, developed by Joseph Weizenbaum, is the first chatbot: a technology capable of simulating a conversation

Eliza is the first chatbot. It was created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT, based on the idea of machines capable of behaving like humans. It is a program intended to be able to deceive humans into believing they were talking to another person.

Frederick John Kiesler dies in New York

Pierre Bézier lays the foundations of CAD

Bézier developed a computer-aided design system called UNISURF CAD, patented in 1968. At the end of his career he was able to concentrate on surface modeling.

Oxford Corner House, a project by Cedric Price

The Architecture Machine Group (AMG) is founded by Nicholas Negroponte and Leon Groisser

Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and Leon Groisser, it was a laboratory that combined architecture, engineering and computing in a new vision of design research and teaching. It remained active until 1985.

Stanley Milgram proposes the six degrees of separation experiment

The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale University. The aim was to measure a participant’s willingness to obey the orders of an authority figure even when these might conflict with their personal conscience.

Guy Debord publishes The Society of the Spectacle

Debord traces the development of a modern society in which “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation”. He argues that the history of social life can be understood as “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing”. This condition, in which authentic social life has been replaced by its represented image, marks, according to Debord, “the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life”.

Marvin Minsky publishes Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines

“The Happy Breed”, by John Sladek

The story tells how human beings have been enslaved by machines. It is not exactly a machine rebellion; rather, the machines have protected them from the dangers around them until they are reduced to practically nothing, with no will of their own.

Fun Palace, a project by Cedric Price.

The “Cybernetic Serendipity” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London

Gilles Deleuze publishes his thesis Difference and Repetition

Difference and Repetition criticizes the subordination of difference to identity; in it Deleuze develops the concepts of difference in itself and repetition for itself, both prior to identity. This work is influenced by metaphysical thinkers such as Spinoza, Leibniz and Bergson.

Mark Fisher is born in the United Kingdom

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a novel by Philip K. Dick

The story follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter attached to the San Francisco police whose job is to “retire” (kill) human-like androids who have escaped from the colonies on Mars and are seeking refuge on Earth to escape the “slavery” (as they themselves suggest) in which they lived. The novel brings together futuristic technology, the idea of no distinction between humans and machines (androids), and a mystical-religious background that the film Blade Runner would leave out years later.

2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick

2001: A Space Odyssey is a science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is inspired by “The Sentinel”, a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, who also co-wrote the screenplay. The film is a “journey” through different periods of human history, from its most primitive origins to the proliferation of artificial intelligence. At the time, it broke all the conventions of the genre and became a cultural phenomenon.

Birth of ARPANET, connecting four universities in the United States

ARPANET was a computer network created as a means of communication between various academic and government institutions. The first node was created at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and it was the backbone of the Internet until 1990, after the transition to the TCP/IP protocol model, begun in 1983, was completed. ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.

Emergence of the UNIX system, by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie

UNIX is a portable, multitasking, multi-user operating system. It was developed in 1969 at AT&T’s Bell Labs.

Gordon Pask publishes The architectural relevance of cybernetics

In this text, Pask highlights the influence of cybernetics on the development of design and how the controller (the architect) can, under certain laws, have complete control over the design.

Ludwig G. Bertalanffy publishes General System Theory

General system theory holds that the properties of systems cannot be meaningfully described in terms of their separate elements. Systems exist within systems and are open. The functions of a system depend on its structure.

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is founded as an extension of Xerox, and the concept of the GUI emerges there

PARC is a company owned by Xerox. It was initially founded as a research division. Since then it has been recognized worldwide for its contributions and important developments in the hardware and software industry, and it created some of the most widely used standards today. PARC has been responsible for well-known and important developments such as laser printing, the Ethernet standard, the graphical user interface (GUI), the desktop metaphor, object-oriented programming, ubiquitous computing, amorphous silicon applications, advances in the development of the mouse pointing device, and very-large-scale integration semiconductors.

Masahiro Mori proposes the idea of the “uncanny valley”

The “uncanny valley” is a hypothesis in the field of robotics stating that when anthropomorphic replicas come too close to the appearance and behavior of a real human being, they provoke a response of rejection among human observers.

Intel presents the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004

The first 4-bit processor produced commercially by Intel, and the first to be available in a desktop calculator. Designed by Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff and Stan Mazor.

Pong, programmed by Allan Alcorn at Atari, is born as the first commercial video game and, with it, the concept of the arcade

Pong is a classic video game, born at Atari, that brought a sense of play to computing, bringing it closer to a wider audience.

Marvin Minsky publishes Artificial Intelligence

The father of artificial intelligence was one of those responsible for the MIT laboratory’s great push into the computing industry and software design. He held that computer code should be shared freely, a stance that underpins the modern free software movement. This work laid the foundations for many aspects of today’s computer systems, software and robotics.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is patented

RFID is a system for storing and retrieving data remotely using devices called RFID tags, cards or transponders. The fundamental purpose of RFID technology is to transmit the identity of an object (similar to a unique serial number) by means of radio waves.

Daniel Bell publishes The Coming of Post-Industrial Society

Here some relevant ideas are put forward about “post-industrial society”, defined as one in which most employees are not involved in the production of material goods.

Nick Bostrom is born in Gothenburg, Sweden

Crash. A novel by J. G. Ballard

An unsettling, at times repugnant read that celebrates acceleration and the sexual fetish of humans for machines, and the use of prostheses replacing lost parts of the body.

Soylent Green, a film by Richard Fleischer

Soylent Green is a story of techno-political domination through control of the population’s food supply. A futuristic dystopia that foresees a future of struggle over the quality of food.

Stanford University patents recombinant DNA, enabling genetic manipulation across species

Recombinant DNA (rDNA) molecules are obtained through laboratory methods known as genetic recombination, which bring together genetic material from various sources to create DNA sequences that would not otherwise be found in the genome.

TCP/IP protocols

The TCP/IP model is a description of network protocols created by Vinton Cerf and Robert E. Kahn. It was implemented on ARPANET, the first wide area network (WAN), developed for DARPA and the predecessor of the Internet. For this reason, it is sometimes also called the DoD model or DARPA model.

Paik proposes the term electronic super highway

This is how the Korean artist describes the future of telecommunications.

The Next Ten Thousand Years, by Adrian Berry

A classic of the most enthusiastic futurology, inviting readers on a journey through a splendid technological future of unstoppable economic growth. Ten thousand years during which human beings will shape the universe to their liking, using the laws of physics and ever-greater technological possibilities.

John Holland publishes Genetic algorithms

Using an appropriate (rule-based) production language, Holland argues that it is even possible to build sophisticated models of cognition in which the genetic algorithm, applied to the productions, gives the system the means to learn from experience. Among the most important properties they exhibit are: the ability to modify and develop sequences of decision and action when reward or feedback on performance comes only after long sequences of context-dependent action; and the ability to generate a model of the environment based on the system’s experience, a model usable for anticipation and prediction.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak found Apple Inc.

Apple is one of the most innovative and revolutionary technology companies in terms of UX/UI and systems design. It has brought design-driven computing to the general public and has set trends since its founding.

Neri Oxman is born in Haifa, Israel

Christopher Alexander publishes A Pattern Language

This is a book on architecture written by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein of the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley (California), with authorship credits also going to Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. The book is a solid, illustrated discussion of a pattern language derived from traditional architecture.

Reza Negarestani is born in Iran

“True Love”, by Isaac Asimov

Understanding love through a machine’s understanding. Reflecting on the human condition, but through the cold eyes of an android, a monster or an alien. Sometimes an outside view is needed to see more clearly what was just around the corner.

Demon Seed, a film by Donald Cammell

Demon Seed is a film based on a novel by Dean R. Koontz that reflects on human procreation driven by the will of a machine, as a way of approaching immortality.

Lecture by Cedric Price. “Technology is the answer… but what was the question?”

Cedric Price, in a highly successful act of provocation, had stated in a 1966 lecture: “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?”, intending to invite his audience to seek, question and reconsider the impact of technological progress on architecture. In 1979 he published the book of the same name, and his question is as relevant today as it was then.

James Lovelock’s GAIA hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis, formulated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, holds that planet Earth as a whole, including living beings, oceans, rocks and the atmosphere, functions as a superorganism that actively modifies its internal composition to ensure its survival.

The first version of Interact CAD, the forerunner of AutoCAD, is released

Interact CAD, also known in early Autodesk documents as MicroCAD, was written before Autodesk existed (then Marinchip Software Partners) by Autodesk co-founder Michael Riddle.

“The Generator”, a project by Cedric Price

Sinclair Research launches the ZX80, “the world’s cheapest computer”

The Sinclair ZX80 was a personal computer sold from 1980 by Science of Cambridge. Designed by Sir Clive Sinclair, it was notable for being the first computer available in the United Kingdom at a very low cost. It was sold as a kit: buyers had to assemble it and solder the parts. The ZX80 was very popular in its time and a forerunner of the golden age of 8-bit computing.

A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus is the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The book is written as a series of plateaus, a concept derived from Gregory Bateson, each identified by a particular date and title. Each refers to an era or date that has played a central role in the world. The book reflects Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of hierarchical, arborescent organization in favor of less structured, rhizomatic growth. A central concept of the book sets the nomadic war machine against the state apparatus. The final plateau invokes the mechanosphere.

ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture) is founded

The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) emerged as an international network of digital design researchers and professionals. Its mission is to produce critical research on the role of computing in architecture, planning and building science, fostering innovation in design creativity, sustainability and education.

Discovery of HIV

On June 5 of this year, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) detected the HIV virus for the first time.

The Chaos Computer Club is founded in West Berlin

The Chaos Computer Club is the largest association of hackers in Europe. It is based in Berlin and extends to other German-speaking countries. According to its website, the Chaos Computer Club’s areas of interest are hacking, science, sociology and hacker culture. As an organization, it anticipated the role computing would come to play in the way people live and communicate. It is widely known for its public demonstrations of security flaws.

Sinclair Research updates the ZX81

The ZX81 was the cheapest computer of its time. It was the improved version of the ZX80, released the previous year. The case was black, with a membrane keyboard. The final look of the machine was the work of industrial designer Rick Dickinson. As with the ZX80, video output went to a television through a radio-frequency modulator, and programs were loaded and saved using an ordinary cassette recorder, on magnetic audio tapes.

IBM launches the IBM PC

This launch marks the beginning of personal computing, bringing computing into the home.

Microsoft releases the first version of MS-DOS

MS-DOS was developed from QDOS, Quick Disk Operating System, also known as 86-DOS. Its development officially began in 1981 and it was released in 1982 as MS-DOS 1.0. It had eight major versions and became widespread, but was gradually replaced by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in particular the successive generations of Microsoft Windows.

Paul Benioff lays the foundations for the quantum computing paradigm

The essential ideas of quantum computing came from Paul Benioff, who worked at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, United States. He imagined a traditional computer (a Turing machine) that worked according to some principles of quantum mechanics.

Vernor Vinge publishes True Names, a work that mixes elements of transhumanism and anarchism and anticipates aspects of the singularity paradigm

A science fiction novel by the American writer Vernor Vinge and a foundational work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the first stories to present a fully developed concept of cyberspace, which would later become central to cyberpunk.

Tron, a film by Steven Lisberger

It was one of the first films produced by a major studio to make significant use of computer graphics. Although initially unsuccessful, it eventually achieved cult status thanks to its computer-generated imagery. It is considered a prelude to a new subgenre of science fiction, virtual reality, and later inspired several video games.

Time magazine names the IBM PC Man of the Year

For the first time, the popular magazine chose a non-human entity as Man of the Year. In this case, IBM’s Personal Computer.

The ZX Spectrum is launched in the United Kingdom

The ZX Spectrum was the first computer for the general, non-specialist home market, and Generation X’s gateway into programming. It launched the golden age of 8-bit computing in places such as Spain, the United Kingdom and several Latin American countries.

“Burning Chrome”, a short story by William Gibson that introduces the concept of cyberspace

The word cyberspace is used for the first time in this story by Gibson, which connects with his later work and with that of other authors. It also shapes an environment of cybernetic hybridization between the human and the machinic.

Blade Runner, a film by Ridley Scott based on Dick’s 1968 novel

Blade Runner is a film by Ridley Scott based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Beyond seeking to recreate the atmosphere of the novel, it has innovative elements of its own that have made it a cult film.

eCAADe (Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe) is founded

eCAADe is a non-profit association of institutions and individuals with a common interest in promoting good practice and sharing information on the use of computers in research and education in architecture and related professions.

The Free Software movement emerges. Richard Stallman launches the GNU project

This is a technology-oriented social movement whose aim is to obtain and guarantee the freedoms that allow users to run, study, modify and redistribute software, with or without changes. Drawing on the traditions and philosophies of hacker culture, Richard Stallman formally founded the movement with the launch of the GNU project. He later established the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. The goal is to give users freedom and raise awareness by replacing proprietary software with free software.

Donna Haraway writes A Cyborg Manifesto

Haraway’s text caused controversy in the feminist world with its proposal to “eradicate gender” as a notion and its reflections on the figure of the cyborg, conceived as a contemporary being fused and blurred between human and machine, needing no distinctions. For Haraway, this concept is a rejection of rigid boundaries, especially those separating the “human” from the “animal” and the “human” from the “machine”.

Natasha Vita-More circulates the Transhuman Manifesto

The manifesto is framed within the scientific and technological field of human enhancement and life extension. Its tenets focus on the ethical uses of science and technology and the sociopolitical implications of revolutionary advances affecting the future of humanity.

Graphisoft, in Hungary, creates the concept of the Virtual Building, which years later would become the idea of BIM

GRAPHISOFT’s Virtual Building concept was a milestone in CAD development and came to lead the architecture, engineering and construction industry under a new name: Building Information Modeling, or simply BIM.

Minds, Brains, and Science, by John Searle

The central thesis of strong artificial intelligence is that the processes carried out by a computer are identical to those carried out by the brain, and therefore that, if the brain generates consciousness, computers must be conscious too. Against this, Searle proposes the “Chinese room” thought experiment.

Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers

This book sparked an important debate in both Europe and the Americas. Stengers and Prigogine show how the two great themes of classical science, order and chaos, which coexisted uneasily for centuries, are reconciled in a new and unexpected synthesis.

Neuromancer, William Gibson’s iconic novel

Neuromancer is an iconic novel of the cyberpunk genre. The title combines the terms neuro (mental) and mancer (one who practices “-mancy”, meaning ‘divination’ and, by extension, ‘magic’). The universe built in this work would be continued in various visions and prefigurations of the future up to the present day.

Apple’s Orwellian Super Bowl commercial

Ridley Scott directed the promotional commercial for Apple’s Macintosh, recreating an Orwellian atmosphere in which the machine (the Macintosh) represented a means of liberation.

The Terminator, a film by James Cameron

The film, directed by James Cameron, posits an apocalyptic future in which machines have achieved consciousness and decided to wipe out the human species.

CAADFutures is founded

CAADFutures was created to promote, through international conferences and publications, the advancement of Computer-Aided Architectural Design in the service of those concerned with the quality of the built environment.

Philips and Sony launch the first CD-ROM as a new data medium

The CD-ROM was a compact disc that used a laser beam to read information in digital format. The CD-ROM standard was established in 1985 by Sony and Philips. From this milestone onward, the expression “burning” came into use for recording digital content, referring to the effect of the laser light on the disc. Years later, this technology was replaced by the DVD-ROM, which was similar but had greater capacity.

The television series Max Headroom: 20 minutes into the future

The series featured innovative characteristics and a futuristic style clearly influenced by the cyberpunk movement, presenting an artificial intelligence in a future in which an oligarchy of technology corporations rules the world.

William Mitchell publishes City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn

City of Bits is an introduction to a new kind of city, an increasingly important system of virtual spaces interconnected by information networks. Mitchell makes extensive use of practical examples and illustrations in a technically well-grounded yet accessible examination of architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital communications revolution, the ongoing miniaturization of electronics, the commodification of bits and the growing dominance of software brought into material form.

Marvin Minsky publishes The Society of Mind

This is a collection of fundamental reflections, expressed in their instructive essence. Minsky posits that a “mind” is not a single, efficient decision-making machine but a collection of many machines, which he calls agents. Each agent on its own is simple and specialized, but through a process of cooperation and competition among them, the agents form a collective understanding of the world. This gives rise to an emergent intelligence guided by preprogrammed assumptions but not restricted by them.

RoboCop, a film by Paul Verhoeven

A science fiction film that links the cyborg, the human-machine hybrid, to a paradigm of surveillance and security, with a violent aura of redemption.

James Hansen begins raising awareness of global warming

Hansen is considered to have been the first to alert the public to the effects of global warming when, in 1988, he told a US Congressional committee that he was “99 percent sure” that the sharp rise in temperatures was linked to human activity.

The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, by Gilles Deleuze

Deleuze presents the fold as a constant of all artistic periods and praises the Baroque as the one that took it to its limits. He sets out Leibniz’s philosophy and finds its justification in the fact that, within it, everything folds, unfolds and refolds. Deleuze sets out to follow the history of the infinite fold across all the arts. A kind of neo-Leibnizianism that has never ceased to inspire the most diverse philosophical theories.

Reyner Banham dies in London

Akira, a film by Katsuhiro Otomo

Akira is a post-apocalyptic anime film directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, an adaptation of the manga of the same name by the same creator. Since its release it has long been recognized as a cult film and one of the best animated and science fiction films of all time.

Moravec’s paradox

This is the discovery, in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics, that, counterintuitively, human reasoned thought, intelligent and rational, requires relatively little computing power, whereas sensory and motor skills, which are unconscious and shared with many other animals, require great computational effort. This principle was postulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others.

GNU General Public License (GPL)

The GPL was created by Richard Stallman in 1989 to protect the programs released as part of the GNU project. The original GPL was based on the unification of similar licenses used in earlier versions of GNU Emacs, the GNU Debugger and the GNU C Compiler. These licenses contained provisions similar to the current GPL, but were specific to each program, making them incompatible despite being the same license. Stallman’s aim was to produce a license that could be applied to any project, so that it could be used across many projects to share code.

Tim Berners-Lee achieves the first successful communication over HTTP

Berners-Lee established the first communication between a client and a server using the HTTP protocol.

Ghost in the Shell. A manga by Masamune Shirow

In a hypothetical future around 2029, humanity has been able to incorporate cybernetic implants into their bodies, augmenting natural human capabilities. This manga builds a world where cyberization is commonplace and robots are extremely faithful imitations of humans. Everyone is connected through their ghosts (their souls) to a kind of internet or cyberspace containing all the data created by society.

