IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 21
masterful historian who knows his
way around archives and among
the ways of researchers, and he
explores the many meanings and
ramifications of the cybernetics
concept from its birth (Wiener
himself coined the word) to the
1980s, by which time most of the
early participants had either died
or returned to their respective traditional disciplines.
If the story can be said to have
main characters, there are two:
Wiener, a child prodigy and later an
academic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his industrial-research counterpart, Claude
Shannon, who worked for Bell Laboratories. Both were mathematicians
by training, and both were profoundly influenced by the defense work
they were called upon to do during World War II. Wiener contributed
to the development of automatic
fire-control systems for anti-aircraft
weapons. Shannon, working on
secret wartime communications
systems at Bell Labs, was inspired
by those problems to develop what
came to be known as information
theory, and Wiener developed similar ideas at about the same time.
But what they did with their
respective discoveries could not
have been more different. Shannon
published his work in his seminal
1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory
of Communication" which is widely
regarded as marking the foundation of the discipline of information
theory. Shannon's focus was narrow
and technical - to him, the content of a message was completely
irrelevant. All that mattered was
its mathematical characteristics,
which allowed a communications
system designer to know certain
things about how accurately the signal carrying the information could
be transmitted.
Wiener, on the other hand,
had bigger plans for his ideas.
june 2016
Essentially, a cybernetic system
was any system that used information about its output to control
itself in a feedback loop. This sort
of behavior is obvious in a simple
control loop such as a household
thermostat that controls a heating
system. In his 1948 book Cybernetics, Wiener claimed that the
cybernetic viewpoint applied not
only to nuts-and-bolts hardware,
but also to living things ranging
from simple cells all the way up to
human beings. Possibly no one was
more surprised than Wiener himself when his rather mathematically
dense book became a best-seller,
with over 22 000 copies sold by the
end of 1949. Kline attributes some
of these sales to what he calls the
"Hawking effect," referring to the
popularity of physicist Stephen
Hawking's A Brief History of Time,
which was much more widely purchased than read.
Whether or not buyers of Wiener's book actually read it, its
popularity quick ly established
the term "cybernetics" as a new
buzz word that attracted both
researchers and funding to the
interdisciplinary work that the concept encouraged. When Wiener
energetically promoted his concepts and wrote a second book
aimed at a more popular audience,
he unleashed a chain of events
that eventually went in directions
he never anticipated. In particular, several prominent researchers
in the social sciences took up the
cybernetics cause in ways that Wiener eventually disapproved of.
From that point on, despite
K line's effor ts to keep things
orderly, the tale grows increasingly
complex. To deal with the cybernetics heyday of the 1950s, Kline
book's has chapters entitled "The
Cybernetics Craze," "The Information Bandwagon," "Humans as
Machines," "Machines as Human,"
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
and finally, "Cybernetics in Crisis."
A bewildering cast of characters
enter - Warren Weaver, a director
at the Rockefeller Foundation who
not only did important research
on his own but played a crucial
role in funding information-theory
research as applied to language
translation; Herber t Simon, a
well-known social scientist who
struggled to apply cybernetics
principles to his field; and a number of individuals well known for
their work in other fields, ranging
from Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Denis Gabor to Whole Earth
Catalog author Stewart Brand and
anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Among other things, The Cybernetics Moment is a fascinating
study in how institutional support
in the form of grants by both private foundations and the thennew National Science Foundation
(established in 1950) were critical
in forming (or not forming) new
disciplines, as well as encouraging new interactions among established disciplines.
Most researchers who have
depended on external funding are
familiar with the fact that funding
tends to follow trends, almost like
clothing fashions. From Kline's
evidence, it appears that grant
proposals that mentioned cybernetics were in great favor in the
1950s, and he traces numerous
connections among resea rchers,
foundation officers, and government figures who supported projects in many disciplines, all related
to cybernetics in some way.
His other primary source for
what was going on in the field is
professional journals, including
those devoted primarily to cybernetics itself. The American Society
for Cybernetics was not founded
until 1964, by which time it was
clear to many that the term had
been overused. Many attempts to
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