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The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future
Abstract
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present. The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cyberneticsâ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
... As a first example, consider the robot 'tortoises' built by the English cybernetician Grey Walter in 1948(Walter 1953, Pickering 2010. The tortoises were small mobile robots which dodged round obstacles while locating and homing in on lights. ...
... Walter ( From a different angle it is interesting to think about another cybernetic machine, the homeostat, built by another British cybernetician, Ross Ashby, also in 1948 (Ashby 1960, Pickering 2010. The homeostat was an electromechanical device that explored its environment (modelled by more homeostats) via the currents it emitted and responded to whatever currents came back to it-another dance of agency. ...
... On the other hand, a focussed interest in self-organisation far from equilibrium would point to a different field of cybernetic exemplars. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask's 'biological computing' project included experimentation on so-called 'threads' and 'whiskers'electrolytic metal dendrites that indeed organised and recreated themselves in farfrom-equilibrium conditions (Pask 1960, Cariani 1993, Pickering 2010. I 15 Froese and Stewart (2010) argue that Maturana's conception of autopoiesis cannot identify what is singular about organisms because of its origins in Ashby's work, which in the end amounted to a general and non-specific theory of everything (Pickering 2010, ch 4). ...
Part I of this essay relates a minimal and primordial concept of agency to be found in science and technology studies to an overall ontology of liveliness. Part II explores the relation between minimal and higher-level conceptions of agency concerning goal-orientedness and adaptation, and moves towards specifically biological concerns via a discussion of cybernetic machines.
... A good example of applying cybernetics to the psychology of teaching and learning, or educational psychology (the focus of this paper) is Gordon Pask's work in understanding learning using intelligent technologies to spur human-human collaboration. These efforts lie at the crosscurrents of educational psychology and computing (Pickering, 2010;Tilak & Glassman, 2022). Educational psychology too, is a transdis-cipline (albeit presently, a more localized one) that brings together the types of thinking exercised in facilitating and designing teaching and learning in both computational and social domains (Graesser, Sabatini, & Li, 2022). ...
... In what came to be known as second-order cybernetics, both the researcher, and the observed system recalibrate activity in a continuous, circular fashion, learning from one another. Scholars like Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, and Margaret Mead were instrumental in kickstarting conversations about this new cybernetics (Pias, 2016); other masters like Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask further championed the cause by applying cybernetics to create technology mediated industrial and educational environments (Pickering, 2010). An example of the application of second-order cybernetics in researching mental models and learning would be redesigning online discussions in a classroom in an ongoing manner on a weekly basis to gauge how learning and reflection change, depending on preferences of students, and insights from an analytical tool, like Social Network Analysis (SNA) (see Tilak, Evans, Wen, & Glassman, 2022b) ( Figure 2); or interviewing students to iteratively design content over four staggered curricular units based on evolving student preferences (Tilak et al., 2023). ...
... Despite these innovative directions that the BCL took to reinvent the state of the art in teaching and learning, the laboratory was defunded in 1974 (Umpleby, 2005) owing to the Mansfield Amendment arising from the Vietnam War, which withdrew funding for research distally related to military efforts. Other events such as the failure of project Cybersyn owing to a military coup in Chile may have also contributed to the sudden decline of second-order cybernetics (Pickering, 2010). ...
This three part paper explores how the approaches of cybernetics (a field investigating how complex systems- brains, individuals, societies and machines navigate their realities) have influenced education and psychology over time. The first part recounts the establishment of first-order cybernetics, and the emergence of an observer driven approach to understanding the adaptation of living systems at the Macy Conferences. I suggest that psychology adopted the computational aspects of cybernetics models, paying attention to figure-ground relationships rather than emergent, integrated relationalities in human learning and adaptation, leading to the popularization of neuropsychological and information processing approaches in the 50s and 60s. The second part outlines emergence and sudden decline of second-order cybernetics through research efforts at the Biological Computer Laboratory, and suggests psychology and education bifurcated from this approach during the Cognitive Revolution, producing social cognitive and cognitivist approaches, direct instruction, and prescribed outcomes for learning and mental models. The third part suggests the aftereffects of the Cognitive Revolution led to (re)interpretation of constructivist approaches through a cognitivist lens by scholars like Jerome Bruner, and outlines current efforts to embrace the ethos of second-order cybernetics in educational and psychological research and treat learners as historical actors constantly evolving in a complex social world.
... A pioneer in the field of electroencephalography (EEG, a technique to measure the electrical activity of the brain via electrodes placed on the scalp), he conducted revolutionary work into the detection of brain tumors via the presence of delta waves, as well as work linking individual differences to variation in alpha, delta, and theta waves. He was also interested in the kinds of altered states of consciousness that could be induced by stroboscopic light ("flicker") and performed some of the first work in "biofeedback" (the use of visual feedback to control one's own brain waves) (see Walter 1953;Pickering 2010 for review). Walter is, however, best known for his work in cybernetics (the science of control systems), where he developed the first biologically inspired robots and initiated the field of behavior-based robotics (Walter 1950(Walter , 1951(Walter , 1953. ...
... The broader discipline of cybernetics itself also spoke to possibility. Unlike American cybernetics, which emerged from military research, the British cyberneticians, of whom Grey Walter was a leading light, were (literally) a less disciplined bunch: more interested in biology and brains than military weapons, they came from a variety of backgrounds; favored dining clubs and informal, relaxed meetings (the Ratio club being the most famous instantiation of this); and mostly pursued cybernetics as enthusiastic amateurs and hobbyists, holding down positions in other fields Pickering 2010). A lack of university departments and dedicated research institutions meant that British cybernetics was always a rather marginal subject: cyberneticians had no way to "reproduce themselves," via their PhD students, nor to direct and sustain the field through time. ...