The Python programming language emerges, created by Guido van Rossum

Python is one of the most versatile dynamic programming languages in existence, along with Perl, Tcl, PHP and Ruby. It is a general-purpose language, used for everything from simple scripts to large web servers providing uninterrupted service. It is used for programming graphical interfaces and databases, web programming and application testing. It is accepted both for hard scientific uses and as an introduction to programming.

Ray Kurzweil publishes The Age of Intelligent Machines

This is a prophetic book. In it, Kurzweil predicts the rise of the Internet and the collapse of the Soviet Union because of new technologies such as smartphones, which would weaken authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. He also predicted that computers would defeat the best human chess players by around 1998. In fact, this happened in 1997, when Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue.

Linus Torvalds releases the first version of Linux, based on the Unix system

Linus Torvalds releases the first version of Linux capable of running BASH (Bourne Again Shell) and the compiler known as GCC (GNU Compiler Collection). By 1992, the General Public License (GPL) had been adopted for Linux. It grants Linux freedoms of use completely opposed to those of proprietary software, allowing its modification, redistribution, copying and unlimited use. In a way, it launched the rise of free software.

Terminator 2, from James Cameron’s saga

The sequel to the 1984 film The Terminator, directed by James Cameron. Although the plot is no longer new, it is one of the first films to integrate CGI animation with live-action footage, building an extremely high-quality mixed reality.

GeoCities is born, the first social network, later acquired by Yahoo

GeoCities was a free hosting service whose features made it an ancestor of social networks.

John H. Frazer publishes The architectural relevance of cybernetics, borrowing Gordon Pask’s title

The title of this work by Frazer is taken from Gordon Pask’s article of the same name in Architectural Design in 1969. It builds a series of questions it seeks to answer. How did Pask come to write for an architecture publication? What was his contribution to architecture? How does he now come to be part of the faculty of a school of architecture? And what, really, is the architectural relevance of cybernetics?

Yahoo is born

Yahoo began as a hierarchically organized directory of websites, rather than a searchable index of pages. Over time, it added new features and expanded its services.

Manuel Castells marks this year as the birth of the commercial Internet

In his text The Internet Galaxy, Manuel Castells identifies this date as the launch of the open-access, commercial Internet.

Amazon is born

Jeff Bezos created the company Cadabra in 1994 and changed its name to Amazon a year later. He also acquired the URL Relentless.com and, for a short time, the online store bore that name, but it was later replaced by Amazon.com.

Netscape appears, the first free browser

Netscape was a free browser, freely available owing to the company’s policy that Internet software should cost nothing. It marked the beginning of an era in which access to the web increased considerably, thanks in particular to this browser.

Berners-Lee founds the W3C Consortium

In October of this year, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), based at MIT, to oversee and standardize the development of the technologies on which the web is built and which make the Internet work.

Birth of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an interdisciplinary collective run by students in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. The collective’s research was closely linked to the work of the philosophers Sadie Plant and Nick Land. Plant would leave her academic post and her affiliation with the CCRU in 1997, after which the collective came under Land’s intellectual guidance. Under his leadership, the collective became increasingly experimental and unorthodox in its work, with its output (which included writing, performance events and collaborative art) crossing poststructuralism, cybernetics and science fiction.

Gartner Inc. proposes the concept of the Hype Cycle

The Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of the maturity, adoption and commercial application of a specific technology. The term was coined by Gartner Inc., which provides opinions, advice and data on the global information technology industry.

The VRML language emerges

The Virtual Reality Modeling Language, or VRML, is a standardized file format for representing interactive three-dimensional scenes or objects, designed especially for the web. It works through English commands, which add and define the characteristics.

Wiki formats are born

Cunningham created the first wiki site, WikiWikiWeb, part of the Portland Pattern Repository in Portland. The site, still active, specializes in “personal projects” and design patterns, and keeps an informal historical record of programming ideas. For example, the site catalogs design patterns and anti-patterns worth knowing for software development, especially under the extreme programming methodology. According to Cunningham, the idea of the wiki occurred to him in the late 1980s, and he first implemented it as a HyperCard stack.

Apache becomes popular as an open-source server

Apache is an open-source HTTP web server for Unix, Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and other platforms, implementing the HTTP/1.1 protocol and the notion of a virtual site according to the RFC 2616 standard. Its name comes from someone wanting it to connote something firm and energetic but not aggressive, and the Apache tribe was the last to surrender to what would soon become the United States government. It is said that, at the time, the founding group’s concern was that companies would arrive and “civilize” the landscape the first Internet engineers had created.

GPS begins to be used for civilian purposes

The Global Positioning System, originally Navstar GPS, is a system that makes it possible to locate any object on Earth with an accuracy of up to centimeters, although a few meters is more common. It is considered to have become fully operational in 1995.

Nicholas Negroponte publishes Being Digital

Negroponte presents a general history of digital media and technologies. Throughout the book he analyzes several of these technologies and tries to predict how they would evolve, arguing that humanity is inclined toward digitization, moving from a world of atoms to a world of bits.

Bernard Cache publishes Earth Moves

In this book, Bernard Cache conceptualizes a series of ideas about the architectural as a driver of major developments. He offers a new understanding of the architectural image itself. Following Deleuze and Bergson, he develops a description of the image in which subjectivity itself is a special kind of image. He redefines architecture beyond construction proper to include cinematic, pictorial and other frames. He also draws a parallel with Deleuze to argue that what is significant about the fold is that it provides a way of rethinking the relationship between interior and exterior, past and present, and architecture and the urban.

SIGraDi (Ibero-American Society of Digital Graphics) is founded

The Ibero-American Society of Digital Graphics (SIGRADI) is an association bringing together architects, urban planners, designers and artists involved with new media, and is the counterpart of the organizations ECAADE, ACADIA, CAADRIA and ASCAAD.

CAADRIA (Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia) is founded

Brewster Kahle founds the Internet Archive

Gordon Pask dies. eCAADe, theme: Education for Practice

First Cyberfeminist International

During Documenta X, one of the most important international art exhibitions, the First Cyberfeminist International was convened. The Old Boys Network (OBN), a consortium of European women artists, was key in organizing the meeting, held within the section called “Hybrid Workspace”. Most of the discussion focused on defining what cyberfeminism is, what it contributes and what goals it fights for within the framework of information and communication technology.

The CCP installs the Great Firewall of China, subjecting the Chinese Internet to strict censorship

Although the popular name is an English pun on the Great Wall of China, the project is officially called the Golden Shield Project and involves the censorship and surveillance of the Internet by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The project began in 1998 and started operating in November 2003.

Meg Whitman becomes the first CEO of an Internet mega-company (eBay)

Meg Whitman is the first CEO of the online store eBay. When she took over, the company had 30 employees and operated only in the United States. Today, eBay is a global organization with more than 9,000 employees.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page found Google

The rise of Google changed the paradigm of Internet search forever, introducing the concept of content relevance.

Gattaca, a film by Andrew Niccol

This film addresses the debate on biopolitics, eugenics and the possibilities of a not-so-distant future marked by transhumanism.

James Thomson and Jeffrey Jones begin research on human embryonic stem cells

Thomson and his team isolated and cultured human and primate embryonic stem cells in vitro. From then on, laboratory studies with animals multiplied, with a clear purpose: to increase the biomedical potential of using these cells to treat human diseases and to expand knowledge of genetic diseases.

Nick Bostrom and David Pearce found the World Transhumanist Association, known as Humanity+.

Humanity Plus, formerly known as the World Transhumanist Association, is a non-profit organization that works to promote discussion of the possibilities for radically enhancing human capabilities through technologies based on nanotechnology, genetic engineering and cybernetics. It was originally founded by the philosophers Nick Bostrom and David Pearce.

Open source

The Halloween Documents is the name used outside Microsoft for a series of confidential memos on the company’s potential strategies in 1998 regarding open-source programs, and GNU/Linux in particular. Marked “confidential”, the documents acknowledge that open programs pose a significant threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry and suggest ways of interfering with their development. In them, Microsoft acknowledges that many open-source programs are technically competitive with its own.

The rise of open source

Open source is a software development model based on open collaboration. It focuses more on practical benefits (access to the source code) than on the ethical or freedom issues so strongly emphasized by free software. The term open source was coined in Palo Alto, and Bruce Perens and Eric S. Raymond later launched the opensource.org initiative.

Netscape appears

Netscape releases most of the Netscape Communicator code under a free license. The project becomes known as Mozilla.

Christopher Alexander publishes The origins of pattern theory: the future of the theory and the generation of a living world

The adoption of patterns, as understood by Christopher Alexander, has inspired the software development community. It is not surprising that his ideas found a welcome in this field, given the initial resistance they met in the world of architecture. This text inspired that community to adopt the pattern approach for its relevance in tackling problems that had long affected both software design in general and object-oriented design in particular.

Ray Kurzweil publishes The Age of Spiritual Machines

A book of philosophical, technological, computational and scientific content that connects with hard science fiction. It deals with the history of evolution and its relationship with natural life and technology, the role of human beings in the development of technology and computing, and the future of their evolution toward the integration of human and machine.

The Matrix, a film by the Wachowskis

A science fiction film written and directed by the Wachowskis. It represents a new way of understanding cyberspace, also adopting religious elements and concepts such as illusion (Maya) or the apparent indistinction between physical reality and digital reality.

