A friend of mine, Jaime Requena, the same one that wrote the Requena Files on the left of this blog in the Venezuelan links, sent this week to me a copy of his book (in Spanish) “Half a century of Science and Technology in Venezuela” which I am still reading. In it, in Chapter 3, there is an article published in 1950 by Venezuelan scientist Humberto Fernandez Moran. I had never seen this article entitled “General ideas about the foundation of a Venezuelan Institute for Brain Research”, published in Acta Cientifica Venezolana, Vol. 1, Number 3 (1950)page 85-87. Fernandez Moran poses a visionary proposal for a research institute which became a realty under his leadership and is now known as IVIC, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas. This represented at the time a huge jump in organized scientific activity in Venezuela as well as in the financing of scientific research in the country which still plays a role in Venezuelan science. But if his vision of the importance of organized science and its role was impressive, I was even more impressed about his scientific vision:
“In the last decades a new discipline has been created that encompasses all of the processes of communications, the control and integrated dominance of machines and biological systems, looking for common elements: “Cybernetics (Wiener, Rosenblueth) and is destined to play a role comparable to atomic energy, because it provides the basis for the creation of huge(!!) calculating machines and to the legion of hardware that replaces men and even surpasses him in the execution of superhuman tasks. Each one of these computing machines executes in a determined time certain functions equivalent to the effort of a few thousand human brains. They are only prototypes, the machines of the future that will translate millions of abstract operations in actions corresponding to inconceivable complexity, like it would be for example the automatic control of the whole communications system of a country or the management of an industry. But despite this unilateral superiority these machines can only be considered as primitive models of the brain, lacking intuition, the capacity for creative change and the characteristic autonomy of this organ. One can foresee however, the possibility of associating in complementary fashion the two systems, reaching in that way an entity which would be incomparably superior…..It is impossible to predict in all of its magnitude what this link between these two complementary disciplines will represent for our civilization in the future”
Blows my mind how visionary this was….the work is still going on 53 years later!!!
The Devil's Excrement 
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