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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

We failed when we killed Cybernetics and AI became part of Computer Science instead of the multidisciplinary field it actually is

Weiner was an outspoken socialist and was persecuted for it, to such an extent that Cybernetics got needled to death and AI became “simply a matter of computing.”

Hopefully we all see now how wrong that was

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Author here. Thank you, I thought this was an interesting point. Researching the book this post is based on, I was really struck by who was actually attending the Macy cybernetic conferences — it was incredibly eclectic. Anthropologists, physiologists, psychiatrists... and, of course, also Claude Shannon and von Neumann.

Carving off computer science as a separate realm with less interdisciplinary input was definitely a fork in the road for the history of science.

By the way, if anyone is interested, you can find the list of cybernetics conference attendees here: https://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeop...

And if anyone is really interested, here's my book, which is coming out in January: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/benjamin-breen/trip...

Awesome. Glad to see there’s other people out there that care and understand that “AI” fully understood, is marginally about the computer, and primarily about society.

I’m just waiting to see who starts hiring English majors first. I’ll join or invest.

I've always assumed the various three letter agencies would need those sorts of people but I've never looked into it...I definitely agree with you though.

Isn't 'Cognitive Science' (at least as I remember it) about bringing together again all those domains?

Yes, but the focus is more on human cognition, where cybernetics has more focus on (business, complex, control) systems, (automated, biological) processes, and human collectives.

It is interesting how cognitive science sees AI as a sub-discipline, where AI sees cognitive science as its sub-discipline.

McCarthy was not too enamoured with the bombastic nature of Wiener's persona and research, and may have birthed the field of AI, in part, to carve out his own field of study, and move away from an existing and defined field. As a result, control theory and reinforcement learning have a big overlap, yet use different words, approaches, and concepts.

Interesting. I always thought of cybernetics as robot hands and such, but your description of it is exactly the thing I am most interested in right now.

This article about the Ratio Club cybernetics meetings in London is interesting http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~philh/pubs/Ratio2.pdf

I agree and feel sad for the vanishing of Cybernetics.

Transdisciplinary fields are usually more delicate; they're often the momentary confluences of scientifically-inclined humanists and prominent scientific fields of their time. Before cybernetics there was various ambitious/systematic philosophy/evolution crossovers like Herbert Spencer.

From what I've researched and worked with individuals on the edge of the field, the contemporary debates seems to be going for "Second-order cybernetics"

Possible resources of interest are "IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics" (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?reload=true&...), as well as the work of Hugh Dubberly (Apple II, DNS) from Dubberly Design Office.

BTW the only CS class I took in college (in the mid-90s) was called Cybernetics, taught by Huffman (a Wiener disciple) and I can't say it had anything to do with AI at all; it was all control theory and information theory (compression, message integrity, boolean circuit design). I see it as complementary to ML in CS. Personally I took the class to learn how to make robots and was very disappointed we didn't cover that.

Sounds like you learned a lot about AI actually :)

Especially for the time

In the 90s, we taught neural networks, and statistical machine learning in AI. Cybernetics (as a term) had been out of fashion for decades by then, if only because it was taken to be how Wikipedia describsed it: the study of "circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems" and was the domain of applied mathematics and PDEs, whereas neural networks weren't even recurrent.

No, I learned about ML in another way: working with a CS professor who worked on ML at the time. This was back in the days when autodifferentiation was not well known, so we had to come up with analytic derivatives of our loss function to do gradient descent.

What I learned in Cybernetics was really: how prefix-free codes work (unsurprising given that Huffman was the instructor), how karnaugh maps work, and something about sphere packing being easy in 8 dimensions. Oh, and that Huffman was an arrogant jerk but also an excellent teacher.

Wait... unless I'm missing a lot here, the concrete parts of cybernetics became known as control theory (and the more wishy-washy parts are known as "systems thinking"), and in both cases, the primary idea behind it all is exactly to turn dynamic problems into "simply a matter of computing".

That's literally what the whole thing is about - you model a problem as a bunch of cybernetics/control theory equations (with or without helper diagrams of boxes and arrows), do some computing on it, and implement the result in the physical world. In many cases, the computational model is partially included in the result itself - the physical control system includes a computer (whether it's an analog or digital one) that keeps the physical system stable by means of computation, i.e. "simply a matter of computing".

