FUTURE MAP. By Brian Holmes
“We are living through a movement from an organic industrial society to a polymorphous information system – from all work to all play, a deadly game.” Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto In his final book, published in 1964 at the height of the industrial boom under the title of God & Golem, Inc., the scientist Norbert Wiener asked a question: “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?”. The example he used was trivial: a computer program for playing checkers, written by A.L. Samuel of the IBM corporation. As for the definition of “significant,” it’s not very clear: but Wiener does observe that just as in the contest between God and Lucifer, the programmer may well lose the game. He had reason to be nervous. During the war he had worked on electronic targeting mechanisms and had come to conceive the feedback loop as a model for every kind of purpose, whether of animals or machines. In December of 1944, acting jointly with his colleagues Howard Aiken and John von Neumann, he invited a select group of researchers to join a “Teleological Society” to study the intersections of neurology and engineering.2 The name made use of a term that had previously been reserved for the final causes of speculative philosophers and theologians. Soon after its first meeting, the Teleological Society transformed into the famous Macy Conferences on “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems” – a title summed up as “Cybernetics” after Wiener had coined the word in 1947. more... http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/future-map/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
