Cybernetics

28:46But this constant comparison between machines and animals in cybernetics, where they seem to assume that animals and machines function in the same way, isn't there something specific about the human brain, which is it's not entirely rational? It doesn't follow logical patterns. so the cyberneticians would say absolutely we are giving you a science that describes living and non-living thinking non-thinking entities all in the same framework okay so they were really deeply interested in breaking down those boundaries between thinking and non-thinking living and non-living and of course this upset people there are people in the 1940s and 50s same time as when Turing was working when Grey Walter was displaying his tortoises when Norbert Wiener was publishing cybernetics who were deeply deeply upset by this idea there might be something troubling because it was suggesting that there wasn't anything unique about the human mind that you could recreate the human mind in machines and that seemed deeply, deeply threatening.

30:07So even something like the friendly tortoises would provoke actually quite disquiet and denunciation even on the BBC. Heaven for fans. Greywater gave talks on the BBC and very heavyweight respondents came in and said, you're talking nonsense. I would say pessimistic optimism might be the right term. I mean, that might be the right term for the age. Like contemporary thinkers in science technology studies that are critically thinking, you know, don't want to be technophobic and want to be more, you know, techno positive, shall we say, are saying, you know, there's a silver lining behind this whole de-centering, making humans equivalent to machines and animals and everything else.

30:57And that is that indeed that might actually reconfigure how we think about ourselves. And there might actually be an opportunity, new opportunities to work with our technologies that they may have possibilities to break certain ideas about, say, biological determinism or sort of social order as it was beforehand. And obviously these are very challenging technologies. But cyberneticians themselves, I would totally agree with John. Like they, you know, at one point Warren McCullough says to another very famous mathematician, John von Neumann, who kind of constructed the digital computer and did all the math for the bomb.

31:44And he's in a kind of conversation about whether machines could become autonomous, kind of pre-conversation about artificial general intelligence, if you will. So McCullough said about the neural net, he said, I think what we did and did fairly well is build a brain if only it were to go psychotic. And this is a quote, OK? I'm just quoting pretty much. What did he mean by psychotic in this case? What he meant, and it's a fundamental problem for computing actually in general and for neural networks as we all know they have a problem with causality. We know that large language models, for example, can't really assign how they learned.

32:24They just kind of replicate or create an end point, but they have a problem with time and space, in short. Machines can't tell, for example, if the data is new or if it's retrieved from memory. And in order to get the math and the logic of the neural net to work, you basically had to evacuate time. And this is an ongoing issue. But aside from the theory of it, I also want to mention that a very big part of cybernetics and things like game theory was the idea that human beings don't make good decisions. And therefore they need computers. They need mathematical and rational tools because we're not rational.

33:06But when you talk about the psychosis, is that, and you've mentioned large language models, is that the same as what we now understand to be hallucinations of large language models? It can be sometimes. I mean, a lot of times what we call hallucination might also just be sycophony, the machine generating response it thinks you want. But hallucination also is a key feature of this problem where machines are feeding back on the same data to a point where they're no longer capable of generating, let's say, an answer that fits the real world, for lack of a better word. So cybernetics during the 1950s and early 60s seems to turn up everywhere.

33:55It's not just in matters military. It's in sociology. It's in anthropology and so on. Jacob, how do we then get from, you know, the issue of the anti-aircraft gun, for example, to the sort of bureaucratic cybernetics of the post office? Tell us about the post office and why cybernetics was important to it. Yeah, so cybernetics isn't even just in science, right? It goes beyond science to business, to organizations, to governments, because a lot of the people working with cybernetics, they're not necessarily working on cutting edge science, innovations, AI, military research. They're working in more prosaic settings like large organizations.