... Holland (2003) suggests that the tortoise technology may have been too inaccessible to those without a good knowledge of postwar electronics or that his papers and books were too old-fashioned in their tone and stylea deep irony considering their futuristic possibilities. Alternatively, as Pickering (2010) suggests, the fizzling out of Walterstyle robotics may have more to do with the lack of an institutional base and support for cybernetics, rather than any inherent flaws in Walter's approach. One wonders, as Holland (2003Holland ( , pp. 2117Holland ( -2118 does, whether "biologically inspired robotics might have advanced further and faster if his work had not been allowed to fade away quite so fast." ...
Henri Bergson (1859–1941) contributed major philosophical works on time, consciousness, evolution, and morality. His thinking remains central to debates on fundamental issues within philosophy and social science, particular around “process ontology.” Bergson’s work was of enormous influence to early-twentieth-century social science, and has seen a resurgence in the twenty-first century. This is in part due to the reception of Gilles Deleuze’s work, which engaged extensively with Bergson. In this entry, we focus on Bergson’s treatment of the relationship between “the possible” and “the real.” Bergson inverts the Platonic organization of these terms, where the real is constituted by the selection of ideal forms of possible. Bergson argues that this makes it impossible to understand how “unforseeable novelty” might emerge in the world. The possible is instead a “mirage” retrospectively posited as prior to the real. This treatment is part of a broader project of overcoming metaphysical mistakes which consist in seeing one philosophical term as adding fullness and positivity to another. In its place, Bersgson offers an account of life as dynamic, autopoietic emergence. In the final part of the entry we describe how an engagement with Bergson can afford social science approaches to memory, imagination, and lived experience as emergent patternings of life responding to life.
... We're all familiar with enframing and its many darksides. But the poetic, acting-with, stance is much less familiar, and my goal here is to try to bring poiesis to life, to make it imaginable (see also Pickering (2010), where I discuss cybernetics as "ontological theatre", and Scott (1998) on metis). I'm currently writing a book that goes through several examples of poiesis in action, including styles of water management, rewilding, ecosystem restoration, farming, Aboriginal burning and communicating with spirits (Pickering, in preparation;see also Pickering, 2019). ...
... My political project is to map out and connect these examples across different fields as instances of an overall nonmodern paradigm of acting with the world. My book, The Cybernetic Brain(Pickering, 2010), was another part of that project.But to finish I want to think about ontology from a different angle, I find it revealing to connect natural farming to eastern philosophy. I want to think about two key concepts.First, the Chinese idea of shi, which FrançoisJullien (1999) translates as the 'propensity of things'the disposition of things to act in specific ways in specific contexts. ...
In this paper I contrast two systematically different patterns of acting in the world via the concepts of enframing and poiesis. Enframing is the usual stance of dualistic domination that we can associate with the Anthropocene, and I focus here on the contrast class, poiesis. To bring out its key features I discuss a form of natural farming developed in Japan by Masanobu Fukuoka, emphasising the way in which Fukuoka’s poetic approach foregrounds the performative back and forth with nature that I call a dance of agency. I review Fukuoka’s critique of the usefulness of modern science and argue instead that strands of traditional eastern philosophy help us to grasp the poetic alternative.
... We're all familiar with enframing and its many darksides. But the poetic, acting-with, stance is much less familiar, and my goal here is to try to bring poiesis to life, to make it imaginable (see also Pickering (2010), where I discuss cybernetics as "ontological theatre", and Scott (1998) on metis). I'm currently writing a book that goes through several examples of poiesis in action, including styles of water management, rewilding, ecosystem restoration, farming, Aboriginal burning and communicating with spirits (Pickering, in preparation;see also Pickering, 2019). ...
... My political project is to map out and connect these examples across different fields as instances of an overall nonmodern paradigm of acting with the world. My book, The Cybernetic Brain(Pickering, 2010), was another part of that project.But to finish I want to think about ontology from a different angle, I find it revealing to connect natural farming to eastern philosophy. I want to think about two key concepts.First, the Chinese idea of shi, which FrançoisJullien (1999) translates as the 'propensity of things'the disposition of things to act in specific ways in specific contexts. ...
... Historians of science and technology have conducted case studies of "reenchanted science" (Harrington, 1996). Examples are the spread of occultism in Victorian science (Owen, 2004;White, 2014), the emergence of a German-speaking science of wholeness in the early decades of the 19 th century (Harrington, 1996;Treitel, 2004), and a range of "groovy sciences" (Kaiser & McCray, 2016)cybernetics in Great Britain (Pickering, 2010) and parapsychology in the United States (Kaiser, 2011) flourishing from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Historical studies frame scientific and public interest in paranormal phenomena and altered states of consciousness as fringe reactions to religious doubts sparked by Enlightenment thinking, uncertainty in times of rapid socio-political changes, and postwar alienation following from the fatal sides of science, technology, and bureaucratic society. ...
... Future research could further examine and interpret the hidden or soctech.spbstu.ru refuted connections between contemplative science and research on psychedelics (Langlitz, 2013), psychoanalysis (Harrington & Dunne, 2015), and cybernetics (Pickering, 2010). This sort of analysis could also be fruitful for other academic fields. ...
