Cybernetics History
* Book: Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetics History. Thomas Rid.
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Description
"“who doesn't love a book that talks about the HAL9000, Arthur C. Clarke, Playboy articles, Omni magazine, AT-ATs, Terminator, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word “robot”), Blade Runner, Whole Earth Catalog, Mary Pranksters and acid trips, the counterculture of San Francisco, and finally, finally, lets us all quote the real origins of that much-maligned term "cyber." Rise of the Machines ... covers it all, including the arts, literature, and trends in pop culture.
Thomas Rid, is a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the author of Cyber War Will Not Take Place and War and Media Operations. Professor Rid's research is extensive as he takes us through the history of cybernetics, the merging of man and machine starting with cybernetics foundations in Norbert Weiner's writings in the 1940s and moving through each subsequent decade, including the West Coast techno-libertarians' addition to the theory, ending with an extensive look at what Rid calls the first cyberwar.”
(https://icdt.osu.edu/rise-machines-cybernetics-history)
Review
Bob Clark:
"The author, Thomas Rid, is a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the author of Cyber War Will Not Take Place and War and Media Operations. Professor Rid's research is extensive as he takes us through the history of cybernetics, the merging of man and machine starting with cybernetics foundations in Norbert Weiner's writings in the 1940s and moving through each subsequent decade, including the West Coast techno-libertarians' addition to the theory, ending with an extensive look at what Rid calls the first cyberwar.
...
Rid builds the book’s narrative through eight main chapters that are organized chronologically: Automation, Organisms, Culture, Space, Anarchy and War. Cybernetics found its beginnings in Norbert Wiener’s foundational Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1949) that became improbable bestsellers. Using this as a launching point, Rid looks at cybernetics through the decades to include not only the technological advances but also the philosophical developments dealing with advances in merging machines with humans. Others mentioned, who come and go along the way, include John von Neumann, Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, Timothy Leary and Jaron Lanier.
Developed from the mind of MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision looked at the merging of man with the future of machines. This need to combine man and machine to improve our defenses and man's capability to fight looks at the early advances in war-fighting capabilities, not only man becoming engaged with various machines but also computer systems developed, such as our air defense system SAGE – one would say, the predecessor to NORAD.
The 50s and early 60s see the same focus, making technology that can increase man's power and strength to include fighting devices developed for the war in Vietnam and walking machines that never got past prototypes but preceded the AT-ATs of Star Wars. Ultimately cybernetics finds two competing factions: some seeking to make a better world – Bay Area denizens/libertarians hoping for a new unregulated and uncontrolled digital space – and some seeking to control it (i.e., Washington, DC).
In the 60s and 70s the technology side of the cybernetics movements, changes with the Bay Area’s introduction into drugs, rock and computers. Rid details the rise of this movement including the numerous influencers from the West Coast, including the birth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization for defending civil liberties in the digital world.
As the Bay Area movement subsides, the 80s did bring us Gibson's cyberpunks and "Rid takes us back inside the green machine — the military, specifically the U.S. Department of Defense, aligning the precepts of the AirLand Battle that was supposed to defeat Warsaw Pact tank armies in the 1980s and the post-Desert Storm revolution of military affairs with cybernetic arts of war." We also see the rise of unfulfilled promises of cool "virtual reality" devices, the prototypes of which were clunky at best and looked like "Dark Helmet" from Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. And let us not forget what the 90s brought us, of course: the crypto wars and introduction of cypherpunks.
Finally, Rid finishes up with a topic near and dear to his heart and extensively researched: moonlight maze, as many U.S. government folks called the first state-on-state cyberwar. (Cyber-espionage is what it should have been classified.) Ironically Matt Kirschenbaum compares Rid's discussion on this subject with Fred Kaplan's in Dark Territory, also reviewed by me and on the Canon website. Kirschenbaum believes Rid presents this information much more deeply than Kaplan. And while I know Rid's research is extensive, I thought both covered it equally well with Kaplan painting the Russian's actions much better. Then again, I think it fit better into Kaplan's book and was treated appropriately in Rid's.”
(https://icdt.osu.edu/rise-machines-cybernetics-history)
Discussion
Phases in Cybernetic Modelling
Ron Eglash:
"This article categorizes ... shifts in terms of three historical phases:
(1) modern cybernetics, focused on digital hierarchical systems, which reached its high point in the late 1960s;
(2) transitional postmodern cybernetics, focused on analogue decentralized systems, which started in the late 1970s; and
(3) stable postmodern cybernetics, based on a synthesis between the analogue/digital and centralized/decentralized oppositions, which started in the late 1980s."
(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248996254_Cybernetics_and_American_youth_subculture?)
More information
More books about the History of Cybernetics
- N. Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1999.
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000. A revised paperback edition is about to be published by the MIT Press under the title On the Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind (2008).
In French:
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, L’essor de la première cybernétique (1943-1953), Paris, Ecole Polytechnique, Cahiers du CREA, 7, 1985.
- Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Aux origines des sciences cognitives, Paris, La Découverte, 1994.