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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · Cybernetics · 28 May 2026 podcast

Sure.

So what Arit has just been telling us about is the brain modeling side of artificial intelligence.

So this idea that if you can represent the nervous system, the brain, as a series of logical statements, and Claude Shannon had shown that you can also represent logical statements through electrical circuits, right?

It presumably follows that you can then use electrical circuits to recreate a nervous system that produces a kind of logical pattern of thought.

That's simplistically the brain modeling side of things.

Let's build electrical circuits that kind of recreate logical systems that are modeled on the nervous system.

And that sets up a whole direction of AI research that still lives on today in things like neural networks, for example.

So there's a researcher, Frank Rosenblatt at Cornell in the USA, who builds a machine called a perceptron, which is a neural network that can learn to recognize shapes using electrical circuits.

The other side of early AI research at this time is mind modeling.

And

Effectively, let's not worry about trying to physically build a brain in electric circuits.

Let's not worry about how you could actually represent the nervous architecture of the brain in a computer or in electronics.

Instead, let's worry about simulating how a human reasons, right?

How do humans think?

And can we use a digital computer to simulate that?

So forget about the brain, think about the mind.

Instead, try to simulate how a human mind works.

Yeah, so cybernetics isn't even just in science, right?

It goes beyond science to business, to organizations, to governments, because a lot of the people working with cybernetics, they're not necessarily working on cutting-edge science, innovations, AI, military research.

They're working in more prosaic settings like large organizations.

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