IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 20

beyond - how we produce longterm stability in a world where most
people are left with no feasible productive work they can do - is left
as a subject for another book.
Overall, Rise of the Robots is
well-constructed, aimed at a popular audience that knows little
about the underlying automation
technologies or the social and
economic realities of competing
with automation. For a technologist, the coverage of the "robots"
themselves is not pa r ticula rly
novel or insightful beyond what
a consistent reader of Wired,

Technology Review, and other
technology-focused publications
would already be familiar with.
And for someone who attends
to debates in contemporary economics or public policy, much of
the economic and policy information is unlikely to be groundbreaking. But while little of Ford's
book is on the cutting edge of
any one sub-field, Rise of the
Robots is a competent, approachable, and well-written sy nthe sis of information across many
areas, and provides a valuable,
coherent picture of automation's

s o cio - ec onom ic i nter ac t ion s.
While those looking for a technica l deep - dive w ill likely be
disappointed, his well-reasoned
p er sp ec t ive ma ke s t he bo ok
worthwhile for general readers.

Reviewer Information
Erik L. Stayton is a doctoral student
at M.I.T. in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology
and Society program. His research
interests include artificial intelligence, automation systems, and
human-computer interaction.
Email: estayton@mit.edu.

Karl D. Stephan

The Cybernetics Moment
The Cybernetics Moment, Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age.
By Ronald R. Kline. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

he photograph on
the dust cover of The
Cybernetics Moment
is striking. In front of
a chalkboard covered
with equations, a man wearing owlish glasses contemplates a lash-up of
wires and vacuum tubes mounted on
a carriage with wheels that look like
they belong to a child's tricycle. He
holds a large cigar in his right hand.
The man is Norbert Wiener, and
the rig he's looking at is a "communications machine" that moves in

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2016.2564503
Date of publication: 2 June 2016

response to changing light patterns.
The year is 1949, and the photograph shows Wiener near the peak
of what author Ronald Kline calls
"the cybernetics moment." By the
early 1950s, the term cybernetics
will come to be regarded as almost
magical in its promise to solve
problems ranging from technical
matters of control theory in hardware systems all the way to social
problems such as urban planning
and the economy. But by the late
1960s, it gradually became clear
that the hope of uniting groundbreaking efforts in both the physical and social sciences under the
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

umbrella science of cybernetics
was only a hope, not a reality.
In choosing to wr ite about
the history of an idea, Kline has
undertaken one of the most difficult of historical tasks, and it's
no wonder it took him the better
part of fifteen years to complete
the book. Biographies start and
end with the subject's life. Histories of a particular technology
have similar well-defined limits.
But the history of an idea, especially an idea as multifaceted and
chameleon-like as cybernetics,
can easily turn into a cat-herding
expedition. Fortunately, Kline is a
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june 2016

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