“Cybernetics” (based on kybernetes, the Greek word for “steersman,” cognate to English “governor”) was the science, Wiener announced, of “communication and control,” or of feedback mechanisms in general.”
“Towering figures from the history of computing, like Claude Shannon and John von Neumann, argue with social scientists like Margaret Mead and her then-husband Gregory Bateson about feedback mechanisms, the concept of information, and something called “the digital.””
“Wiener developed many of the basic ideas of cybernetics alongside a variety of collaborators during a series of conferences that took place in New York City between 1946 and 1953. The transcripts of the so-called “Macy Conferences” (named after their patron, Josiah Macy Jr.) were reissued by the University of Chicago Press last year, on the heels of the first two histories of the movement, Ronald Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment, or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age and Thomas Rid’s Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History.”
“A debate about whether the brain was digital at the second Macy conference got heated, as the discussion quickly turned from the brain to what counted as “digital” in the first place. Everyone agreed that digital measurement was discrete and exact, while analog was proportional and continuous. But the question of which is which in any given machine or animal continues to plague commentators to this day. The psychologist J. C. R. Licklider eventually closed down the debate, giving up the definition game by declaring: “We will use the words as best we can.””
“Reconceiving the notion of the human, and the organic, was always essential to the cybernetic project. One result of Wiener’s spotlight experiments at MIT was a short paper he co-authored with Julian Bigelow and Arturo Rosenblueth called “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology.” This paper — one of the founding documents of cybernetics — distinguishes between a “functional” view of organized beings (on the one hand animals, and on the other machines) and a view based on the notion of “behavior.””
“The functional perspective — for example, the perspective of physiology — sees great differences between animals and machines: “[O]rganisms are mainly colloidal, and include prominently protein molecules, large, complex and anisotropic,” while “machines are chiefly metallic and include mainly simple molecules.””
“But from the standpoint of behavior, machines and animals are not essentially different at all. Both types of entities absorb external impulses, interpret them, and put them to use through internal and external commands. They are input-output patterns, users and manipulators of energy. They differ only in arrangement, not in kind.”
“By looking at the world through the prism of behavioral pattern rather than function, Wiener was able to describe both animals and machines in terms borrowed from physics: both were pools of negative entropy, relatively stable patterns of resistance to the slow degeneration of all organization in the universe.”
“This idea would prove crucial in the next years, when Wiener and Claude Shannon simultaneously developed a new theory: the theory of information, or what Shannon called “the mathematical theory of communication.””
“Kline’s account of this simultaneous discovery is one of the high points of his book. Both men made the analogy to thermodynamics, arguing that messages, too, were pools of negative entropy. Shannon provided a general formula for channel capacity, a way to ensure that messages could be encoded and decoded without degrading into mere noise. For Shannon, as Kline points out, “information” was an entropic background from which specific messages had to be selected (with shades of the way we use “data” today). For Wiener, it was the other way around: information was the message, entropy the noise. Wiener’s metaphor ultimately won. We now mostly imagine information as message, or, in Bateson’s famous phrase, as “a difference that makes a difference.””
“Either way, information had to be processed, and the processors of information were special parts of animals and machines: brains and computers. Warren McCulloch had published an article on “neural nets” in 1943 that suggested a sort of digital programmability at the basis of neural functioning. Virtually every major cybernetician entertained this analogy at some point, including John von Neumann and Wiener himself, and it remains a stock element of speculation about artificial intelligence.”
“Both Kline and Rid show how crucial the brain debate was to the cybernetics fad. It inspired the author Alice Mary Hilton, for example, to envision a “cybernated” world in which intelligent machines would take over mental work, as they had taken over manual labor during the First Industrial Revolution.”
“For cybernetics, the digital brain completed the picture. Animals were machines, communication was control, and information processing was the principle, not just an element, of the new science. Wiener would not shy away from the philosophical consequences, claiming that “information is information, not energy or matter. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.””
“Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date.”
“Consider, for example, the creation of the Agile Eye helmet for Air Force pilots who need to integrate “cyberspace” (their term) with meatspace. The officer in charge reports, according to Rid, “We actually used the same industrial designers that had designed Darth Vader’s helmet.” This fluid movement between futuristic Hollywood design, science fiction, and the DOD is a recurring feature of Rise of the Machines”
“Take the NSA’s internal warning that “[l]aymen are beginning to expect science fiction capabilities and not scientific capabilities” in virtual reality. Or Rid’s account of the so-called “cypherpunks” around Timothy May. Their name was cribbed from the “cyberpunk” science fiction genre (“cypher” refers to public-key encryption), and they were inspired by novels like Vernor Vinge’s True Names (1981), one on a list of recommended books for the movement on which not a single nonfiction text figures.”
“Taken together, Kline and Rid’s narratives suggest that cybernetics had a significant inkling about its implications for the traditional preserve of the humanities — language, the soul, freedom — precisely because notions like “feedback” put computation or counting under the scientific microscope as such.”
“Including Leibniz in physics was always going to have consequences for the humanities, as was a general theory of communication. If the human subject was part of the scientific enterprise, the automation of subjective capacities that the digital foresaw would have to be a major question for the humanities.”
“Maybe that’s why literature plays an outsized role in Rid’s book. Maybe we’re playing catch-up to a much more expansive digital humanities that antedates our devices. If we live in a digital world precipitated by the cyberneticians whose stories are told in these books, then we don’t have a choice but to look to them, as Kline and Rid begin to do, for updates to our vocabulary and conceptual apparatuses as well. These books make a powerful case for a return to the origin of the cybernetic myth, an object that might come to the aid of a humanities that has unwittingly inherited so much from it.”