THECYBERNETICS MOVEMENT
(essay)
THE ORIGIN OF CYBERNETICS
Cybernetics as a field of scientific activityin the United States began in the years after World War II. Between 1946 and1953 the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of conferences in New YorkCity on the subject of "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological andSocial Systems. "The chair of the conferences was Warren McCulloch of MIT. Onlythe last five conferences were recorded in written proceedings. These have nowbeen republished (Pias, 2004). After Norbert Wiener published his book Cyberneticsin 1948, Heinz von Foerster suggested that the name of the conferences be changedto "Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mec
hanisms in Biological and SocialSystems. "In this way the meetings became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics.
In subsequent years cybernetics influenced many academic fields- Computer science, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics,management, family therapy, political science, sociology, biology, psychology, epistemology,music, etc. Cybernetics has been defined in many ways: as control and communicationin animals, machines, and social systems; as a general theory of regulation; asthe art of effective organization; as the art of constructing defensible metaphors;etc. The term "cybernetics" has been associated with many stimulating conferences,yet cybernetics has not thrived as an organized scientific field within Americanuniversities. Although a few cybernetics programs were established on U. S. campuses,these programs usually did not survive the retirement or death of their founder.
Relative to other academic societies the meetings on cyberneticstended to have more than the usual controversy, probably due to the wide varietyof disciplines represented by those in attendance. Indeed Margaret Mead wrote anarticle, "Cybernetics of Cybernetics," in the proceedings of the first conferenceof the American Society for Cybernetics, in which she suggested that cyberneticiansshould apply their knowledge of communication to how they communicate with eachother. (Mead, 1968)
INTERPRETATIONSOF CYBERNETICS
Not everyone originally connected with cybernetics continuedto use the term:
1.The cyberneticsof Allen Turing and John von Neumann became computer science, AI, and robotics.Turing formulated the concept of a Universal Turing Machine - a mathematical descriptionof a computational device. He also devised the Turing test - a way of determiningwhether a computer program displays "artificial intelligence." The related professionalsocieties are the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Associationfor Artificial Intelligence.
2.NorbertWiener's cybernetics became part of electrical engineering. This branch of cyberneticsincludes control mechanisms from thermostats to automated assembly lines. The Instituteof Electrical and Electronics Engineers, including the Systems, Man, and CyberneticsSociety, is the main professional society. The principal concern is systems engineering.
3.WarrenMcCulloch's cybernetics became "second order cybernetics." McCulloch chaired theMacy Foundation conferences. He sought to understand the functioning of the nervoussystem and thereby the operation of the brain and the mind. The American Societyfor Cybernetics has continued this tradition. It is the only one of the threegroups that seeks to promote cybernetics as a transdisciplinary field.
Other, smaller groups can also be identified. For example, acontrol systems group within psychology was generated by the work of William Powers(1973). Biofeedback or neurofeedback is a subject of investigation by researchersin medicine and psychology. The Santa Fe Institute has developed simulation methodsbased on the idea of ​​cellular automata.
This paper recounts about sixty years of the history of the cyberneticsmovement in the United States, divided into five year intervals. The focus willbe on the third group, McCulloch's cybernetics.
EARLY1940S
In 1943 two landmark papers were published. Warren McCulloch andWalter Pitts wrote, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity."(McCulloch and Pitts, 1943) This article sought to understand how a network ofneurons functions so that we experience what we call "an idea." They presentedtheir explanation in mathematical form.
Arthuro Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow published,"Behavior, Purpose, Teleology." (Rosenblueth, et al., 1943) They observed behavior,which they interpreted as purposeful, and then sought to explain how this phenomenoncould happen without teleology, using only Aristotle's efficient cause. Also inthe early 1940s Wiener worked on a radar-guided anti-aircraft gun.
LATE 1940S
In the late 1940s the early Macy Conferences were held in NewYork City. They were attended by scientists including Norbert Wiener, Julian Bigelow,John von Neumann, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson., Ross Ashby, Grey Walter, andHeinz von Foerster. By 1949 three key books were published: Wiener's Cybernetics:Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Von Neumann's and Morgenstern'sTheory of Games and Economic Behavior, and Shannon's and Weaver's, The MathematicalTheory of Communication. These three books defined a new science of informationand regulation.
EARLY1950S
In the early 1950s more Macy conferences were held. This timeproceedings were published with Heinz von Foerster as editor. Meanwhile the firstcommercial computers were manufactured.
LATE1950S
In the 1950s the CIA was concerned about the possibility ofbrain-washing and mind control. Under the code name MKUltra experiments withLSD and other drugs were conducted at Harvard University and elsewhere. (Marks,1978) Some of the money for this research was channeled through the Macy Foundation.In one incident, a CIA employee was given LSD without his knowledge. Apparentlyhe thought he was going mad and dove out a window of a hotel in New York City. TedKaczynski, the Unabomber, when he was a student at Harvard, was an experimentalsubject of these mind control experiments. (Chase, 2003)
Early checkers-playing programs were written and raised thepossibility of artificial intelligence. In 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth Universitypeople interested in studying the brain and people interested in creating computerprograms parted ways. Thereafter the people interested in cybernetics and the peopleinterested in artificial intelligence had little interaction.
Following a sabbatical year working with Arthuro Rosenblueth andWarren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster founded the Biological Computer Laboratoryat the University of Illinois.
EARLY 1960S
In the early 1960s several conferences on self-organizing systemswere held, one of them at the University of Illinois's Allerton Park. (Von Foersterand Zopf, 1962) As a result of an invitation made at this conference, Ross Ashbymoved from England to Illinois. The work on self-organizing systems was a forerunnerto the field of study now called "complexity."
Although the Macy Foundation Conferences ended in 1953, the AmericanSociety for Cybernetics (ASC) was not founded until 1964. This seems rather late.Actually the founding of the ASC was in part the result of the Cold War. Duringthe Presidential campaign in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, there wastalk about a "missile gap" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Notlong thereafter there began to be talk of a "cybernetics gap." Some people inthe Soviet Union thought cybernetics would provide the theory they needed to operatetheir centrally planned econ...
