Another reason (among many) why I became disenchanted with #Cybernetics and had to “invent” #Kihbernetics.
Warren Sturgis McCulloch, the co-inventor of the first computational model of a #Neuron that was the precursor for #AI and #DeepNeuralNetworks, uses a racial slur to incorrectly suggest that Cybernetics is somehow the result of the “interbreeding” between the Natural and the Artificial in the preface he wrote for Gordon Pask’s book:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3965798-an-approach-to-cybernetics
Knowing #McCulloch to be one of those writers well-read in the Classics who tends to use words in their original senses, where miscegenation may connote nothing more than mixed genus, I would not without further evidence convict him of a slur here.
Yes, a "classic" indeed. The word was coined and used for the first time in 1864 in a racist hoax to discredit Lincoln.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscegenation_hoax
He could have used other words like mix, combine, merge, amalgamate, ... instead of such an obscure one.