In modernity, narratives seem to have lost their magical power to effect changes in the world. Language is generally considered as a system of arbitrary symbols coordinated with aspects of reality. Yet, research in the social studies of science and technology indicates that modern aspirations to exorcise magic co-exist with oppositional pulls towards re-enchantment: feelings of awe and wonder, practices akin to sorcery, searches for moral values, transcendental meaning, and magic words. This study on contemplative science, the neuroscientific, psychological, and clinical study of contemplative practices like mindfulness meditation, sheds light on the enchanting power of historical narratives. Historical narratives are revealed to play an important, but as yet unacknowledged role, in the re-enchantment of brain research. Drawing on historical ethnography, this study analyzes how the contemplative science community narrates history at conferences, commemorative events, and in published textual accounts to valorize this field of research as a project of re-enchantment without destabilizing its scientific legitimacy. First, the folk history of contemplative science is shown to endow the field with enchanting qualities by combining Weberian ideal types of charismatic and rational authority. Second, alternative histories of meditation research are reconstructed and their absence from the official narrative is explained in relation to the charismatic-rational Janus face of contemplative science. Third, contemplative scientists are found to take recourse to history in mobilizing regimes of valuation that help justify their work in light of socio-ethical critiques. The analysis contributes to scholarly discussions on the thesis that language can be considered as technology, having practical effects in the world. In support of this thesis, the argument presented indicates that historical narratives can serve to defend science against critics, attract novice researchers, and build a research community around the allure of modern enchantment.
... A combination of technology and inquiry becomes a modeling facility to guide learning on an exploratory path of conceptual understanding, and organize coherent problem-solving dialogs (Scott, 2021). Early learning technologists such as Gordon Pask followed approaches similar to John Dewey's ideas, and proposed tools allowing ongoing conversations, such as the Cybernetic Theater, which allowed audiences to recreate play plotlines by relaying alternative outcomes to theatrical productions to actors using an electrical device, mediated by an interpreter (Pickering, 2010). The conceptual framework of such devices was used by Pask to create educational technologies such as THOUGHTSTICKER (Pask andKopstein, 1977, Pangaro, 2001), which allowed students to pick concepts related to a particular topic and engage in how and why explanations and demonstrations to iteratively learn ideas through exploratory, collaborative journeys (Wilson and Scott, 2017). ...
Immersive storytelling (IST) is usually conceptualized within the framework of technologically immersive tools such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. While these tools offer some unique features (such as visual fidelity, interactivity, and embodied, first-person perspective), their level of technological immersion (based on the system’s objective qualities) might not directly translate to the psychological immersion experienced by the user. Such tools also tend to require access to digital or financial resources unavailable to many schools. We propose a low-tech alternative approach leveraging storytelling’s power for learning through affordable, accessible, and familiar classroom technology – Google Slides. We used the Participatory Learning framework to generate curricular design principles that aim to create a sense of psychological immersion through active participation in technology-mediated storytelling. In this design case study paper, we describe the design of a 10-day unit on Native American history implemented across nine teachers’ elementary school classrooms in the US. We examine the interplay between pedagogical and technological constraints in the design process, the role of the theoretical framework in the design, and conclude by detailing future directions for research on low-tech immersive storytelling environments.
... En campos especializados del conocimiento tan distintos como sociología y psicología (Favaretto et al., 2020), o ingeniería y ciencias de la computación (De Mauro et al., 2015), esta manera de definir al big data convive con otras que, en lugar de referir a propiedades y atributos, buscan poner el foco en los procesos prácticos, sociales y tecnológicos que le dan origen y sentido. Por su parte, la noción de "inteligencia artificial" surge en los años 40-50, a partir de los desarrollos pioneros de la cibernética en la que confluyeron matemáticos y psiquiatras de la talla de Ross Ashby o Norbert Wiener, y discípulos como Alan Turing, cuyo trabajo (1950) le ganó el mote de "padre de la inteligencia artificial", que se propusieron modelar y replicar los procesos y las capacidades cognitivas humanas a través de la técnica, desarrollando dispositivos computacionales, matemáticos, mecánicos e incluso biológicos que pudieran tener comportamientos inteligentes (Pickering, 2010;Franklin, 2014). En las décadas siguientes, este esfuerzo tecnológico se ha ido desligando del objetivo científico de modelar la mente humana, orientándose hacia el avance de capacidades mucho más acotadas, tales como las que se persiguen en el campo del aprendizaje automático: reconocimiento de imágenes a partir de patrones, procesamiento del lenguaje natural, construcción de modelos estadísticos y predictivos, entre otros. ...
This work seeks to explore the social representations of big data and artificial intelligence. A survey was carried out with a word association technique, with Argentine university students and recent graduates of different branches of knowledge (N = 335 for big data and 255 for artificial intelligence). We explore the meanings to which both phenomena are associated, the structure of their representation, the similarities and differences between them and with other phenomena, the possible themes that are inferred, and the possible differential positions of the groups. The results indicate the predominance of senses linked to information (big data) and robots (AI), coexisting with positively valued notions, such as knowledge, and with references to negatively valued social problems, such as unemployment and social control.
... A new aspect of the agency of machines, and no doubt organisms, which we could call inscrutability, surfaces here, which I have not seen discussed explicitly in the literature. I think of this as the cybernetic discovery of complexity (Pickering 2010): even a few simple minimal agents acting in relation to one another can generate an effectively indefinite range of performances. 11 From a different angle it is interesting to think about another cybernetic machine, the homeostat, built by another British cybernetician, Ross Ashby, also in 1948 (Ashby 1960;Pickering 2010, Chap. ...
