Norbert Weiner

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Norbert Weiner Cybernetics

• LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media
• Fall 2005
• Ian Bogost

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Norbert Weiner

• American mathematician, 1894 - 1964
• Entered Tufts University at age 11. Completed
  studies at 14 and attended Harvard and Cornell.
  Received a Ph.D. from Harvard at age 18.
• Worked on Ballistics during WWII, and
  specifically synchronized control of weaponry
  systems (gunnery management.
• This led to insights in communications and
  eventually led to his interest in Cybernetics.
• The classic absentminded professor

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Cybernetics

• 1948 book Cybernetics, or control and
  communication in the animal and machine
• From the Greek kybernêtês steersman, rudder,
  governor
• Logic, Neurology, and Electronic Networks
• Not related to Cyborgs

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Cybernetics

• The relations between parts of a system
• Information, Feedback, Control
• The intrinsic relationship between the observer
  and the system
• The limits of what we know

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Information, Control, Feedback

• Information as any stimulus, data, or content
  that can be read by an agent.
• Information is often described as a
  representational flow
• Control the agent acting upon another part of
  the system
• Feedback the thing controlled provides a
  relation to the controller

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Feedback

• Circular relations that regulate a system
• Leads to emergent self-organization
• Goals regulated by positive or negative feedback
• Systems map an environment back onto themselves
• Complex, adaptive, self-regulating systems

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Positive Feedback

• Produces cumulative effects
• Divergence a trend toward zero or toward
  infinity
• The snowball effect
• Chain reactions (dominoes, nuclear weapons),
  population, compound interest, cancer

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Negative Feedback

• Oscillation around an ideal
• Self-determination (the ecosystem, the cell)
• Designed determination (servomechanisms
• Goal seeking behavior (thermostats, toilet tanks,
  non-Norman Doors)

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Don Norman again

• Visibility
• Actions should be immediately obvious
• Feedback
• Results should be immediately obvious
• Designing for Error
• Progress toward desired results should be
  oriented toward human expectations without
  resorting to failure
• In cybernetic terms negative feedback equilibria
  from visual, audible, or tactile information
  flows
• Approximations toward desired goals
• Decision Networks

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Weiner Liberal Humanist?

• Liberal humanist values
• The rational self
• Autonomy and freedom
• Agency
• Enlightened self-interest
• Men, Machines, and the World About
• Address to physicians in 1954
• The Automatic Factory
• Computers can take over many thinking processes
• Humans must not let computers become their masters

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The Automatic Factory

• Ultra-Rapid Computing Machine
• Functions like a brain
• Artificial sense organs would regulate the
  environment, like so many thermostats
• Hardware replaces the sense organs of the
  blue-collar worker
• Computer calculations replace the judgments of
  the white-collar worker
• The unscrupulous get rich at the cost of society
• Fiction or reality?

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Cybernetics vs. Humanism

• War Machine
• Self-correcting radar
• Automated anti-aircraft fire
• Torpedoes, guided missiles
• Systems left to work on their own?
• Adam Smith, The Invisible Hand
• The free market economy
• Healthcare
• Active Participation in a Community
• Still not much of a solution Men must not let
  machines take over
• Gentlemen, when we get into trouble with the
  machine, we cannot talk the machine back into the
  bottle