Jacob Ward
speaker
135 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
Jacob Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, so I'll start with the example that Arit introduced of the anti-aircraft gun trying to shoot down the enemy plane.
And Norbert Wiener and his team at MIT were working on a device called a predictor that you would attach to the anti-aircraft gun that would predict where the plane was going to be.
It would use statistics to figure out the general predictable directions that the plane would take, use radar to detect where the plane had been, and move the anti-aircraft gun so the gun could try and shoot down the plane.
And crucially, as part of this kind of model of feedback and of cybernetics, is that the predictor using radar could then detect whether or not it had shot down the plane.
And if it had missed the plane, had moved the gun too far in one direction, for example, it could recalculate and move the gun again, kind of taking into account what it had just calculated.
So the kind of key idea there is that this isn't a linear form of causality.
It's not just the predictor moves the gun, the gun shoots down the plane.
It's not X causes Y, but it's that the predictor moves the gun, the gun shoots down the plane or not, and then recalculates.
So it's X causes Y, Y feeds back into X, and you just rinse and repeat until, hopefully, from the point of the anti-aircraft gunner, you shoot down the plane again.
So this is this idea that in these systems, causality is not linear, but circular.
It has a goal, right?
This is not just a circular system that exists with no purpose.
It has a goal.
So these are circular systems that are goal seeking, and they're always going through these circular causal loops of feedback.
in order to achieve their goal, whether or not that's shooting down a plane or whatever an animal does to survive in its environment.
So there's a purpose to cybernetics?
So Claude Shannon, like Veena, is another fascinating individual.
Anthropics AI model Claude is actually named after Claude Shannon.
And he's a mathematician and electrical engineer who works at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the USA.
We've talked a lot about these systems as a kind of form of control, controlling the anti-aircraft gun or controlling the animal, how the mind controls the animal.
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