Error Correction as the Methodology of Cybernetics

Discussion

Adrian Lahoud:

"At MIT, on a miniscule military budget, Norbert Weiner led research into the mathematics and circuit boards that would eventually help to automate anti-aircraft fire. The achievement was as conceptual as it was technical, a re-imagining of the method by which a highly maneuverable fighter and its pilot could be fired at, with the projectile anticipating the future position of the target. The design of the mechanism had to reconcile meteorological factors such as wind with human cunning and be able to outsmart both. Wiener’s research arrived at a time in which the idea of large-scale computational modelling had begun to take hold in many areas, almost exclusively evolving from the war effort and the attempt to build a systematic basis for strategic decision-making. Though Weiner set the incalculability of nature against the calculus of man, what held the two together and ties cybernetics to the eighteenth Century is the fundamental commitment to understanding human populations as unknowable in ways that resonated with the unknowability of nature, and thus to open the possibility of re-inscribing human interaction either socially or economically within a specific kind of calculus, in this case, the mathematics of error correction. The cybernetic black box operated at the very limits of the known, the very idea of a cybernetic control mechanism — in that it posed the correlation between the behavior of an open system and the tracking of that system in terms of error correction — attempted to collapse the ontological into the epistemological with only the latency of the feedback loop to separate them (Galison1994,228)."

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