34:38There's a foundational conference for artificial intelligence that happens in Teddington here in London at the National Physical Laboratory in 1958 called Mechanization of Thought Processes. But one of the interesting papers given there is a paper called To What Extent Can Administration Be Mechanized? And that's given by a British electrical engineer, James Merriman, who goes on to become the chief engineer of the post office. and the post office at the time ran Britain's telecommunications infrastructure. And Merriman and his engineers paid close attention to cybernetics. Merriman was at these conferences, his engineers went to symposia on cybernetics and information theory at Imperial College in London and they were trying to think about how can you apply cybernetics to a large organisation like the post office, which at the time was one of Britain's largest employers, but also had a big complex electrical network of telecom lines that sent telephone messages, telegraph messages, and so on.

35:38And they arrive at this vision of what they call a self-healing, self-governing network, that you could use cybernetics and kind of cybernetic theories to think about how you could embed computers into the network to control and organize all of the messages that are sent around the network, but to also organize all of the people that work for that network, tell them where to go, what they need to repair, where they're going to be working each day, and so on. And it leads to this statement that Merriman makes, and he says, information and control, which is a reference to cybernetics, it's one of the leading cybernetics journals at the time, he says, information and control is fundamental to the management of any large organization.

36:18So a lot of people at the time, they're not just thinking about cybernetics in these cutting-edge applications, they're also thinking about how it can be applied to large bureaucratic organisations. So when they're looking at the telephone exchange, what do they see? So at this point in time, a lot of telephone exchanges, which are what, you know, routes your call from one place to another, right? If you're in London and you're calling Edinburgh, it's not just a direct line, it has to go through various telephone exchanges to route the call from London to Edinburgh. And this is also the time where they're thinking about, okay, how can we computerize these telephone exchanges?

36:49How can we put computers in them to route all the traffic for us? And this lends itself to this idea of this self-governing, self-healing network, because if one communications link becomes disused or breaks down or something, the computers can reroute the call via another set of telephone exchanges. So it's, again, this kind of responsive system of feedback, thinking that, okay, that route isn't working, So we will update and regulate the system so we can find another route using these cybernetic computerized telephone exchanges. So there was another example of this, quite a memorable one, John, in Chile.

37:26Tell us about Project Cybersyn and what happened to it. So there's another British cybernetician called Stafford Beer, who is another very interesting, slightly eccentric figure, slightly an outsider figure, who has an epiphany when he reads Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics, thinks this is a clue to how to understand organisations. briefly he's employed by united steel in sheffield he proposes to reinvent the steel industry on cybernetics terms they show him the door he then does management consultancy for a bit and then he gets a call from chile and chile which had a long history of democratic government had recently elected Salvador Allende, a socialist who had nationalized parts of the Chilean economy and wanted to think about how to manage all these new big organizations that the Chilean state now had to look after.

38:35And they'd heard of cybernetics and they'd heard of Stafford Beer, who had published on management cybernetics and said, come to Chile. You can rearrange the state for us. and he joined this Chilean team, and together they produced this extraordinary plan, partly implemented, which would gather information from telex lines from around the country, gathering them together at a central control room. And this control room, I do encourage people to look it up online. Project CyberSyn stands for Cybernetic Synergy. The control room looks a little bit like the bridge on Star Trek on the USS Enterprise.

39:23It does a lot. It has these extraordinary chairs. You're surrounded by panels and flashing lights. But essentially, this was meant to be machines and humans working together, going back and forth, interacting with each other in order to make better decisions at the centre of a new cybernetic socialist country. So there's real ambition to cybernetics. Arete, can you tell us about smart cities, which people are talking about smart cities now all the time. Can you tell us about cybernetics and smart cities? Yeah, you know, cybernetics, as everyone here has already suggested, was a really compelling idea.

40:10And it spread like, I don't know, a good meme. It was very popular. And I think part of the popularity was the kind of new way of imagining organizational management at scale. And it was countries, as we just suggested, but it was also cities at MIT, which had a huge urban planning department. A lot of people there, particularly a couple of planners, one of them named Kevin Lynch, were really influenced by these ideas. But it also had a huge influence on people in ecology and ecosystems management. So individuals like the Odom brothers, who had been working with the atomic tests in the Marshall Islands, started tracing, for example, radiation moving through the ecosystem in the little fish and all the stuff.