Paul Crutzen introduces the concept of the Anthropocene

Although Crutzen was not the first to use the term, he was one of the first to define and contextualize it. He considers that the influence of human behavior on the Earth in recent centuries has been significant enough to constitute a new geological era. The Anthropocene would thus be a geological epoch proposed by part of the scientific community to follow or replace the so-called Holocene, the current epoch of the Quaternary period in Earth’s history, owing to the significant global impact human activities have had on terrestrial ecosystems.

The so-called Y2K bug occurs

The year 2000 problem, also known as the millennium bug, the Y2K computer problem or by the numeronym Y2K, is a software bug caused by programmers’ habit of omitting the century from the year when storing dates (usually to save memory), assuming the software would only run during years beginning with 19XX.

Mike Bergman proposes the concept of the Deep Web

The Deep Web is Internet content that is not indexed by conventional search engines, for various reasons. The term is attributed to the computer scientist Mike Bergman. It is the opposite of the surface web.

The dot-com bubble bursts

This phenomenon had two main causes: a change in expectations about dot-com companies, as investors began to realize that the principles of the new economy were not so different from those of the old one, and the workings of the financial markets.

Neil Gershenfeld publishes When Things Start to Think

In this book, Gershenfeld, from MIT, offers a vision of a post-computer world in which microchips work for humanity rather than against it. He argues that we waste the potential of the microchip when we confine it to a box on our desk. According to Gershenfeld, the real electronic revolution will come when computers have disappeared into the walls.

ASCAAD is born

ASCAAD is a society of educators, researchers and practitioners of computer-aided architectural design (CAAD) in the Arab regions of Western Asia and North Africa. It aims to facilitate communication and the exchange of information on the use of digital design technology in architecture, planning and construction, which radically challenge the conventional design paradigm.

Creative Commons licenses emerge

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to promoting access to and the sharing of culture. It develops a set of free legal instruments that make it easier to use and share both creativity and knowledge. These instruments consist of a set of “model licensing contracts”, or copyright licenses, that give the author of a work a simple, standardized way to grant the public permission to share and use their creative work under the terms and conditions of their choice. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright; rather, they build on it to allow authors to choose the terms and conditions of the license.

9/11 attacks

The attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States permanently changed the paradigm of security and control over human movement, especially border control, introducing digital tracking and recognition tools.

The Center for Bits and Atoms is born at MIT

The Center for Bits and Atoms was established at MIT’s Media Lab. It is currently directed by Neil Gershenfeld. Its goal is to cross disciplines, broadly seeking the intersection of digital information with its physical representation.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launch the Wikipedia project

Three essential features of the Wikipedia project together define its role on the web. It is an encyclopedia, understood as a medium for collecting, storing and transmitting information in a structured way. It is a wiki, so with minor exceptions it can be edited by anyone. And it is open content.

Pekka Himanen publishes The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age

This book, with a prologue by Linus Torvalds, sets out a hacker ethic based on work and money, arriving at the concept of the nethic, an ethic of the network.

Use of the Darknet spreads through P2P protocols and Tor

The alpha version of the free software TOR was released by Roger Dingledine, Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson. It emerged as an evolution of the Onion Routing project of the US Naval Research Laboratory. It was then sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, and the Tor project is now in the hands of The Tor Project, a non-profit research and education organization. Tor later received the Free Software Foundation’s 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit for “having enabled roughly 36 million people around the world, using free software, to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping their privacy and anonymity”.

Toshiyuki Inoko founds the teamLab collective in Tokyo

The founding of the teamLab collective in Tokyo by Toshiyuki Inoko revolutionized the interaction between art and technology, creating immersive experiences that spur creativity and redefine today’s cultural landscape.

Neil Leach publishes Designing for a Digital World

Neil Leach puts forward the thesis that digital technologies are changing the way we live and work. But what impact are they having on the discipline of architecture? The book features contributions from several authors who pioneered the digital in design: Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (UN Studio); Sarah Chaplin and Karl S Chu (Metaxy); Richard Coyne, Manuel DeLanda, Andrew Gillespie and Mark Goulthorpe (dECOi); Marcelyn Gow and Jeffrey Inaba (AMO); William J Mitchell, Farshid Moussavi and Alejandro Zaera Polo (Foreign Office Architects); Sadie Plant and Hani Rashid (Asymptote); Douglas Rushkoff, Patrik Schumacher and Lars Spuybroek (NOX); Sherry Turkle and David Turnbull (ATOPIA); Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler and Andreas Broeckmann (Knowbotic Research); and Slavoj Zizek. The discussion ranges from broad cultural concerns to new construction techniques.

Minority Report, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick

This film, based on a story by Philip Dick, takes up a Lombrosian approach in which a system is able to predict future behavior and allows preventive measures to be taken.

Greg Lynn: Architecture for an Embryologic Housing (IT Revolution in Architecture)

The Pirate Bay is born, promoting various P2P possibilities through torrents

The Pirate Bay is a BitTorrent search engine and tracker where all kinds of multimedia material can be searched for. It was founded by the Swedish anti-copyright organization Piratbyrån. It is the largest BitTorrent tracker in the world.

William Mitchell publishes Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Mitchell describes the transformation of wireless technology in the hundred years since Marconi: the expansion of networks and the shrinking of transmitting and receiving devices. This transformation, in turn, has changed our relationship with our environment and with one another. He argues that the separation between bits (the elementary unit of information) and atoms (the elementary unit of matter) has ended, giving rise to global interconnection, miniaturization and portability in our bodies, our clothes, our architecture, our cities and our uses of space and time.

The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, sequels to The Matrix

The two films form a continuous whole, like a single film in two parts. Here, the universe of the real is once again confronted with the illusion of the Matrix, establishing its non-human character, in which a singularity has taken control.

Facebook is born

The social network par excellence began as a student project to connect people through shared interests and evolved into a megastructure of global surveillance.

Nick Bostrom co-founds the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies with James Hughes

This institute seeks to “promote ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness and human flourishing in democratic societies”. It was created by the philosopher Nick Bostrom and the bioethicist James Hughes. Its goal is to influence the development of public policies that distribute the benefits and reduce the risks of technological change.

I, Robot, a film inspired by some of Asimov’s stories

Drawing on Asimov’s three laws, this film addresses the ethical implications of robotics and the frayed boundaries between the human and the machinic, pointing toward an emancipated intelligence and consciousness.

Google Earth is born

The program was created under the name EarthViewer 3D by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. The company was bought by Google in 2004, which absorbed the application. The Google Earth map is made up of overlaid imagery obtained from satellite images, aerial photographs, geographic information from GIS data models around the world, and computer-generated models.

The concept of crowdfunding emerges

Crowdfunding is a collaborative mechanism for financing projects developed on the basis of new technologies. It dispenses with traditional financial intermediation and consists of putting project promoters seeking funds, through the issue of securities and equity or through loan requests, in contact with investors or fund providers seeking a return on their investment. Two features stand out in this activity: the massive pooling of investors who finance small, high-potential projects with small amounts, and the risky nature of such investment.

Ray Kurzweil publishes The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

This work deals with the concept of the technological singularity, an event the author foresees for the year 2045, and the impact it will have on humanity. The book’s main thesis is that the growth of information technologies is not linear but exponential. This allows information technologies to move into ever broader fields of science, such as biology or neuroscience. Eventually, information technologies will take over the entire spectrum of human technology and science, producing an explosion of intelligence we call the technological singularity.

YouTube emerges

YouTube is the largest video platform in the world. It began as an independent venture but was acquired by Google in 2006. Over time, it became a structure of controlled content, with the power to censor at its discretion anything that does not fit its policies.

Twitter emerges

Twitter is the largest microblogging network. Like YouTube, it functions as a supranational and supra-democratic structure of control, in which control algorithms have the ability to “cancel” anything deemed inconvenient.

Neil Leach publishes Camouflage

This book explores the human drive to find a role in the world and the part architecture plays in that process. The desire to camouflage oneself is a desire to feel connected, to find one’s place in the world and feel at home. Neil Leach analyzes this desire and its architectural consequences. Design can provide a form of connectivity, a mediation between us and our environment, and can contribute to a sense of belonging. Architecture, and indeed all forms of design, can be an effective arena for forging a sense of belonging and establishing an identity.

Bruno Latour publishes Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

This work by Latour is a fundamental challenge to how we understand society and “the social”. It argues that the word social, as used by scientists, has become so loaded with assumptions that it has turned into a misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to describe a stable state of affairs, a bundle of ties that can later be mobilized to explain another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the term used as if it described a type of material, as if it were an adjective.

The Three-Body Problem, a novel by Liu Cixin

When the Chinese government stepped up its promotion of the country’s “scientific and technological rejuvenation” and the continued development of science and technology, many favorable conditions arose for the creation of science fiction novels. Most of these writers worked in various fields of science and technology. Liu Cixin is a mechanical engineer. His creative thinking is deeply influenced by Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Leo Tolstoy. The novel has profound social implications, and in it the author reveals the principles of “cosmic sociology”, a protoscience of the laws of survival in the universe.

Apple unveils the iPhone

Steve Jobs presented the greatest technological revolution with global impact of recent years: the iPhone. With it, he redefined ubiquitous computing through a device that would become indispensable and that every competitor on the market would try to copy in the years to come.

Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, launches the neoreactionary movement, or NRx

NRx is an anti-democratic, reactionary movement that sees itself as the antithesis of the Enlightenment. In general, it rejects egalitarianism and the view that history shows inevitable progress toward greater freedom and enlightenment, and so it is partly a reaction against Whig and Marxist historiography. Its advocates also generally support socially conservative views on issues such as gender roles, race relations and migration. The Dark Enlightenment has been described as an early school of thought of the alt-right.

The first version of Grasshopper is released by McNeel

Grasshopper is a visual programming language developed by McNeel & Associates. It was originally a plug-in installed separately in the CAD application Rhinoceros 3D. Since version 4, the two programs come integrated. In Grasshopper, programming is entirely visual, created by placing and organizing components on the canvas. Components have inputs and outputs, and the outputs connect to the inputs of subsequent components. It is used mainly to program generative algorithms for 3D geometry with various functions.

Marvin Minsky publishes The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Marvin Minsky builds a new model of how the mind works. He argues that emotions, intuitions and feelings are not distinct things but different ways of thinking. By examining these different forms of mental activity, he seeks to explain why thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns into emotion. According to his thesis, if thinking can be understood as the step-by-step process it is, then we can build machines, artificial intelligences, that not only help with our thinking by thinking as we do, but also have the potential to be as conscious as we are.

Timothy Morton publishes Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics

Timothy Morton argues that the main obstacle to environmental thinking is the very image of nature. Morton poses an apparent paradox: to have a properly ecological view, we must give up the idea of nature once and for all. This would broaden our view of ecological criticism and deepen our understanding of ecology itself. Rather than trying to use an idea of nature to heal what society has damaged, Morton establishes a radical new form of ecological criticism: “dark ecology”.

Anonymous makes its appearance

Since 2008, Anonymous has carried out protest actions in favor of freedom of expression, access to information and the independence of the Internet, and against various organizations, including ISIS, Scientology, public services, global corporations, copyright societies and all government censorship systems. At first, participants acted only on the Internet, but over time they also developed their activities offline.

Satoshi Nakamoto creates the cryptocurrency Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a protocol, open-source project and peer-to-peer network used as a cryptocurrency, payment system and commodity. It was conceived in 2008 by an entity known by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, whose actual identity is unknown.

Chris Anderson publishes The end of theory hypothesis

Anderson’s main point is that the modern information age of “petabytes” and “cloud” computing on the web is bypassing science’s “hypothesize, model and test” procedure, because scientific theorizing simply cannot cope with the flood of data.

Reza Negarestani publishes Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials

Negarestani anticipates an intellectual frenzy: bacterial archaeology, petropunk, meteorological teratology, white warfare and hypercamouflage, infernal engineering, schizostrategies for openness and insurgency.

The Dark Forest, a novel by Liu Cixin

The second part of the trilogy, which blends scientific and technological speculation with an apocalyptic future imagined on the basis of present-day perspectives.

China launches Weibo, a substitute for Twitter

Because of the Great Firewall, Western networks are officially inaccessible. The CCP has therefore created alternatives to Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and several other popular applications.

Franco Bifo Berardi publishes the Manifesto of Post-Futurism

In 1909, the Futurist Manifesto began a process in which the collective organism of humanity became a machine. Berardi argues that this machine has come to an end with the concatenations of the worldwide web, and warns of the collapse of a financial system based on the futurization of the economy.

Nick Bostrom publishes Human Enhancement

Human enhancement seeks to increase human capabilities beyond normal levels. Various forms of human enhancement are already in use. Here Bostrom frames the debate between transhumanists and bioconservatives from an ethical standpoint.

WikiLeaks leaks and the sentencing of Chelsea Manning

The United States diplomatic cables leak, or Cablegate, are the names by which the work done by the WikiLeaks website is known. It was a massive leak of US State Department documents, made public on November 28, 2010.

Tongji University launches DigitalFUTURES

DigitalFUTURES is a digital platform to promote discussion on a wide range of contemporary topics, with a particular emphasis on fabrication technologies and computational design. But it also addresses broader ethical and social issues, such as environmental concerns, within our highly technological and constantly evolving culture.

The Roko’s Basilisk hypothesis is put forward

Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment that became known in 2010, when the user Roko wrote about it on Less Wrong, an online forum devoted to philosophy and psychology with a futurist outlook. Its premise is the hypothetical but inevitable advent of an artificial superintelligence in the future. This superintelligence would be the inevitable product of the technological singularity, that is, the moment when an artificial intelligence created by humanity becomes capable of recursively improving itself. In the Roko’s Basilisk experiment, this superintelligence is called the Basilisk.

Jaron Lanier publishes You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Lanier takes aim at what he has recently dubbed the nerd culture of the Internet, or digital Maoism: the tendency of the technology community to put the platform before content and computers before people. In stark contrast to those who hail the triumph of user-generated content, Lanier sees an uninformed and tedious Internet in which quantity prevails over quality and good ideas are shouted down.

William Mitchell publishes Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century

In the 21st century, cars are still built on 20th-century premises. They are inefficient at providing personal mobility within cities, where most of the world’s population lives. Mitchell and two industry experts reinvent the automobile, describing near-future vehicles that are green, smart and connected.

Death’s End, a novel by Liu Cixin that completes the trilogy

The conclusion of Liu Cixin’s trilogy, taking the imagined future to the limits of humanity’s existence.

Walmart begins applying AI and machine learning to manage its logistics and predict behavior

Through AI algorithms, Walmart becomes the first global retailer to manage its product logistics according to customers’ consumption habits.

Uber is born

Travis Kalanick founds Uber, inaugurating a new app economy. From then on, the term uberization would be used to refer to similar business models.

Techno-colonialism. Geraldine Juárez and the case of the Google Cultural Institute

Geraldine Juárez presents her reflection “Intercolonial technogalactic”, in which she questions Google’s criteria for cultural indexing and argues that “indexing is never innocent”.

Nick Bostrom publishes Global Catastrophic Risks

Bostrom classifies risks according to their scope and intensity. A “global catastrophic risk” is any risk that is at least “global” in scope and not subjectively “imperceptible” in intensity. Those that are at least “trans-generational” (affecting all future generations) in scope and “terminal” in intensity are classified as existential risks. While a global catastrophic risk may kill the vast majority of life on Earth, humanity could still potentially recover. An existential risk, on the other hand, destroys humanity (and, presumably, all but the most rudimentary species of animal and/or plant life) entirely, or at least prevents any chance of civilization recovering. Bostrom considers existential risks to be far more significant.

Nick Land publishes Fanged Noumena

Beginning with Land’s early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, this work collects the documents, talks and articles from the mid-1990s in which Land developed his futurist theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone mad, and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognizable hybrids.

Neil Gershenfeld publishes Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop

What if one day the manufacturing power of a car plant could be put on a desktop? Gershenfeld argues that the next big breakthrough is personal fabrication: the ability to design and produce one’s own products at home with a machine that combines consumer electronics and industrial tools. In his view, personal fabrication is about to transform the world, just as personal computers did a generation ago.

Mario Carpo publishes The Alphabet and the Algorithm

Mario Carpo points to a key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. He highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the 15th century, Leon Battista Alberti’s idea of the architectural project, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect’s design; and, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrices, prints or molds. The modern power of the identical, Carpo argues, came to an end with the rise of digital technologies. Everything digital is variable. In architecture, this means the end of the limitations of notation and mechanical standardization. Carpo compares new forms of post-industrial digital craftsmanship with handmaking and with the cultures and technologies of variation that existed before the arrival of machine-made identical copies.

“Staying Behind”, a short story by Ken Liu on the singularity and its consequences

A short story by Ken Liu that addresses themes such as the singularity, immortality through uploading minds to the cloud, and physical and digital life.

The series Black Mirror begins, running until 2019

Black Mirror was a milestone in speculative fiction, showing the dark side of technology through self-contained dystopian stories that generally convey a sense of techno-paranoia.

The Hacked Matter collective is founded in Shanghai

Hacked Matter is a Shanghai-based research hub devoted to investigating the process of technological innovation in China. Through a series of immersive events, public programs, online outreach and secondary publications, it brings together academics, makers, artists and entrepreneurs to explore the interconnections between manufacturing, product design, hardware and speculative thinking.

Ray Kurzweil publishes How to Create a Mind

Kurzweil raises the possibility of creating strong artificial intelligence, that is, human-level artificial intelligence, not by artificially replicating a biological brain but by creating an artificial model that behaves the same way a biological brain does.

Eric Sadin publishes Augmented Humanity

Sadin expresses a fundamental trend in the course of contemporary technology: the “robotized administration of our existence”. The hyper-individualized, GPS-geolocated assistance of smartphones, the highly complex systems that autonomously guarantee water and electricity supplies to entire cities, and the algorithmic trading that regulates stock market exchanges all reflect the sophisticated coupling between computational intelligence and humanity that pervades our daily lives and has turned “electronic dynamics” into an indispensable layer of experience. The accelerated process of the “digital duplication of the world”, exemplified by platforms such as Google Maps or Facebook profiles, has produced the exponential growth of an unprecedented mass of data that exceeds our sensory and cerebral modes of apprehension.