The first part of this essay relates a minimal and primordial concept of agency to be found in science and technology studies to an overall ontology of liveliness. The second part explores the relation between minimal and higher-level conceptions of agency concerning goal-orientedness and adaptation, and moves towards specifically biological concerns via a discussion of cybernetic machines.
... In other words, it is not a given activity itself that is deemed intelligent, but its coordination within an ordered process of production, an algorithm of sorts. As a mediator between theory and practice, the algorithm came to stand for Modern rationality (Totaro and Ninno 2014) and would find new expressions in the cybernetic emphasis on information and feedback as mechanisms of control and communication (Mindell, 2002;Wiener, 1961;Pickering, 2010). ...
Contemporary discourses accompanying the deployment of machine learning tend to fit within a meta-narrative of automation. Whether heralded as inevitable or criticized as reductive, this process of automation tends to be considered as concurrent to technology’s extension in general. By drawing on the social and technical history of machine learning, I would like to suggest that play offers at least one other way of framing machine learning’s development, one that could help foster other expectations and evaluations of machine learning performances. The genealogy of machine learning I will provide draws on certain historical tropes to problematize contemporary debates. I will distinguish two normative paradigms: automation and play. Each one expresses differing, albeit not incompatible values, expectations and objectives when evaluating machine behaviors and their interactions with human ones. Whereas automation pushes us to consider machines as ideally working by themselves, play requires a social and affective engagement whose outcome is always partially unpredictable. It helps account for the relative open-endedness, intractability and recursiveness of machine learning systems embedded in social practices. More specifically, I underline why play provides a sweet spot for thinking about performances such as those we are increasingly seeing in machine learning systems, that combine both rule-following behaviors and forms of improvisation upon those rules. Play includes automaticity as a level of behavior among others. The more general claim I am making is that play gives us a window onto a different history of machine learning and for imagining other forms of social interaction with and through technology.
... I can refer toPickering (2011) for a thorough discussion of the British tradition of cybernetics, whileHayles (2000) presents a relevant critique of the disembodied notion of information in much cybernetic thought. ...
This thesis explores double bass feedback systems, with a focus on the FAAB (feedback-actuated augmented bass)—a self-resonating vibrotactile feedback string bass instrument equipped with onboard DSP. Developing against a background of an extensive acoustic instrumental practice in improvised and experimental music, the thesis examines how salient properties of timbral complexity and performative resistance may be applied in an extended electro-acoustic domain. An analysis and discussion of interaction and human-machine improvisation informed by neocybernetic and enactivist theories of autonomy and interactional asymmetry leads to the development of a conceptual framework for the creation of adaptive signal processing architectures. This framework is applied to the design of a set of algorithms, the behaviours of which are described in the context of performance, improvised as well as composed. The discussion is guided by the conviction that what is often conceived of as digital/material binaries is better understood in a shared performative domain. In the discussion of performance, attention is paid to how the FAAB affords the reconsideration of old—as well as the development of new—instrumental techniques and modes of performance, through the unpredictable, yet largely deterministic behaviour of the instrument. The final chapter of the thesis discusses resistance, mastery, and virtuosity, again in the context of a performance practice with the FAAB. With the instrument eluding traditional notions of performative control, materialist, queer, and decolonial theories are employed in a discussion of precariousness and failure as artistic opportunities particularly
suited to feedback musicianship and human-machine improvisation.
The practice-based contribution of the thesis consists of a set of solo and duo performances
using three different feedback bass configurations. The majority of these highlight the role
of the FAAB in developing a largely improvised solo performance practice in which the
feedback-induced and algorithmically extended behaviour of the instrument affords timbral,
amplitudal, and interactional complexity. The two collaborative works situate the FAAB
within a performance ecology comprised of other performers, compositional scaffolding, and
a set of laptop-based multichannel signal processing algorithms developed in extension of the
embedded DSP of the FAAB. The accompanying DSP library consists of familiar low-level algorithms. Yet, their creative integration with a feedback instrument and the implementation
of an adaptive and largely autonomous high-level digital infrastructure contributes to the
field of feedback signal processing, and can be of value to practitioners beyond the specific
field of feedback.
The identification of instrumental resistance as being intimately tied to the establishment
of interactional asymmetry and instrumental autonomy affects the cultivation of a
performance practice as well as an aesthetic, both of which are grounded in an appreciation
of unmastery and failure. This does not entail the absence of skill or tools for evaluation,
but rather paves the way for the development of aesthetics as well as skillsets that accommodate
the dynamic and precarious ecologies emerging through nonlinear human-machine
relationships.
... A product of research-creation, [RIP]_Montevideo is not an artwork in a conventional sense, and my referencing to it in the context of this article is not to be confused with an illustration or demonstration of the issues discussed. It should rather be seen as a 'stage' or 'experiment', an "ontological theatre" (Pickering 2010) designed to build, observe and This type of strategy is the keystone of research-creation, an approach characterized by "the complex intersection of art practice, theoretical concepts, and research [ … ] an 'event' that creates concepts that problematize. Concepts are not pre-given or known in advance" (Truman and Springgay 2016). ...
