PERSON
Konrad Lorenz
The Austrian ethologist who built a science of innate behavior—imprinting, releasing mechanisms, fixed action patterns—and whose concepts map, point for point, onto the structure of the artificial minds we are building now, both as guide and as catastrophic warning.
Konrad Lorenz founded ethology on a refusal: he would not accept that behavior was merely learned, that an animal arrived in the world as a blank slate to be written upon by experience. Against the
behaviorism that ruled the laboratories of his century, Lorenz insisted that animals arrive already furnished—with instincts as integral to their makeup as a beak or a webbed foot, with
critical periods of irreversible early development, with drives that build from the inside and releasing mechanisms that fire for forged keys. For this work he shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. But Lorenz is a warning carried in the same body as the guide: he joined the Nazi Party in 1938 and lent his science to its racial-hygiene program, committing in its most lethal form the error every builder of autonomous systems must refuse—the slide from “this drive is innate” to “this drive is