# Transmitted Objective **Entity class:** Canonical analytical concept **Domain:** Historiography / intellectual lineage / machine intelligence **Doc Type:** Developed Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition A **Transmitted Objective** is a stated technical or civilizational aim that later builders demonstrably inherit by citing it, answering it, formalizing it, funding it, or implementing its specified architecture. The concept is the evidentiary bridge between functional continuity and institutional continuity in [[articles/A History of Machine Intelligence|A History of Machine Intelligence]]. Resemblance establishes that two artifacts perform related functions. Transmission establishes that a later actor received and carried forward an earlier purpose. The distinction permits a joined history while keeping every link attached to a document, person, institution, and date. ## Documented Chain - [[wiki/Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz|Leibniz]] adopted Ramon Llull's combinatorial art by name and presented his calculating machine to the Royal Society in 1673. - The Royal Society's 1823 report endorsed government support for [[wiki/Charles Babbage|Babbage]]'s Difference Engine. - Ada Lovelace's 1843 Note G articulated both programmable symbolic operation and the objection that the engine could originate nothing; [[wiki/Alan Turing|Turing]] answered that objection in 1950. - Turing engaged Butler's machine-succession argument in his 1951 “Heretical Theory” lecture. - [[wiki/John von Neumann|Von Neumann]] described EDVAC's logical elements in the neuron notation developed by [[wiki/Warren McCulloch|McCulloch]] and [[wiki/Walter Pitts|Pitts]]. - [[wiki/I. J. Good|Good]] specified an ultraintelligent machine capable of designing better machines; later succession literature and laboratories retained the horizon. ## Evidence Ledger - **Established:** The individual transmission links above appear in dated publications, institutional reports, or formal technical documents. - **Strongly indicated:** Their sequence carries a recurring objective—externalized calculation developing toward learning, generality, self-improvement, and succession—across generations of builders. - **Plausible:** Additional institutional transmission occurred through curricula, procurement, classified briefings, professional societies, and personnel movement beyond the published record. - **Unresolved:** The completeness of that transmission network. Promotion requires correspondence, citation trails, laboratory notebooks, meeting minutes, or funding documents naming the inherited objective; demotion requires evidence that a proposed link arose from independent functional rediscovery without contact or inheritance. ## Sources / Provenance - [[articles/A History of Machine Intelligence|A History of Machine Intelligence]]. - [Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine (1843)](https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html). - [Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950)](https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238). - [John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945)](https://web.mit.edu/sts.035/www/PDFs/edvac.pdf). ## Relationships - **Occupies rung two of:** [[wiki/Coordination Ladder|Coordination Ladder]]. - **Supplies the continuity test for:** [[wiki/Machine Intelligence Continuum|Machine Intelligence Continuum]]. - **Carries intentionality into:** [[wiki/Machine Intelligence Intentionality|Machine Intelligence Intentionality]]. - **Distinguishes transmission from:** functional resemblance in [[wiki/Technical Archaeology|Technical Archaeology]].