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
Yet it has these fantastic opportunities if only we adopt the tool properly.
Do you recognize that kind of way of talking?
It's our way of talking about AI.
The talk about whether or not it's conscious or not, the LLMs and the idea that we might be releasing machine consciousnesses into the world.
This is precisely the language of Norbert Wiener and the warnings.
So the whole way we've ended up talking about information and information in society and big organisations and the dangers of science and technology, this comes out of this language about AI from the 1940s, a way of talking about technology.
So one of its legacies is...
in some ways, a rather unhelpful way of talking about technology that only has these extremes of abundance and a world of leisure or world destruction and mass unemployment and worse, right?
And we're trapped into ways of talking about machines being conscious in a way that is frankly unhelpful.
So one of the legacies, unfortunately, is I think a style of talking about technology.
McLuhan's also got this idea of media technologies as being extensions of the human.
Right.
So there's a sort of seamlessness back and forth between the machine and the human in McLuhan's way of talking, which I think has got a cybernetic feel about it, for sure.
The other thing is, I think, like a lot of cyberneticians, Marshall McLuhan is at that edge of intellectual disrespectability and is also extremely exciting, right?
There's something in common with a lot of cyberneticians and someone like Marshall McLuhan as these intellectual figures who are constantly surprising and challenging and going where you don't think you should go, which is both exciting but also slightly upsetting.
In the Soviet Union, attitudes of cybernetics undergo a complete reversal.
So during the sort of Stalinist years, so when cybernetics is published, cybernetics is defined in a Soviet encyclopedia as a reactionary Western pseudoscience that is all about the control of the worker and to make the worker into an instrument of war.
And therefore should be rejected.
After Khrushchev says Stalin was a bit of a mistake, that was a cult of personality, we should maybe think about something different.
This opens the door to scientists in Soviet institutes, research institutes, and suddenly cybernetics and talking in cybernetic terms, cyberspeak,
Showing 101–120 of 129 · page 6 of 7
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