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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's a foundational conference for artificial intelligence that happens in Teddington here in London at the National Physical Laboratory in 1958 called Mechanization of Thought Processes.
But one of the interesting papers given there is a paper called To What Extent Can Administration Be Mechanized?
And that's given by a British electrical engineer, James Merriman.
who goes on to become the chief engineer of the post office.
And the post office at the time ran Britain's telecommunications infrastructure.
And Merriman and his engineers paid close attention to cybernetics.
Merriman was at these conferences.
His engineers went to symposia on cybernetics and information theory at Imperial College in London.
And they were trying to think about how can you apply cybernetics to a large organization like the Post Office, which at the time was one of Britain's largest employers, but also had a big complex electrical network of telecom lines that sent telephone messages, telegraph messages and so on.
And they arrive at this vision of what they call a self-healing, self-governing network that you could use cybernetics and kind of cybernetic theories to think about how you could embed computers into the network to control and organize all of the messages that are sent around the network, but to also organize all of the people that work for that network, tell them where to go, what they need to repair, etc.
where they're going to be working each day and so on.
And it leads to this statement that Merriman makes.
And he says, information and control, which is a reference to cybernetics.
It's one of the leading cybernetics journals at the time.
He says, information and control is fundamental to the management of any large organization.
So a lot of people at the time, they're not just thinking about cybernetics in these cutting edge applications.
They're also thinking about how it can be applied to large bureaucratic organizations.
So when they're looking at the telephone exchange, what do they see?
So at this point in time, a lot of telephone exchanges, which are what, you know, routes your call from one place to another, right?
If you're in London and you're calling Edinburgh, it's not just a direct line.
Showing 61–80 of 135 · page 4 of 7
← Previous
Next →