Timothy Morton publishes Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Morton coined the term hyperobject to refer to things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans. A black hole, an oil field, the biosphere or the solar system, all the nuclear materials on Earth: these are hyperobjects. A hyperobject could be a long-lasting product of human manufacture, such as polystyrene, or the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism. Hyperobjects are “hyper” in relation to some other entity, whether or not they are produced by human beings. They share many features: they are viscous, “nonlocal” and involve a temporality radically different from the human scale we are used to. They occupy a high-dimensional phase space that makes them invisible to humans for certain periods of time.

Mario Carpo publishes The Digital Turn in Architecture

Twenty years on, the digital turn in architecture has already gone through several stages and phases. Architectural design has passed through all of them: from folding to cyberspace, nonlinearity and hypersurfaces, from versioning to scripting, emergence, information modeling and parametricism. It has recorded and interpreted the spirit of the times with vivid documentary precision, fostering and often anticipating crucial architectural and theoretical developments. Carpo offers an astute view of the recent history of digital design in his comprehensive introductory essay and in his guides to each original text.

Henry Markram works on the Human Brain Project

The European Union funded this project, led by Markram, who claimed that he himself would create a simulation of the entire human brain on a supercomputer within a decade, revolutionizing the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain disorders. In less than two years, it was acknowledged that the project was badly managed and its claims exaggerated, and Markram was asked to step down.

Jerome Bonnet proposes the Transistor project. Cell-based computing. DNA, RNA and silicon

At Stanford University, the first biological transistor is developed from genetic materials: DNA and RNA. Under the name “transcriptor”, scientists describe this biological transistor as the final component needed to build biological computers that work inside living cells. Like a transistor, one of its functions is signal amplification. A small change in enzyme activity can cause a huge change in the two connected genes. By combining multiple transcriptors, the Stanford researchers created a complete set of Boolean logic gates that would make it possible to run calculations inside a living cell.

Greg Lynn exhibition: Archaeology of the Digital, at the CCA

Archaeology of the Digital focuses on four key projects whose common feature is their architects’ pioneering use of digital tools or languages inspired by computer modeling. The four projects are: Frank Gehry’s Lewis Residence (1995); Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere (1992); Peter Eisenman’s unrealized Biocentrum (1987); and the roof structures designed by Shoei Yoh for the Odawara (1991) and Galaxy Toyama (1992) gymnasiums.

Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, by Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

In the face of the reduction of radical politics to proposals based on horizontality, consensus, local action and direct democracy, Williams and Srnicek argue for the need to radicalize the liberating tendencies that capitalism must keep under control at all times. It is an alternative within the framework of capitalism’s development and expansion, accelerating the speed of production, circulation and consumption until a breaking point is reached.

David Pearce publishes The Biointelligence Explosion: How Recursively Self-Improving Organic Robots will Modify their Own Source Code and Bootstrap Our Way to Full-Spectrum

In this text, Pearce promotes the idea that there is a strong human ethical imperative to seek the abolition of pain and suffering, and proposes technological incorporation and manipulation to that end.

Nick Bostrom publishes Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

The human brain has capabilities that other animal brains lack. It is because of these distinctive capabilities that our species occupies a dominant position. If artificial brains one day came to surpass human brains in general intelligence, this new intelligence would become very powerful. Just as the fate of gorillas now depends more on humans than on themselves, the fate of the human species would come to depend on the actions of artificial superintelligence. This is Bostrom’s thesis in this book.

Yuval Noah Harari publishes Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Harari examines the history of humanity, from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age to the 21st century. His main argument is that Homo sapiens dominates the world because it is the only animal capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers, thanks to its unique ability to believe in entities that exist only in its imagination, such as gods, nations, money or human rights.

Jaron Lanier publishes Who Owns the Future?

Lanier has drawn on his experience to reflect on how technology transforms society and culture. Who Owns the Future? is his take on the most important economic and social question of our time: the concentration of money and power in digital networks. According to Lanier, the rise of these networks has driven our economies into recession and decimated the middle classes. As technology destroys more and more in sectors such as media, medicine or industry, the challenges to employment and individual prosperity deepen. The author nevertheless proposes an alternative to the advance of a technology that threatens to take over the future. He sets out the path toward a new information economy that will respect society and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they create and share online.

Gramazio, Kohler and Willmann publish The Robotic Touch: How Robots Change Architecture

As the connection between data and building materials grows ever closer, and digital information is used not only to represent or plan but to create the material that will make up a building, robots necessarily play an important role in architecture. However, the use of robots in architecture had not been dealt with comprehensively. This book presents thirty research projects on robots in architecture originating at ETH Zurich, documenting various methods and concepts related to the use of robots in architecture.

Achim Menges publishes Material Synthesis: Fusing the Physical and the Computational

Designers no longer conceive of the digital realm as something separate from the physical world. Instead, computation is regarded as the key interface for material exploration, and vice versa. This represents a significant perceptual shift in which the materiality of architecture is no longer seen as a fixed property and passive receiver of form, but is transformed into an active generator of design and an adaptive agent of architectural performance. In marked contrast to earlier linear and mechanistic modes of fabrication and construction, materialization is beginning to coexist with design as exploratory robotic processes. This represents a radical departure both from the well-worn modernist emphasis on ‘truth to materials’ and from the previous generation of digital architects’ rejection of materials.

The Institute of Human Obsolescence is founded (http://speculative.capital)

The Institute of Human Obsolescence was created to seek new meaning and new purposes for human beings in the face of their obsolescence in favor of artificial intelligences.

Climate change conference in Paris

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP21, led to the Paris Agreement. This agreement is an international treaty that seeks to limit global warming and its effects.

The Ecomodernist Manifesto appears

The manifesto argues that technology, supported and accelerated by government investment, can simultaneously allow humanity to mitigate climate change, protect land and alleviate poverty. Eco-pragmatists, as they call themselves, endorse urbanization, intensive agriculture, nuclear energy and aquaculture, and oppose suburbs, low-yield agriculture and forms of renewable energy that require large amounts of land.

Blue Brain Project

The Blue Brain Project published the first digital reconstruction and simulation of the microcircuitry of a neonatal rat’s somatosensory cortex.

OpenAI emerges

OpenAI emerges as a non-profit organization with the mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Its founders included Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and other AI experts.

The Homo Faber project begins, by David Sperling, Pablo Herrera and Rodrigo Scheeren. It is presented at that year’s CAADFutures and at SIGRADI 2015

The exhibition Homo Faber – Digital Fabrication in Latin America brought together architectural digital fabrication labs from Latin America, showcasing the recent but already thriving digital fabrication scene in the region. The exhibition presented the work of 25 labs from universities, research groups, architecture studios and independent researchers.

Donna Haraway writes the Chthulucene Manifesto

Since the destruction of the planet will not be stopped by denying it or downplaying the evident impact of its effects, Haraway suggests a multispecies alliance as a way out. She also puts forward a kind of founding manifesto for a new civilization, hybridizing utopia with scientific fact and with accounts of small experiences pointing in the same direction.

Albert Cortina publishes ¿Humanos o posthumanos? Singularidad tecnológica y mejoramiento humano (Humans or Posthumans? Technological Singularity and Human Enhancement)

Are we willing to accept a technologically enhanced human species based on the radical transformation of its natural conditions? Is the technological singularity already under way that will give rise to an irreversible evolutionary leap from humankind to the posthuman? What role do consciousness, ethics and democracy play in controlling abuses in this process? These are the questions Cortina weaves through his work.

Laboria Cuboniks publishes Xenofeminism

The Laboria Cuboniks collective defines xenofeminism (XF) as a “technomaterialist, anti-naturalist and gender abolitionist” accelerationism. Among other things, this means biotechnology in the service of multiplying genders and the disappearance of the binary.

Murray Shanahan publishes The Technological Singularity

Murray Shanahan offers an introduction to the idea of the singularity and considers the ramifications of such a potentially seismic event. His aim is not to make predictions but to investigate a range of scenarios. Whether we believe the singularity is near or far, likely or impossible, utopia or apocalypse, the very idea raises crucial philosophical and pragmatic questions, forcing us to think seriously about what we want as a species.

Gramazio and Kohler publish Made by Robots: Challenging Architecture at a Larger Scale

Here Gramazio and Kohler explore the possibilities of robotic construction processes for architecture and their large-scale application to the design and construction of high-rise buildings. Together with other contributors, such as Philippe Morel, Neri Oxman, François Roche and Antoine Picon, they also discuss the far-reaching transformations beginning to take place within automated fabrication: in terms of freeing up labor, in situ fabrication and design theory.

Ex Machina, by Alex Garland, is released

The story centers on the relationship between a human and an anthropomorphic machine subjected to a kind of Turing test. The film also incorporates the bodily dimension as a fundamental part of identity, and takes the theory of the uncanny valley to a new level.

Sam Esmail launches the series Mr. Robot, which would run until 2019

Mr. Robot presents the dark side of technology, establishing hacker culture and open source as the only option for citizen empowerment against the abuses of technology corporations.

Benjamin Bratton publishes The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

Bratton proposes a layered system of study, relating user, interface, address, city, cloud and earth. The earth layer makes possible the existence of the hungry machine known as The Stack. The consequence of this machine’s existence is that enormous amounts of the earth are consumed in different ways. Without the extraction of minerals or precious stones, it is impossible to conceive of the birth of the Stack, which terraforms the earth according to a notion of logical, yet random, geodesign.