41:00Because radiation makes a really good visualization tool. You can really trace it, the nitrogen and carbon cycles. And they started thinking about these nitrogen and carbon cycles as feedback loops and in terms of information and communication too, which goes to show you how widely these ideas were kind of interpreted. And the reason I'm bringing ecology is because it was a close integration to how people were thinking about urban systems and environmental systems. And the fact that you could manage an environment and an urban system with the same tools, the same idea, if you could map all the kind of feedback loops and flow, you could turn everything into a flow chart, you could plan better.

41:44You could manage the ecosystem better or the city. And so there was a lot of interchange between the two. And people like Buckminster Fuller, who's a really prominent kind of technologist and futurist, started imagining cities like New York City as sort of these metabolic systems. And eventually this went all the way up to the planet in a famous report called Limits to Growth in the 1970s that started the contemporary environmental movement and was an effort to computationally model all the world's systems. It's environmental one and human ones, and try to understand the impact of human behavior on the planet.

42:23So again, incredibly ambitious. And tell us a bit more, Jacob, about how it's used in climate theory later on, particularly here in Britain. So as Aritz mentioned, cybernetics influences ecological theory. A somewhat controversial ecological theory that it influences is the Gaia hypothesis. And that's promoted by a British scientist, James Lovelock, and an American microbiologist, Lynn Margulis. And the Gaia hypothesis states that all of the organisms on the planet kind of exist in this network of feedback loops that exist to kind of keep the Earth at a stable, kind of habitable condition, right?

43:01So they maintain the temperature, the humidity, the oxygen levels, and so on in a kind of habitable zone. So in other words, life maintains the Earth so that the Earth can sustain life. And that's controversial, A, because it's kind of too grand to prove, but B, because some people have used it to kind of claim that perhaps the Earth could resist climate change, right? It'll stay in a habitable zone. And when Lovelock first thinks about Guy Theory, he's not thinking about climate change. He's thinking about cybernetics. He speculates about a biological cybernetic system that will exist to keep an entire planet's physical and chemical systems in a habitable zone.

43:41One of the interesting things, and I think this also touches on how and why cybernetics begins to disappear, is Lovelock and Gaia theory become quite popular amongst more countercultural theorists of the environment. So Lovelock joins an association called the Lindisfarne Association, which is a New Age utopian group where he meets other theorists of energy and ecology and, you know, come up with all of these cybernetic utopian theories of kind of self -stabilizing planetary systems. And he publishes about Gaia in a countercultural journal called Co-Evolution Quarterly, which is read by many other cyberneticians, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, for example, also popular amongst the counterculture.

44:23And these countercultural cyberneticians who are reading about Gaia theory really use themselves as a platform to elevate Gaia into this new ecological theory. But at the same time, it becomes tinged with this countercultural kind of vibe that begins to sap its kind of scientific legitimacy amongst the self-perceived serious scientists who want cybernetics to become a serious field. John, these days we don't hear much talk about cybernetics. it seems to have dissipated but what are its main legacies what what's important about cybernetics today so i think it's fair to say that throughout the history of cybernetics there have there's been opposition it's claimed too much it claims that humans animals machines are all equivalent this upsets people and when it gets associated with radical politics and countercultural ideas for some people this is this is too much so it's true to say that cybernetics as a branch of science i think dwindles in many areas but there are legacies in a way it's gone from deep secrecy from the war to everywhere within years that's from in the 1940s now it's almost apparently nowhere we don't hear this term cybernetics but in fact it is in it is everywhere is everywhere in the way we talk about ai for example just as norble wiener in the book human use of human beings warns against the automatic factory and says it's going to lead to mass automation and unemployment and devastating consequences for society, yet it has these fantastic opportunities if only we adopt the tool properly.

