Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in machines and living organisms, focusing on how systems regulate themselves using feedback loops. Back in the 1950s this area of study was gaining momentum cross disciplines, bringing together mathematicians, anthropologists, psychologists, communications and other sciences together to have constructive conversations around our relationship with technology. However, shortly after building some momentum the coordination and concept of cybernetics fell apart, with everyone going back to their corners taking what they’ve learned, but it is what the telecommunications folks did that I think set the stage for where we are today.
The cybernetics matters today because it laid the groundwork for compute, the Internet, and artificial intelligence. However, it wasn’t just the name and area of study we lost, we missed out on the Internet, compute, and artificial intelligence, and the impact of all of this being driven across multiple disciplines of professionals–not just technologists. Instead we ended up with technology wagging the tail across all of the disciplines these experts operate within. Like today, back in the 1950s a bunch of white guys decided they didn’t need the anthropologists, psychologists, and others from the human side of things to be part of the discussion, and began focusing on compute and artificial intelligence on top of increasingly small transistors that saw the world in a boolean way.
After John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the first working transistors at Bell Labs in 1947, the world got to work miniaturizing the transistor and began using it to power a new world of compute that would lead to the Information Age as defined in the 1960s. We had a brief window in the 1950s to take a multi-discipline approach to what would become compute, networking, and artificial intelligence, but due to the race towards digital, and the priorities of Bell Labs and the telecommunications industry, we prioritized what these white dudes in Bell Labs thought mattered rather than what was essential from the human perspective these other disciplines would have brought to the table. It was quite a missed opportunity for us to understand the control and communication between machines and humans, while establishing rich multi-discipline feedback loops.
Considering my work to define what abstraction means in today’s Internet shaped reality, I feel like this missed opportunity has led to much of the challenges we face with our relationship with our mobile phones, social media, and the many other Internet powered applications that are defining our lives. This feels like the origin point where the essential human considerations with compute, networking, and artificial intelligence got de-prioritized and abstracted away in order to make more money. This is something that sets the tone of compute, the Internet, and artificial intelligence today. Cybernetics often sounds dated, even though cyber is ubiquitous across popular culture today, but the problem really comes in when we aren’t having those important conversations about the messy human layers of how all of this work versus just making money with the machine bits. There is no balance in our approach with the business and technology having all the say, and experts, as well as your average person impacted by technology doesn’t get to weigh in.