Luc Ferry publishes The Transhumanist Revolution

The progress of the technosciences is of unimaginable scope and speed. It is silent, attracts little attention from politicians and barely any from the media, so it happens behind the backs of most of the population and is practically unregulated. Luc Ferry reflects on the abysmal questions that these new powers of humans over humans will inevitably raise in the coming years, on the ethical, political and economic planes, but also the spiritual.

Michael Fox publishes Interactive Architecture

Michael Fox sets out a process-oriented guide to creating dynamic spaces and objects capable of performing a variety of pragmatic functions. These complex physical interactions are made possible by the creative fusion of embedded computation (intelligence) with a tangible physical counterpart (kinetics). A unique 21st-century toolbox and skill set. Digital and physical modeling, sensor technology, CNC fabrication, prototyping and robotics require the collaboration of many diverse scientific and artistic communities. Interactive architecture includes contributions from the worlds of architecture, industrial design, computer programming, engineering and physical computing.

Eric Sadin publishes The Silicolonization of the World

Sadin focuses on describing the trajectory of Silicon Valley, from its origins in Californian counterculture and psychedelia to the establishment of a new capitalism, a techno-liberalism that, through connected objects and artificial intelligence, seeks to extract profit from our slightest gesture, ushering in the era of a “life industry”.

Yuval Noah Harari publishes Homo Deus

Here Harari continues the work he began in Sapiens, presenting a vision of the future in which technology grows exponentially and impacts social structures, revolutionizing life. Biotechnology, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology will make it possible to extend human life. A book that places humankind at the gates of eternity on Earth.

Keith Evan Green publishes Architectural Robotics

Green looks toward the next frontier of computing: interactive, partly intelligent and meticulously designed physical environments. He also examines how these “architectural robotics” systems will support and enhance us at work, in education and at home, as we roam, interconnect and age.

Mono No Aware, by Ken Liu

This work, included in the collection The Paper Menagerie, builds a near future in which, following a catastrophe, humanity must leave the planet on a ship. It is a song against individualism and a celebration of collaboration toward common goals.

In New Zealand, the Whanganui River is recognized as a living entity with legal identity

The Whanganui is now a “legal person” and, as such, will have rights and obligations under a pioneering agreement signed by the New Zealand parliament. This means that the river, revered by the Māori people, will have the same rights as a person. The river is recognized as an ancestor, that is, a living entity.

The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution begins, according to Klaus Schwab

This is the fourth major industrial stage since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. This fourth stage is characterized by a fusion of technologies currently being tested or developed, which is dissolving the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological spheres.

Machine learning becomes established as the data interpretation tool par excellence

This is a scientific discipline within artificial intelligence that creates systems that learn automatically, that is, that identify complex patterns in millions of data points. The machine that actually learns is an algorithm that reviews the data and is able to predict future behavior. These systems improve autonomously over time, without human intervention.

Neil Leach and Philip Yuan publish Computational Design

This anthology by Leach and Yuan offers an organized overview of the impact of computational techniques on architectural design today, providing a snapshot of the latest developments in the field, drawing on leading experts in architectural practice and education from around the world.

Lluís Ortega publishes El diseñador total (The Total Designer)

Ortega’s work is a reflection on the relationships between technology and creation. It contributes to an essayistic form relatively unusual within architectural historiographies, but one that has had great influence on contemporary architecture: how the historical thematization of post-industrial technology has been one of the fundamental issues in achieving a contemporary condition and in connecting theoretical-critical activity with professional practice.

Klaus Schwab publishes The Fourth Industrial Revolution

From the World Economic Forum, Schwab proposes this concept which, though silent, implies a radical paradigm shift. The fourth revolution is characterized by a fusion of technologies that erode the lines between the physical, the digital and the biological. From this point on, there is no turning back from such convergence.

Timothy Morton publishes Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People

Morton asks: how should life be defined? How far from the non-living should it be placed? He brings into dialogue a series of concepts from contemporary debate: specter, species and community, among others. He seeks to undermine the opposition between the human and the non-human, with constant allusions to contemporary culture, as a philosopher who escapes the strictly academic.

Mario Carpo publishes The Second Digital Turn

The fundamental argument of this work is that design tools are no longer used for making but for thinking. They are no longer instruments of strictly formal innovation, but ways of thinking about and conceiving design from the digital, rather than through the digital.

Amir Husain publishes The Sentient Machine

The debate around artificial intelligence is polarized: some believe machines will solve every problem, while others believe they will lead us down a dark, dystopian path toward total human irrelevance. Beyond this, the idea that we could produce an intelligent creation may be intrinsically terrifying. But what if our greatest role as human beings so far is that of creators?

The Homo Faber project continues with the mapping of digital fabrication in Latin America

In this edition, Homo Faber reflects a maturity of initiatives that improve the approach to different scales of the built environment. The processes investigated and the resulting artifacts show progress in the complexity of the proposals, the scale of fabrication, technical solutions and materialities. The projects are closely tied to local culture, recognized as a source of inspiration that generates meaning for the design and assembly workflow. Labs are emerging with proposals increasingly linked to local problems, moving from experiences referenced to the Global North to others that seek, in their own reality and community, a connection that values their identity.

IoT expands into homes through smart apps and smart devices

In 2018, IoT expanded into homes through smart apps and smart devices, automating tasks and optimizing consumption. Connected technology turned spaces into efficient environments, making remote control easier and improving everyday quality of life.

Eric Sadin publishes Artificial Intelligence, or the Challenge of the Century

The hypothesis of this key book is that the cause (and not the consequence) of the prominence of the artificial intelligence phenomenon is a change in the status of digital technologies: from being cumulative and intellective prostheses (because they allow the storage, indexing and rapid flow of information), they have become entities expected to state a truth based on the automated interpretation of situations.

Albert Cortina publishes Humanismo avanzado para una sociedad biotecnológica (Advanced Humanism for a Biotechnological Society)

For Cortina, the “new utopia” of the 21st century comes down to the idea of “freeing human beings from the rules of biological evolution”, but this goal is paradoxical because it may end up leading to a world in which people have lost their freedom, enslaved by extreme control based precisely on technology. For this reason, he proposes using “the classic methods: democracy and a strengthening of inner life, in which the various religious traditions will have much to say” if we want to build a technological society that is “advanced, just, free and happy”, based on a real humanism.

Molly Wright Steenson publishes Architectural Intelligence

Christopher Alexander, long before his 1977 book A Pattern Language, used computation and structure to visualize design problems; Wurman popularized the notion of “information architecture”; Price designed some of the first intelligent buildings; and Negroponte experimented with the ways people experience artificial intelligence, even at an architectural scale. Steenson investigates how these architects pushed the boundaries of architecture and how their architectural experiments pushed the boundaries of technology.

The rise of biometric technologies and mixed reality

Forms of biometric recognition and authentication are refined as technologies of control, establishing subtle security boundaries that overlap with Chinese-style social credit systems and Western systems of political control.

3D printing goes mainstream

Spurred by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, 3D printing becomes cheaper, both in equipment and filaments. Free, DIY and open-source technologies proliferate, alongside the proprietary technologies that lead the market.

The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds, by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold

The computer interface is omnipresent and invisible, embedded in everyday objects and characterized by hidden exchanges of information between objects. The interface has moved from the office into culture, with devices, apps, the cloud and data streams as new cultural platforms. In The Metainterface, Andersen and Pold examine the relationships between art and interfaces, tracing the interface’s disruption of everyday cultural practices.

Mahesh Daas and Andrew John Wit publish Towards a Robotic Architecture

According to the authors, robotics and artificial intelligence represent the next cutting-edge technology to transform the fields of architecture and design. The past decade’s surge toward more computationally defined building systems and highly adaptable open-source design software has left the field ready for the integration of robotics, through large-scale building fabrication or smarter, more adaptable building systems.

María Ptqk publishes Especies del Chthuluceno. Panorama de prácticas para un planeta herido (Species of the Chthulucene: A Survey of Practices for a Wounded Planet)

María Ptqk offers a journey through the multiplicity of life where experimental philosophy and artistic practices, science fiction and ecology, the environmental humanities and Indigenous worldviews intersect.

Better Than Us. A Russian Netflix series

The story takes place in a near future in which androids serve the population in various positions, even replacing humans in some jobs. They raise children and carry out domestic and security tasks. The series questions human values in light of new forms of artificial “life”, also questioning the validity of Asimov’s three laws of robotics.

The global COVID-19 crisis begins

The crisis brings the world to a partial standstill, calling in-person presence into question and establishing the remote model as a replacement for the traditional one. The accelerated research into vaccines becomes the greatest scientific race.

Anti-5G movements, COVID conspiracy theorists and “neo-Luddites” emerge

Deniers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Luddites and other ideological currents emerge, questioning the nature of the pandemic and, above all, the role of technology, specifically 5G technology.

Elon Musk announces full self-driving at Tesla

According to Musk, autonomous driving will become an essential and indispensable part of driving. He argues that brands that do not commit to it are doomed to irrelevance.

5G technologies are rolled out

5G technologies will enable the greatest global interconnection ever achieved, at extreme speeds. They will interconnect objects, devices, buildings and people.

UAVs expand in uses and capabilities

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are one of the technologies defined as priorities for development in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Their cost has become affordable for the mass market and their commercial uses keep multiplying.

Matteo Pasquinelli publishes The Nooscope Manifested: Artificial Intelligence as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism

Pasquinelli and Joler take up the theme of artificial intelligence as an engine of data extraction, address the automation of its analysis and explore its link with the world of work in an environment of total robotization.