46:12Do you recognise that kind of way of talking? It's our way of talking about AI. The talk about whether or not it's conscious or not, the LLMs and the idea that we might be releasing machine consciousnesses into the world, this is precisely the language of Norbert Wiener and the warnings so the whole way we've ended up talking about information and information in society and big organizations and the dangers of science and technology this comes out of this language about AI from the 1940s a way of talking about technology so one of its legacies is in some ways a rather unhelpful way of talking about technology that only has these extremes of abundance and a world of leisure or world destruction and mass unemployment and worse, right?

47:11And we're trapped into ways of talking about machines being conscious in a way that is frankly unhelpful. So one of the legacies, unfortunately, is I think a style of talking about technology. My thanks to Jacob Ward, John Egar and Areet Halpen. Next week, fall in for the Radetzky March. That's the life and works of Josef Roth, a master of Central European literature. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. OK, so now we can do the podcast bit where we relax a little. Um, first of all, there's one thing that I wanted to ask.

47:55When I was reading about this, when you were talking about this, there was one person I kept thinking about, and that was Marshall McLuhan. So do any of you have any thoughts about how important this was for McLuhan's work, the sociologist and communications theorist, and in particular, The Medium is the Message, which seems to somehow be intrinsic to cybernetics. A read. I mean, I can say that it was extremely influential because I think people have to remember that at the time, cybernetics was the kind of language for computing. I think John already mentioned that it really established a way of thinking about media and thinking about technology.

48:39It was also incredibly influential to many of the artistic and avant-garde kind of milieus that McLuhan often engaged with. And also because cybernetics was so invested in making it not just about computers. You know, one of the most remarkable things about this movement is the way it moves into modeling social systems, brains, humans, that really very quickly established that idea that the medium is indeed the message because the medium is anything. It doesn't just have to be digital. mcclurean's also got this idea of media technologies being extensions of the human yeah right so there's a sort of seamlessness back and forth between between the machine and the human in mcclurean's way of talking which i think is has got a cybernetic feel about it for sure the other thing is i think like a lot of cyberneticians marsh mcclurean is at that sort of edge of intellectual disrespectability and is also extremely exciting right there's something in common with a lot of cyberneticians and someone like Marshall McLuhan, as these intellectual figures who are constantly surprising and challenging and going where you don't think you should go, which is both exciting, but also slightly upsetting.

50:03And I think that just also points to, again, one of the reasons cybernetics begins to fracture a little bit. You know, for example, when it comes to information, right, one of the key debates in cybernetics is, do we think of information as purely kind of something that can be mathematically calculated or are we thinking about semantics, how much meaning information has, which is very interesting to linguists, for example, but people like Claude Channon don't want it to go in that direction. And so when you have characters like McLuhan or in another direction, Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, for example, who really wants to push cybernetics into a completely kind of different direction, thinking about the relationship between the human mind and nature and ecology, that again, these figures like McLuhan, like Bateson, who are pushing cybernetics further and further, then the center cannot hold.

50:48I do also want to mention the Cold War elements. Cybernetics, in many accounts, also began losing its luster because of its appeal to socialist and communist causes. Not just the cyberscene example, which is actually a potent example of an alternative visions of cybernetics. There was also the Soviet cybernetics. And in fact, the very use of the term artificial intelligence came up to get American military funding outside of the rubric of cybernetics. And some of it is said to be that, you know, Marvin Minsky didn't like Norbert Wiener. But outside of that was probably a more sinister problem that cybernetics did actually have these possibilities of social management and planning, possibly socialist bent.

