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Milestone · March 1946

First Macy conference on feedback

The Macy Foundation convened its first conference on feedback mechanisms and circular causality in biological and social systems. The group drew physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, physiologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and anthropologists.

Why it matters

The conversation about machine intelligence started as an interdisciplinary one, and included people who studied brains from the outset.

The first meeting was titled Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems. In the autumn of 1946 the next meetings were on teleological mechanisms, and the series took the name Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms later. The last, tenth conference met in April 1953 in Princeton. By later historians, the first met in New York on 8 and 9 March. No transactions of the first five conferences were published, the foundation itself says; printing began with the sixth, in 1949.

Event record

Event date
March 1946
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Event date
Verification
Sources gathered automatically · September 27, 2026
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evt-0062

The month is the Macy Foundation's own transactions': 'the first Macy Foundation Conference in March 1946'. The days of 8 and 9 March are given only by later historians, citing an archival letter, so the record keeps the month.

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