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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In Our Time · Cybernetics · 28 May 2026 podcast

It has to go through various telephone exchanges to route the call from London to Edinburgh.

And this is also the time where they're thinking about, okay, how can we computerize these telephone exchanges?

How can we put computers in them to route all the traffic for us?

And this lends itself to this idea of this self-governing, self-healing network, because if one communications link fails,

becomes disused or breaks down or something, the computers can reroute the call via another set of telephone exchanges.

So it's, again, this kind of responsive system of feedback, thinking that, OK, that route isn't working, so we will update and regulate the system so we can find another route using these cybernetic computerized telephone exchanges.

So as Aritz mentioned, cybernetics influences ecological theory.

A somewhat controversial ecological theory that it influences is the Gaia hypothesis.

And that's promoted by a British scientist, James Lovelock, and an American microbiologist, Lynn Margulis.

And the Gaia hypothesis states that all of the organisms on the planet kind of exist in this network of feedback loops that exist to kind of keep the Earth at a stable kind of habitable condition, right?

So they maintain the temperature, the humidity, the oxygen levels and so on in a kind of habitable zone.

So in other words, life maintains the Earth so that the Earth can sustain life permanently.

And that's controversial, A, because it's kind of too grand to prove, but B, because some people have used it to kind of claim that perhaps the Earth could resist climate change, right?

It'll stay in a habitable zone.

Now, when Lovelock first thinks about guy theory, he's not thinking about climate change.

He's thinking about cybernetics.

He speculates about a biological cybernetic system that will exist to keep an entire planet's physical and chemical systems

kind of systems in a habitable zone.

But one of the interesting things, and I think this also touches on how and why cybernetics begins to disappear, is Lovelock and Gaia theory become quite popular amongst more countercultural theorists of the environment.

So Lovelock joins an association called the Lindisfarne Association, which is a new age utopian group where he meets other theorists of energy and ecology and, you know,

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