Augmented interiors are here to stay, yet their overall capacity to increase well-being remains unclear despite decades of technical improvements and content development. This article highlights the need to design new ecologies of spatial augmentation, grounded in materials vibrancy and able to reconnect us with ourselves, with places, and with time. To move beyond "things that glitter", information overload, and extended automation, augmented interiors ought to bring about new kinds of interior experiences that are not just novel, or more efficient, but transformative. Reflecting on [RIP]_Montevideo, an interactive installation depicting images from urban archives, it highlights the importance of edge qualities in achieving openness, arguing that a shift of focus from content to edges is essential to resolve the conflicting requirements of digitally augmented interiors, between cognition and sensibility.
... In further studies, it is seen as part of the socio-technical (Callon, 2007). In technology, cybernetics examines whether performativity has the potential to enable a new level of interaction among the human and the non-human (Pickering, 2010). By stretching signs to non-linguistic realms as well, deprivileging speech expands performativity to the non-linguistic (Derrida, 1988). ...
One of the negative impacts of the pandemic on creative culture is new limitations imposed on interactive performance in theatrical production. Producers resorted to digitality to explore the potentials of smart staging. A new play titled Brilliant Mind is a case in point for its innovative use of digital alternatives to maintain interactive performativity in what the producers describe as “live theatre in digital landscapes”. The play was digitally performed online in 2021, and members of the audience were allowed to digitally explore parts of the set and interact with characters. This paper examines the play’s use of digital performativity as a form of mediation for pandemic-era theatre by unpacking its digital interactive strategies. The authors offer a close textual and visual analysis of their experience as audience members in addition to employing theatrical principles of psychodrama, as well as concepts of affect theory as an approach to visual communication.
... Suchman, 2002;Lucy Suchman, 2007). We argue, that the above sketched representationalist understandings does not help us in appreciating what Andy Pickering terms a performative understanding of data as something that creates novelty and adds to the world (Pickering, 1995(Pickering, , 2011. Also, and related to refusing ideas about a full or fuller perspective helps remind us that the problem of any data or account is a matter of relation. ...
In this paper, we propose a cosmopolitical approach to, and understanding of, data, based on the work of Isabelle Stengers. This entails appreciating data as constituted through multiple actors and actions, and, accordingly, as something capable of producing unanticipated, surprising consequences. Cosmopolitics helps us think about data, and datafication, as actors in a more-than-human world in ways that transgress a common and widespread perception of data as either neutral, objective and representational or as socially constructed, perspectivist and endowed with human politics. The argument is thus that data and datafication change practices and can bring forth novel layers and qualities of those practices. We explore data through a cosmopolitical approach using two empirical examples generated during 2013-2017, where the authors carried out ethnographic fieldwork in a project on governing and managing healthcare data. We conclude by proposing the term cosmo-data-politics and discuss the implications of this neologism.
... This simply reinforces that once we look at our own looking, we are forever responsible for what we say and what we do. 15 This is Cybernetics -observing something outside ourselves in terms of its purpose -as well as observing ourselves observing in terms of our purpose. Wicked challenges can neither be seen nor mitigated without this awareness and humility. ...
... Aside from the ill-fated Project Cybersyn mentioned earlier and sporadic attempts by Soviet Russia (Kurkovsky West, 2013), the scholarship on empirical cybernetics is lacking. In fact, cybernetics itself has diversified so much and incorporated so many fields it has seemingly faltered as an evidence-based discipline (Pickering, 2010). This truly is a wasted opportunity. ...
Criminology has for some time considered the importance of “flows” in the commission of crime. This article argues that the practices of regulatory agents often fail to consider these flows—flows in information, assets, reputation or technology. Despite considering criminological flows as a discrete field of enquiry, scholars have failed to address what regulatory agents might do or impose on the system of flows to achieve their goals and outcomes. We propose an approach (grounded in the domain of cybernetics and systems studies) which fosters a collaborative and normative approach to bridging the gap when it comes to the criminology of flows, particularly in our increasingly interconnected and digitized future.
... Nüchtern betrachtet umfasste es die damals neuen Techniken der Nachrichtenübermittlung und der Informationsverarbeitung, die Techniken der Regelung und Automatisierung von maschinellen Prozessen und die "technische Kommunikation" 2 mit menschlicher und natürlicher Umwelt mittels Sensor-, Signaloder Bildgebenden Schnittstellentechniken. In der 60-jährigen Geschichte der KI-Forschung veränderten sich die Visionen, Programme und paradigmatischen Siehe zur Geburt der "Hochtechnologie" aus dem Geist der "technischen Kommunikation" (Rammert 1995a: 65-109) und zur Geschichte der Kybernetik am Beispiel ihrer Artefakte (Meister & Lettkemann 2004), Pioniere und Konzepte (Pickering 2011). Produkte immer wieder und mit ihnen die Anreize und Annäherungspunkte für die soziologische Forschung. ...
Dieses 3. Kapitel führt in die Geschichte der soziologischen Forschung und Theoriediskussion zur "Künstlichen Intelligenz" seit 1993 ein. Sie fragt:
3.1 Wann und wie wurden KI-Produkte Gegenstände soziologischer Forschung? "Von programmierten 'Dialogen', automatisierten 'Wissens'-Systemen und verteilten 'Agenten'-Gesellschaften.
3.2 Wer oder was bestimmt Gestalten und Entwicklungen der KI in welcher Weise?
a) Welche Kräfte kommen infrage? "Akteure und Strukturen".
b) Was ist mit Techniken soziologisch gemeint? "Technisierung und soziotechnische Konstellationen".
c) Wie erfolgt das Bestimmen der Konstellationen aus soziologischer Sicht? "Die Macht gestaltenden Handelns und die Selektivität des installierten Designs".