51:38Just on that to follow up, was there something identifiably specific about Soviet cybernetics that was different from Western cybernetics? Could I? So in the Soviet Union, attitudes of cybernetics undergo a complete reversal. So during the Stalinist years, so when cybernetics is published, cybernetics is defined in a Soviet encyclopedia as a reactionary Western pseudoscience that is all about the control of the worker and to make the worker into an instrument of war, right, and therefore should be rejected. After Khrushchev says Stalin was a bit of a mistake, that was a cult of personality, we should maybe think about something different, this opens the door to scientists in Soviet institutes, research institutes, and suddenly cybernetics and talking in cybernetic terms, cyberspeak, becomes this Soviet enthusiasm for a few years as well.

52:39So it really does mean different things in different countries and at different times. So, Jacob, if I understood rightly what you were saying, cybernetics falls into obscurity because of its own success, because it's taken up by so many disciplines that it no longer has that clear identity that it had at the beginning. Would that roughly be right? I mean, that's one element, certainly, that you have biologists and social scientists who were involved in this cybernetic milieu in the 1950s. And eventually the kind of common ground disappears and they just go back to their own disciplines and integrate cybernetic concepts into their work without explicitly calling it cybernetics.

53:24But there are still people who try to champion the cause of cybernetics and kind of reinvent it for new applications. And that continues in things like systems science. You know, there's societies for systems research that still talk about cybernetics, and that's been called first order cybernetics. So the cybernetics of the closed system where you're trying to engineer and optimize a system. And then there's people who talk about second order cybernetics or second order science. And that's this idea that you have to be aware of your own role as a scientist, as a researcher, as an observer in a cybernetic system.

53:55So it's not just the system is closed with its own feedback loops. There's feedback loops between you and the system. So if you change, the system changes. If the system changes, you change. And this leads to all of these slightly kind of wacky ideas about consciousness transformation. But that continues also to the present day in societies and academics looking at, you know, again, nature and ecology and consciousness and what are the relationship between these things. Arete, anything else you think we've missed out in the discussion that's critical? I think that it's really interesting to also contemplate the place cybernetics has in amending or augmenting flawed human capacities and that kind of imaginary that was really pretty potent.

54:41It comes out in the telephone exchange. It comes out in the idea of game theory, which is like a related science, which is that like, what if people are too emotional and blow up the world? And so we need computers to step in and kind of make better decisions. And it comes out a lot in smart cities in our present as people in the 60s like Buckminster Fuller, but also people at RAND, which was an Air Force funded research institute in Santa Monica, started switching from warfare to welfare and started taking over things like urban management. they increasingly turn to dealing with political problems by saying, let's have a technological solution.

55:25Let's quantify. Let's have data-driven decision-making. Let's add this machinery. And that continues to really inform our attitude to the world maybe today, where a lot of times political decision-making is getting replaced or transformed by computational decision-making. And that sits there at that government question of cybernetics and what the implications of governance are from technology. Jacob, you wanted to come in there. Yeah, I think this point about cybernetics as a decision making tool is really key. And it's something that you see come up in many other things at the time at RAND and elsewhere, looking at cybernetics as a way to think about how can we make decisions better?

56:06How can we optimize systems? There's an overlap with another field, another post-war science that dies away, which is the science of futurology. How can you predict the future using different techniques? And for example, Daniel Bell, the famous American sociologist, he chairs a commission on the year 2000 in the 1960s in the USA. And in his book, The End of Ideology, he talks about how cybernetics is one of these decision sciences which can help build through rational decision making, help us build a utopia. So there's this really this kind of utopia through automated decision tools and cybernetic decision tools and decision sciences.

56:43So finally, there's been a lot of literary speculation about machines and humans and cyborgs. Are we getting to a stage where all of that dystopian vision is actually possibly becoming a reality? John? So in 1952, Kurt Vonnegut published his first novel, Player Piano, in which it's a dystopia all about the terrible effects of automation. And the sort of leader of the whole terrible system is a character called Wiener. so right if you're talking fiction and kurt vonega is one of the very best of the the pessimistic thinkers about our world about war about destruction and about science and technology in the future right from the very start of his work we have norbert weiner and cybernetics i think martha's coming in with an offer of uh i'll take a tea I'd love a cup of tea.

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