(In general, I feel many people didn't get the memo: "computing" isn't something "techbros" do; computing is a fundamental part of how we understand the world works - up there with energy conservation, thermodynamics, etc.)

Yeah, feels like this discussion takes the "computer" part too serious when talking about computer science. Computing isn't necessarily something with a computer. CompSci is about solving problems in general. I'd argue that we just went the normal way a science does. You start by having everyone involved, then you narrow down and focus. In CompSci, focus isn't really what's happening though, as it got broader and broader. The core principle (solving problems) still remains. We'll probably see a split down the line as well.

Penrose disagrees!

Penrose is obviously wrong and has been repeatedly criticized for his shoddy thinking when it comes to cognition.

"Weiner" should be Wiener?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

For what it's worth Cybernetics did try to have a second life here in Eastern Europe going into the '70s and even past that, but the US/Silicon Valley pull was too powerful and by the '90s all of that had been left in the past (the communist governments here falling at the end of the '80s didn't help, of course).

I'm from Bucharest myself, and I live just a couple of blocks away from an institution called the Faculty of Cybernetics, meaning the computer-focused faculty of the local school/university of economics.

If I'm not mistaken, and I hope that I'm not, it had been set up sometime in the early '70s when many of the technocracy higher-ups in here were really into Cybernetics and into Wiener's works (some of which had been translated before Ceausescu fell, so when the communists were still in power). Most, if not all, of those technocrats were not engineers and also not "classical" computer-science people, afaik the majority of them were economists.

But, as a I said, when the '90s came the "classical" computer-science paradigm (and especially the engineering-focused part) took off for good, so that all that "side-quest" about Cybernetics was left in the past (apart from the some entities still being attached to it only by name).

The same can be said about the concept of linear programming as applied to economics and to economic forecasting, that is a quite cool concept that had been almost completely forgotten starting with the '90s but which now is having a small resurgence (I've "re-discovered" it myself by first reading about it in Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis and then by going through a Soviet dictionary of economics published sometime in the '70s).

Indeed I studied computational economics because that’s the closest we get to Cybernetics today IMO

Ironically enough, the people who followed Weiner’s work were persecuted in the USSR.

If you say you can use fancy maths to make tanks roll faster off the assembly lines, or guide an ICBM towards Moscow/Washington, then the regime will happily support you. But if you get in your head that you can apply the same fancy math to run the economy, the regime will object - obviously - and label you as too communist/not communist enough, and persecute you/ship you off to a gulag.

I dont understand why you get down voted. Economics are ultimately about physical power and any new emerging model is a thread to the dominant power structure aka the current model.

The conflicting models were the origin of the cold war (capitalism vs communism) and today between china and the west.

Isn’t China essentially capitalist now? The main difference in my mind is authoritarianism vs liberalism.

I've left a related comment somewhere else in in the thread, but it's interesting that here in neighbouring Romania the practice/science of Cybernetics was quite well regarded almost until the communist government fell.

Its heyday had certainly been back in the '70s, as in the '80s the focus shifted to some other stuff thanks to energy inputs getting too expensive and us becoming bankrupt because of that (someone should write a history of the alternative energy sources tried by the communist government back then, some of which are now getting tested by the West, too), but for sure people weren't getting sent to prison because of it.

Here's [1] a list of Cybernetics-related books published before 1989 that I can find at an old-books store here in Bucharest, and that search reminded me that one of the main proponents of Cybernetics around these parts was Manea Manescu [2], a guy which had been prime-minister of communist Romania in the '70s (just before that he had been in charge of the State Planning Committee) and who stood by Ceausescu's side until the very end (that list of books I linked to includes a book with his name on it).

[1] https://www.targulcartii.ro/cauta/cibernetica?filter_name=ci...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manea_M%C4%83nescu

The book How not to Network a Nation is good on this history

Yep. If we don't get paperclipped then we're getting collectively BORG'ed. Free will? More like a tool by the system that controls the information reality around you.

Wiener

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