In den folgenden 3 Kapiteln wird exemplarisch an ausgewählten Studien über drei Phasen der Informatisierung demonstriert, welche Erkenntnisse gewonnen wurden:
3.3 Frühe Phase der Computerentwicklung: Gestaltung und Kultivierung in der "Informationsgesellschaft"
3.4 Hochphase wissensbasierter Informatiksysteme in der "Wissensgesellschaft": KI-Vision, Wissenspraxis der Profession und Macht in der Organisation
3.5 Aufbruch zu 'sozionischen' Konstellationen: 'Softbots', 'Verteilte KI' und die hybride 'Gesellschaft der Agenten'.
Schließlich werden im Rückblick die Ergebnisse in Form von Konzepten und Schemata der Handlungs- und Konstellationsanalyse festgehalten und ein Ausblick auf die zukünftige Forschung gegeben.
... Akera (2008) also participated in this line of research by finely reporting on the entangled dynamics of military, industrial, and academic research on computer science during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States that further promoted cyborg discourse, now operating as dominant mindset. The works of Dupuy (2009) and Pickering (2011) on the history of cybernetics also provided important insights about this fragmented and interdisciplinary research group and its progressive homogenization and re-appropriation by contemporary promoters of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. For the case of economics as an academic discipline, Mirowski's impressive work (2002) on the cybernetic roots of today's dominant neoclassical economics is a priceless reference as well. ...
In this paper, we build upon Bruno Latour’s political writings to address the current impasse regarding algorithms in public life. We assert that the increasing difficulties at governing algorithms – be they qualified as “machine learning,” “big data,” or “artificial intelligence” – can be related to their current ontological thinness: Deriving from constricted views on theoretical practices, algorithms’ standard definition as problem-solving computerized methods provides poor grips for affective dissensions. We then emphasize on the role historical and ethnographic studies of algorithms can potentially play in the politicization of algorithms. By both digging into the genealogy of algorithms’ constricted definition and by making their contemporary constitutive relationships more visible, both historical and ethnographic studies can contribute to vascularizing algorithms and making them objects of enlarged disputes. We conclude by giving a flavor of the political potential of the vascularization efforts we call for, using materials from an ethnographic study conducted in a computer science laboratory.
... Here we have what Pickering has called the metastable «performative epistemology» of cybernetics and systems thinking, «a vision of knowledge as part of performance rather than as an external controller of it.» 8 Willats brings to the world his formal invitation sets, these structured enticements as creative calls that provoke participation, but the world will always resist such systematicity. tion through iconography, publication, annotation and communication. ...
In his opening address to the symposium Art Creating Society at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1990, Stephen Willats compelled participants and the audience to contribute their viewpoints on the development of a new vision for art, one that extends its social meaning beyond the institutional territory to which it has traditionally been confined. This statement is an example of his pronounced intention to have his artworks intervene into the functioning of society at large, developing models that provide both critical outlooks and promising perspectives. Willats’ approach is connected to the «interactive communication networks» he creates in contemporary art. He also creates a network between artists and others through the magazine Control he has been publishing since 1969. The magazine’s title should be read in the sense of «agency» and «interaction» and not in the authoritarian sense beloved of the critics of cybernetics, as historians like Andrew Pickering pointed out.
... Early in the twentieth century Andrey Markov (2006) developed an analogue model of the frequencies of word and letter occurrence and succession in Pushkin's poetry. In the immediate post-war period, commensurate with the emergence of computers, Markov processes influenced the development of information theory and cybernetic conceptual and operational experimentation that also drew upon biology, behaviouralism, Chomskian linguistics, and Freudian psychoanalysis ((Edwards, 1996;Halpern, 2015;McCray, 2020;Pickering, 2010). In particular, the modelling of intelligence as a connected network of neurons that would pass along information according to probabilities integrated Markov's statistical approach into a larger architecture of cognition (Halpern, 2015) that anticipated and motivated developments in LLMs and AI over the past decade. ...
Drawing from the resources of psychoanalysis and critical media studies, in this paper we develop an analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated subjects. We argue the intentional fictional projection of subjectivity onto LLMs can yield an alternate frame through which AI behaviour, including its productions of bias and harm, can be analysed. First, we introduce language models, discuss their significance and risks, and outline our case for interpreting model design and outputs with support from psychoanalytic concepts. We trace a brief history of language models, culminating with the releases, in 2022, of systems that realise state-of-the-art natural language processing performance. We engage with one such system, OpenAI's InstructGPT, as a case study, detailing the layers of its construction and conducting exploratory and semi-structured interviews with chatbots. These interviews probe the model's moral imperatives to be helpful, truthful and harmless by design. The model acts, we argue, as the condensation of often competing social desires, articulated through the internet and harvested into training data, which must then be regulated and repressed. This foundational structure can however be redirected via prompting, so that the model comes to identify with, and transfer, its commitments to the immediate human subject before it. In turn, these automated productions of language can lead to the human subject projecting agency upon the model, effecting occasionally further forms of countertransference. We conclude that critical media methods and psychoanalytic theory together offer a productive frame for grasping the powerful new capacities of AI-driven language systems.
