Cybernetics
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Before cybercrime, cybersecurity and cyberpunk, there was cybernetics. The writer William Gibson first used the term cyberspace in the 1980s, and the prefix cyber has become a way to denote anything which relates to digital technology and the internet. But cyber originated even earlier, in the 1940s, with cybernetics, the study of communication and control in animals and machines. Cybernetics had taken its name from the ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course.
In cybernetics, everything could be seen as a system which used so-called feedback loops to adjust its own course of action, from thermostats to the human brain. Well, with me to discuss cybernetics are Jacob Ward, historian of science and technology at Maastricht University. John Agar, Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London, and Arit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at the Technische Universität in Dresden. Arit, I'd like to come to you first. Cybernetics emerges after the Second World War. So can you tell us what it was about that conflict in particular that was such a challenge both for the military and for scientists?
Well, blitzkrieg, total war, when we think of World War II, it comes under these very totalizing terms that imply, right, the fact that there were entirely new kind of groupings of technology and media coming together to battle this war. And we had, indeed, a new scale and speed of warfare, blitzkrieg, aerial warfare, but also new media. Radio, for example, had put Hitler in power. Cinema, propaganda. So you have an entirely new combination of things that people had to deal with and contend with, and scientists and engineers had to. And in the face of the kind of speed of battle and the blitzkrieg, a new level and size of scientific endeavor emerged. As the United States and Great Britain mobilized, they recruited scientists, engineers, but not just scientists and engineers, also psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, sociologists.
This was total war. And like I said, it mattered as much how we influenced people's brains and minds and propaganda as the actual technologies and kind of material structures of the war. And so under this condition, particularly during the Battle of Britain, at MIT, people started being concerned about war happening at speeds beyond the ability of human beings to process. MIT being the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And at MIT, they were working on a particular issue that really kind of, I think, identified this war, which was a new idea that information and communication in some sense is power and that you have to manage and control them to win the battle. And at MIT, they were working on radar, which is basically how do you see the enemy before they see you, right?
And along with the radar, they were also working on a certain question of basically how do you shoot a plane down, which isn't that easy because it's moving pretty fast, and how do you process signals, which it sounds pretty simple to see a plane, but really telling a plane from a flock of birds is not that easy when you're trying to figure out how radio waves are changing. And basically, you need to predict where the machine will be.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–12:05
2
What is cybernetics and how did the term 'cyber' originate?
12:05–19:31
3
How did World War II challenges lead scientists to develop cybernetic ideas?
19:31–49:18
4
Who was Norbert Wiener and what did his 1948 book Cybernetics argue?
49:18–56:32