John Agar
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
John Agar’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
So out of that is born this incredibly ambitious scientific program.
Now, he wants to tell the world about that.
And it appears in a book called Cybernetics.
And it's given that term by Norbert Wiener.
He wanted the term that captures something about self-regulation and how things change and adapt through feedback.
And he remembered this Greek word kybernetes, which means steersman of a ship in Greek.
It's also got overtones of being a governor of a state.
So it has a sort of ambitious character as well.
And he writes this up in a book.
It appears in 1948.
It's a very odd book.
It's full of mathematical equations.
It starts with a essay on the nature of time.
It ends with a reflection on how do you get machines to learn how to play chess and covers an awful lot in between.
So the subtitle of Cybernetics, the book, is Control and Communication in Animal and Machine.
So it's this science...
which claims it can, through understanding feedback processes, which is about communication and therefore about information, about the movement of information in and out of a system, through that you have this way of understanding how machines can produce purposeful behaviour, how minds might work, perhaps how societies change.
So it's a science of feedback and communication and information.
Yeah.
So we're going to jump over the Atlantic.
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