ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mice, Marx, and the Machine: ‘Communist’ Donald Michie’s Journey to Artificial Intelligence via Genetics

• In Event: Biology's 20th Century Evolution: From Genetics to AI

English Abstract

This paper explores the severely underexplored interdisciplinary research career and left-wing politics of British artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Donald Michie to understand how his politics and background in biology shaped his AI research. Michie, who was a teenage codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the second world war and a biologist after the war, almost single-handedly established AI research in Britain and co-founded the first university department for AI research in the world at the University of Edinburgh in 1966. But before his foray into AI, Michie had a successful career as a geneticist, collaborating with his then wife and research partner Anne McLaren to carry out path breaking embryo-transfer experiments with mice during the 1950s. They were also communists whose research interests were shaped by the Lysenkoist Soviet biology of the time. Using the largely unexplored correspondences and publications of Michie, I will show how his post-war career as a geneticist was influenced by his Marxist ideals, and how both his background in molecular biology as well as his radical politics shaped Michie the AI scientist, who was as keen on the practical application of his research as he was concerned with the social impact of AI.

Author

• Aswin Valsala Narayanan