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Economic complexity

From useless to keystone

Nature Physics volume 14, pages 9–10 (2018)Cite this article

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Technological innovation seems to be dominated by chance. But a new mathematical analysis suggests we might be able to anticipate when seemingly useless technologies become keystones of more complex environments.

Decades ago, when Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon were fighting to define the field of artificial intelligence (AI), AI wasn't very useful. Wiener's flavour of AI, cybernetics, focused on feedbacks and control, and interested the army because it could be used to adjust the angle of machine guns firing projectiles from moving planes.

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  1. the Collective Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    César A. Hidalgo

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  1. César A. Hidalgo
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Correspondence to César A. Hidalgo.

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Hidalgo, C. From useless to keystone. Nature Phys 14, 9–10 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys4337

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