Item — HN Reader

Author here. Thank you, I thought this was an interesting point. Researching the book this post is based on, I was really struck by who was actually attending the Macy cybernetic conferences — it was incredibly eclectic. Anthropologists, physiologists, psychiatrists... and, of course, also Claude Shannon and von Neumann.

Carving off computer science as a separate realm with less interdisciplinary input was definitely a fork in the road for the history of science.

By the way, if anyone is interested, you can find the list of cybernetics conference attendees here: https://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacyPeop...

And if anyone is really interested, here's my book, which is coming out in January: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/benjamin-breen/trip...

3 comments

Awesome. Glad to see there’s other people out there that care and understand that “AI” fully understood, is marginally about the computer, and primarily about society.

I’m just waiting to see who starts hiring English majors first. I’ll join or invest.

I've always assumed the various three letter agencies would need those sorts of people but I've never looked into it...I definitely agree with you though.

This article about the Ratio Club cybernetics meetings in London is interesting http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~philh/pubs/Ratio2.pdf

Isn't 'Cognitive Science' (at least as I remember it) about bringing together again all those domains?

Yes, but the focus is more on human cognition, where cybernetics has more focus on (business, complex, control) systems, (automated, biological) processes, and human collectives.

It is interesting how cognitive science sees AI as a sub-discipline, where AI sees cognitive science as its sub-discipline.

McCarthy was not too enamoured with the bombastic nature of Wiener's persona and research, and may have birthed the field of AI, in part, to carve out his own field of study, and move away from an existing and defined field. As a result, control theory and reinforcement learning have a big overlap, yet use different words, approaches, and concepts.

Interesting. I always thought of cybernetics as robot hands and such, but your description of it is exactly the thing I am most interested in right now.