Tekst kontekstualizuje realizacje artystyczne zaprezentowane w trakcie przedostatniej edycji Festiwalu Permutacje, który odbył się w Galerii CKiS “Wieża Ciśnień” w czerwcu 2021 w Polsce. Użytymi narzędziami w analizie są narracje naukowe takie, jak artykuły i monografie na temat cyberkultury, technokultury i STS’u. Artykuł stawia pytania o to, czy są one przydatne w interpretacji dzieł zebranych na wystawie, jakie miejsce pozostawiają dla fantastyki naukowej, co je różni, a w czym są wspólne w kontekście stechnicyzowanej kultury współczesnej.
Since industrialization, machines have shaped and transformed human life. Currently, however, there is much talk of a new machine age. A new machine ethic is being discussed. But what characterizes these new machines? And what does it mean for the concept of the Anthropocene? The article differentiates between three categories of machines: the mechanical machine, the so-called trans-classical machine (computer, information-processing machine), and, finally, AI as a new category of machine. Each category of machines is related to historically different human-nature and human-machine relationships.
[Message me for the full text] From the middle of the twentieth-century onwards, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of relation-ality in what it means to be human, which we call a "relational turn." This is found in various domains, including philosophical psychology , psychoanalysis, and theological anthropology. Many have seen a close connection between relationality and personhood. In the second half of the article, we consider the implications of this trend for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. So far, [Message me for the full text] AI has largely neglected relational intelligence, though that could perhaps be about to change. Cybernetics was rendered more open to assumptions about the contextuality of intelligence by its rather different assumptions from AI. Social robotics increasingly requires relational intelligence, and promising steps might be found in computational modeling of human relationships. Questions about whether robots can achieve personhood are difficult to resolve, though the possibility should not be ruled out. Could a robot be a "person"? Could a robot be "relational"? These questions are the focus of this special section. The questions are related, so much so that some people might say they are identical, as relationality
Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances—contradictory statements and affective postures that show intense paradox within a schema of play. I argue that this play has two fundamental and oscillating (or simultaneous) aspects. It is both bottom‐up, in the sense that it is a confined or segregated aspect of society, and top‐down, in the sense that it is experienced as a cosmos of aliens with unknown designs that manifest paradoxically. I argue that the terms of our analysis in the social sciences must reflect the fact that, in this simultaneity of opposites, these extraordinary and sometimes traumatic experiences are neither subjective nor objective but lie in a sort of “hermeneutical” middle ground that recognizes the deeply ironic and recursive nature of UFO phenomena.
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‘Mechanisation of Thought Process’ was an international conference involving researchers from academia, government, industry and the military that took place in the UK in 1958. It saw the first presentation of McCarthy's Advice Taker and of Selfridge's Pandemonium, and one of the first expositions of Rosenblatt's Perceptron, as well as presentations on new programming languages, cybernetic experiments and simple diagnostic systems. This article describes the conference and the occasionally boisterous debates that took place, drawing out the common challenges faced by researchers at the time, focusing on the relevance of biological models for mechanised systems of thought processing and the difficulty of embodying knowledge or context in a system to enable it to solve problems effectively. Particular attention is paid to the methodological criticisms of work in both machine translation and in what we would now consider to be artificial intelligence made by the Israeli linguist and philosopher Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.
Obwohl heute selten explizit von Kybernetik gesprochen wird, ist diese für quasi alle modernen Optimierungsprojekte von zentraler Bedeutung. Der Beitrag unternimmt zunächst eine Begriffsbestimmung der Kybernetik als Universalwissenschaft von Kontrolle und Kommunikation und zeigt dann auf, inwiefern es heute in verschiedenen Lebensbereichen zu einer Kybernetisierung im Sinne einer Durchsetzung kybernetischer Steuerung kommt. Im Bereich der persönlichen Lebensführung haben kybernetische Psychotechniken die Kommunikationstechnik des Feedbacks popularisiert. Digitale Technologie ermöglicht eine Rationalisierung der feedbackbasierten Selbstoptimierung durch automatisierte Datenerhebung im Self-Tracking. In der Arbeitswelt kann das Toyota-Produktionssystem als eine weitgehende Analogie zu kybernetischem Management verstanden werden. Insbesondere im Zuge der Digitalisierung halten hier jedoch auf verschiedenen Ebenen, von der Kontrolle individueller Arbeitsschritte bis zur Optimierung ganzer Lieferketten, kybernetische Prinzipien Einzug. Im Bereich des Regierens werden kybernetische Ideen hauptsächlich von Ansätzen der Big-Data-Governance popularisiert, die darauf abzielen, Politik durch datenbasierte Selbstregulation zu ersetzen. Insgesamt kann im Zuge der Digitalisierung also von einer umfassenden Kybernetisierung gesprochen werden, mit der meist eine Logik der kontinuierlichen Optimierung einhergeht.
The paper is about how the corporate governance affects the financial performance of the banks operating in the Arabian Peninsula.
On 6 January 1973, Chilean media artist Juan Downey exhibited Plato Now at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. A hybrid multichannel video installation and performance, this was Downey’s restaging of Plato’s Parable of the Cave—the “Now” registering what the myth might look like from the vantage of his own historical moment. And whereas Plato’s original operated through an inflexible division between the space of the mind and a derivative sensual reality, Plato Now explicitly sought to blur those philosophical lines by assembling a relay of invisible energies, brain waves, video signals, and telepathic communications, such that the space of mind and sensual reality became speculatively entangled. This article clarifies just how Plato Now did this, and situates its philosophical vision as a significant, if relatively unremarked, aesthetic prefiguration of the new materialist tendencies towards relationality, hybrid assemblages, and vibrant conceptions of energy and matter.
How artificial intelligence and computer science grew up together.
