History of The Concept
The idea of non-biological self-replicating systems was introduced in Samuel Butler's article "Darwin Among the Machines" published only a few years after The Origin of Species. As a serious proposal, it was first suggested by mathematician John Von Neumann in the late 1940s when he proposed a kinematic self-reproducing automaton model as a thought experiment. See Von Neumann, J., 1966, The Theory of Self-reproducing Automata, A. Burks, ed., Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL.
Read more about this topic: Clanking Replicator
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