2021: Creating a Lexicon of Future

A is for Autopoiesis

The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto-) ‘self’, and ποίησις (poiesis) ‘creation, production’) refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.

I love the path to this word, sourced in Don Quixote’s dilemma, and then applied in contexts far beyond literature.

In their 1972 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela described how they invented the word autopoiesis.

“It was in these…