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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It has these extraordinary chairs.
You're surrounded by panels and flashing lights.
But essentially, this was meant to be machines and humans working together.
going back and forth, interacting with each other in order to make better decisions at the centre of a new cybernetic socialist country.
So I think it's fair to say that
Throughout the history of cybernetics, there's been opposition.
It's claimed too much.
It claims that humans, animals, machines are all equivalent.
This upsets people.
And when it gets associated with radical politics and countercultural ideas, for some people, this is too much.
So it's true to say that cybernetics, as a branch of science, I think dwindles in many areas.
But there are legacies.
In a way, it's gone from deep secrecy, from the war, to everywhere within years.
That's in the 1940s.
Now it's almost...
Apparently nowhere.
We don't hear this term cybernetics.
But in fact, it is everywhere.
It's everywhere in the way we talk about AI, for example.
Just as Norbert Wiener, in the book Human Use of Human Beings, warns against the automatic factory and says it's going to lead to mass automation and unemployment and devastating consequences for society.
Showing 81–100 of 129 · page 5 of 7
← Previous
Next →