George Zarkadakis publishes Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Amid the worldwide crisis of democracies and society’s loss of trust in them, automation threatens to turn the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and labor loses. George Zarkadakis analyzes whether this digital dystopia can be avoided, proposing a guide for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the post-pandemic world.

Embodied Computing: Wearables, Implantables, Embeddables, Ingestibles, edited by Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis

The authors examine technologies ranging from fitness trackers to neural implants. They discuss topics including the political implications of ingestibles; the invasive potential of body area networks, which transmit data from bodily devices to the Internet; cyborg experiments that connect a human brain directly to a computer, and other intrusive electronic control devices; “fashiontech”, which offers users an aura of “coolness” in exchange for their data; and the “final frontier” of techno-supremacism: technologies that seek to read our minds.

Achim Menges and Jan Knippers edit Architecture Research Building

By exploring robotic production methods and innovative material developments, Menges and Knippers develop genuine digital building systems that combine architectural elegance with effective construction. Using completed pavilions and buildings as examples, the authors demonstrate the viability of the underlying hypotheses, which remarkably push the boundaries of construction.

Material Ecology. Neri Oxman’s exhibition at MoMA

Oxman, founder of The Mediated Matter Group at the MIT Media Lab, has developed not only new ways of thinking about materials, objects, buildings and construction methods, but also new frameworks for interdisciplinarity, even across species. Her pioneering approach, which she calls “material ecology”, combines materials science, digital fabrication technologies and organic design to create new possibilities for the future. While each of these works is aesthetically compelling on its own, together they present a new philosophy of designing, making and even unmaking the world around us, and this is what the exhibition sets out to express.

Big Tech positions itself above any government and monopolizes control of the networks

After allegations of fraud in the United States elections, Big Tech decides to permanently shut down Donald Trump’s accounts on the dominant social networks. It also boycotts other smaller networks and forces the closure of Parler, as a warning to other companies. This definitively places Big Tech above democracy and calls it into question.

OpenAI launches DALL-E

The launch of DALL-E in 2021 revolutionized AI image generation, turning text descriptions into striking visual creations and opening up new artistic possibilities.

Eric Sadin publishes The Era of the Tyrant Individual: The End of a Common World

Sadin offers a new and tragic analysis of the collapse of our common world through a historical, political, social, economic and technical lens, in order to better rethink the terms of a social contract capable of bringing humanity back together.

Peter Dauvergne publishes AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

AI tools are increasingly being deployed in the battle for global sustainability. Dauvergne, however, calls for caution in declaring AI the savior of the planet. He avoids the hype driven by the artificial intelligence industry and offers a critical view, exploring both the potential benefits and the risks of using artificial intelligence to advance global sustainability.

Germaine Halegoua publishes Smart Cities and Ritu Raman publishes Biofabrication

Halegoua questions the utopian vision of smart cities and defines them as showrooms for the practical application of the Internet of Things, cloud computing and the integration of big data into everyday life. She builds a concise introduction to smart cities, interrogating their real nature and their relationship with democracy and control of the people.

Yuk Hui publishes Fragmentar el futuro. Ensayos sobre tecnodiversidad (Fragmenting the Future: Essays on Technodiversity)

Hui argues that there is no single universal technological pattern against which some countries and cultures would be more advanced or left behind, but rather multiple cosmotechnics expressing different ways of feeling and ordering experience. Recovering this historically traceable technodiversity is a crucial task if we want to question the ontological and epistemological assumptions of modern technology and resituate it within realities broader than the calculable world.

The rise of generative AI

The rise of generative AI in 2021 revolutionized the digital industry and made possible the automatic creation of images, texts and music through advanced algorithms. This innovation boosted creativity and opened a wide debate on copyright, radically transforming many artistic and technological sectors worldwide.

Stable Diffusion appears under the Creative ML OpenRAIL-M license

The emergence of Stable Diffusion, released under Creative ML OpenRAIL-M, transforms image generation. These open-source tools democratize access to powerful diffusion models, fostering collaborative creativity and expanding the frontiers of digital art. Its innovation drives a new era of visual creation.

Launch of DALL-E 2

The launch of DALL-E 2 in 2022 revolutionized AI image generation by offering higher resolution, coherence and creative diversity. This advanced model turns text descriptions into visual works, driving innovation in design and digital art and marking a milestone that redefines the interaction between creativity and technology.

Neil Leach publishes Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects

Neil Leach reveals how artificial intelligence is opening up horizons in architecture and design, showing current examples and future scenarios. In this first volume, he explains what AI is, how it works and why its applications are decisive for conceiving buildings and cities. He describes uses of AI in architecture, data management and project optimization.

Matías del Campo publishes Neural Architecture: Design and Artificial Intelligence

In Neural Architecture, Matías del Campo investigates the application of artificial intelligence in architecture, combining the humanities and the visual arts. He highlights the rise of AI and its relationship with material and symbolic culture, while stressing its ethical implications for architectural practice.

3D printing is put to work producing medicines, new materials and organic elements: food, human organs

3D printing in drug production makes it possible to manufacture personalized medicines, optimizing doses, forms and release. This technology is revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry, reducing time, costs and waste, enabling treatments tailored to individual needs, opening new horizons in personalized medicine and improving therapeutic effectiveness for critical patients today.

Stable Diffusion becomes popular as an open-source AI model

The popularization of Stable Diffusion, boosted by ComfyUI, has revolutionized AI image generation. This open-source model democratizes the technology, allowing customization and experimentation in real time. Thanks to its intuitive interface, artists and developers are exploring new creative horizons, driving innovation and global collaboration and opening up limitless possibilities.

Mario Carpo publishes Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity

Mass production, the foundation of modernity, sought economies of scale through standardization in construction. In Beyond Digital, Mario Carpo shows that the fusion of robotic automation and artificial intelligence reverses that paradigm, enabling flexible and adaptive construction in the face of the climate crisis and the pandemic.

Neil Leach publishes Machine Hallucinations: Architecture and Artificial Intelligence (Architectural Design)

Artificial intelligence already permeates our everyday lives, from smartphones to art. This issue of AD investigates its impact on architecture, where it is used in design and fabrication. It analyzes its capabilities as augmented intelligence, its autonomy and the future it opens up for the discipline.

Figure 01 and OpenAI create their first robotic embodiment with ChatGPT

Figure 01 and OpenAI have created their first robotic embodiment with ChatGPT, a milestone that emulates human communication in a surprising way. This innovation opens up new possibilities in interaction, education and virtual assistance, demonstrating the growing potential of artificial intelligence to transform interactions and redefine technological experiences.

Anthropic and Claude 3 challenge the dominance of ChatGPT 4

Anthropic and its Claude 3 burst onto the artificial intelligence market, challenging the dominance of ChatGPT 4. With innovations in algorithms and language processing, they drive competition, spurring technological progress and broadening the horizons of automated conversation.

Launch of SORA

The launch of SORA marks a technological milestone, presenting an innovative platform that promises to revolutionize its sector. With a focus on efficiency, personalization and the integration of advanced technologies, SORA drives new forms of collaboration and development, opening horizons in an increasingly competitive and dynamic market.

Image, voice and video generation AIs proliferate

In 2024, the development of artificial intelligence for generating graphics, voice and video accelerated. These increasingly accurate and accessible technologies are revolutionizing the creative industry, enabling realistic and personalized audiovisual content. The proliferation of these tools is redefining paradigms in communication, entertainment and multimedia production.

Language-model AIs begin to take over the work of many human beings

In 2024, AI-based language models advanced to the point of taking on tasks previously performed by professionals, from writing and translation to customer service and content creation. By improving efficiency and reducing costs, this trend poses challenges, sparking debate about the future of employment and the need to adapt to new ways of working.

Ray Kurzweil publishes The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

Ray Kurzweil analyzes his prediction that AI will reach human-level intelligence, examining exponential technological growth. He addresses nanobots, life extension, brain-cloud connection, innovation in renewable energy, and risks in biotechnology and automation, transforming the global future.

Matías Del Campo publishes Diffusions in Architecture: Artificial Intelligence and Image Generators

In Diffusions in Architecture, Matías del Campo explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and architecture. His work challenges traditional paradigms, proposing innovative methods and highlighting the transformative impact of generative tools on design.

Eric Sadin publishes Spectral Life: Thinking the Era of the Metaverse and Generative AI

The “specter” haunting the globe symbolizes our technical life: profiles, digital work and consumption become mirages that alienate our existence. According to Eric Sadin, capitalism vampirizes life by turning it into data, delegating to machines the capacity to state truths. This process undoubtedly calls for an urgent political response.

The expansion of anthropomorphic robots

Companies such as 1X Technologies, Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics have developed humanoid robots with enhanced autonomous capabilities, integrating advanced AI to take on roles in domestic, industrial and commercial settings.

Large-scale digital twins

Projects such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Center’s Earth Digital Twin make it possible to model and predict environmental phenomena with unprecedented accuracy, integrating real-time data for sustainable planning.

The United States government announces Stargate

OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and Trump join forces in a historic investment in artificial intelligence, with an impact on technological innovation, ethical debate and the transformation of industry on a global scale.

The Chinese government announces DeepSeek

DeepSeek democratizes artificial intelligence by making advanced technology accessible, driving innovation, lowering economic barriers and fostering digital transformation in key sectors.