I've been motivated to discover what biology is to us as humans. What it means to understand biology, and how I could make it meaningful for my students. I've read as much as I could and reflected, I've discussed and listened, I've taught and observed. While it doesn't cover all aspects of biology education, this book is about sharing what I've learnt on my journey of synthesising and trialling ideas with my secondary-school mixed-attainment biology classes. Chapter 1: This sets the scene for the whole book. It brings together many threads to a define what I think is most meaningful to secondary biology students. Where they are most likely to find meaning. And therefore what we could do about it when designing our curricula and thinking about how students progress through their biology education. Chapters 2 & 3: Teaching for meaning using variation theory This theory is typically known among maths teachers but not so much in biology education. In these chapters I set out to show how useful it is for the secondary biology classroom, and exactly how it can be done. Chapter 4: How to integrate organisms, ecology & evolution. Now I pull together all of the previous chapters to present a new framework for teaching for meaning-making. Chapter 5: Concepts of the organism that unite a biology course. Here I discuss two concepts that I think can unify all the topics on the curriculum. 1. Seeing biology through thermodynamic systems lens and 2. Seeing biology through an ecological-evolutionary lens via the concept of life strategies. I lay out the reasons why and discuss how I've introduced these ideas with students. Chapter 6: Teaching systems thinking to help students see interconnectedness. This chapter is dedicated to systems thinking. Firstly I show how stock and flow diagrams are very useful for the biology classroom and give examples. Next, I introduce a new taxonomy of understanding biological systems.
Chapter 7: Establishing a thinking classroom. This chapter is focused on the whys and hows of embedding the taxonomy into my biology curricula. I give examples of how I use it and examples of my students answers from lower and upper secondary courses. Chapter 8: Navigating classroom and biological complexity. This chapter rounds up the book.
I read the clash between predictive psychoanalytic theories and destabilizing queer theories on the subject of desire as a disagreement over probability. I point psychoanalysts and queer theorists towards four relevant episodes in the history of science: the debate on statistics and thermodynamics within the Victorian intelligentsia, the Einstein-Bergson feud, discussions within the cybernetics movement, and recent critiques of automated cars. Considering our sexual aims and objects as information, our desires would be due to the way we retrieve them. Psychoanalysis explains how such information is stored and queer theory how it is reorganized. In cases where repression is not accountable for lack of desire toward an external stimulus, such absence would be due to information not retrieved quick enough, rather than a genuine incapacity to desire.
This chapter looks at artists’ experimentations with linkages between intelligent computational systems and non-human living organisms. These unusual hybrid systems showcase models for how we can bridge heterogeneous lifeworlds. In doing so, they evince all kinds of heretofore unimagined possibilities for mutual understanding and influence, which may give us new perspectives on AI-non-human alterities and may serve to question the anthropocentric divisions between humans, human technology and the more than human world. At the same time, this approach may point toward a model of art-making, where encounters between living organisms and intelligent machines can serve not only as vectors of novelty and unexpected variety, but also as a step toward developing a system of ideas focused on showcasing alternative possibilities of human–machine non-human relations.
William Grey Walter was a pioneer of both electroencephalography (EEG) and cybernetics (the science of control systems). Trained as a neurophysiologist, he was possessed of the technical skill and the imagination to develop EEG into both a diagnostic tool and a means of offering insight into the function of the living brain. His work in cybernetics was far ahead of its time, and he can rightly be considered the father of biologically inspired robotics. His robotic “tortoises” were physical models of the brain based on principles drawn from his EEG work and also represent the first example of behavior-based robotics. Walter was a visionary who recognized the possibility of EEG for studying the living brain and saw how simple physical models could provide deep theoretical insights. Walter's work has only recently been rediscovered and recognized for its originality, creativity, and exuberant delight in exploring the bounds of the possible.
Amid the ongoing pandemic and the so-called ‘New Cold War,’ physical mobility dwindles and political paranoia surges. China has been increasingly portrayed as a ‘black box’ in anglophone discourse, scholarly and popular alike. More than ever, digital platforms serve as the sites and means to know ‘the Chinese reality.’ In this paper, we mobilize insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially its epistemological and ontological reflections on the ‘black box’ metaphor, to confront the ongoing ‘blackboxing’ of China and, in tandem, the embrace of digital platform data as ‘open source’ to penetrate China from afar. Foregrounding the role of technological infrastructures, research positionality, and power relations in knowledge production, we situate this phenomenon in broader shifts in geopolitics and academic ecology. We then suggest alternative routes for empirical investigation: (1) to reembed Chinese platform data in their sociotechnical contexts, (2) to approach a ‘networked China’ at and across different scales, and relatedly, (3) to attune to obscured positionalities in fieldwork and analysis. Ultimately, we urge communities of China researchers to attend to the politics and materiality of knowledge production and resist the pervading ‘New Cold War’ framing.
A Clockwork Orange is Anthony Burgess’s exploration of violence and free will and their manipulation by the state through psychological treatment administered by the medical establishment. It arose from Burgess’s abhorrence of the division of society by the establishment into the “well us” and the “sick them,” and of his contempt for the dichotomous view that some people are criminals and others not, as opposed to a universal inheritance of badness and violence as in the concept of original sin.The book is narrated by the teenager Alex, who displays conduct disorder and sexual sadism. He misuses drugs added to milk, the first of many perverse learning associations in which the state or the medical profession are culpable. The reader learns (“insidiously” as Burgess puts it) to like Alex, despite graphic and remorseless acts of violence, including rape, …