IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2016 - 22
apply cybernetics concepts had
failed to live up to their earlier
promise, especially in the areas of
biology and sociology, though Wiener himself generally disparaged
the way social scientists tried to
apply the concept.
Meanwhile, the informationtheory parts of the book show
smooth and largely unremarkable
progress in the areas of communications theor y and computer
systems, but this progress eventually left the banner of cybernetics
behind. Following Shannon's more
engineer ing- or iented attitude,
other engineers and computer scientists applied more sophisticated feedback-control theory and
information theory to increasingly
complex systems, and after the
1950s, they largely eschewed the
term "cybernetics" to describe
what they were doing. Wiener's
forecasts of huge automated factories in Cybernetics eventually
came to pass, but at a slower pace
that didn't produce equally huge
bursts of unemployment.
Kline makes it clear that the
surprising popularity of the term
was as much a product of public anxiety concerning the role of
technology in postwar society as
it was a legitimate recognition of
an important new technical field.
The word "cybernetics" gave a specific name to the sometimes intimidating progress of technology that
the public of the 1950s witnessed.
Kline shows how anxiety over technological unemployment and the
threat of "electronic brains" was
portrayed in popular media such
22
as Time and the fanciful creations
of satirical artists such as Boris
Artzybasheff. By the 1980s, familiarity with computers had made
them seem more benign, and
cybernetics was a term largely forgotten by the public, though it lived
on in the name of a journal called
Cybernetics and Human Knowing devoted to "sociocybernetics."
It also persisted in certain rather marginal social-science fields
devoted to "second-order" cybernetics, which includes the observer in a wider system and is more
qualitative than the quantitative,
mathematical "first-order" cybernetics Wiener originally meant by
the term.
Wiener died in 1964. Today,
many technological advances that
he would have classed as cybernetics are now encompassed in
the field of artificial intelligence,
which has passed beyond its purely speculative stage and has now
become a routine part of life in
industrialized societies. While technological unemployment is still
a concern, the forms it takes are
more complex than Wiener or anyone else could envision in 1949,
when only a few room-size computers existed anywhere in the world.
The cybernetics moment has clearly passed.
Because cybernetics involved
so wide a range of disciplines,
researchers, and institutions, Kline
has trouble maintaining a clear
story line through the book. It is
not fair to say that the total is less
than the sum of its parts, but the
nature of his subject forces Kline
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
to run back and forth along the
historical timeline as he takes up
different aspects of his subject.
Perhaps the book will be most
valuable as historical background
for the large number of disciplines
that were involved in the cybernetics moment: computer science,
communications eng ineer ing ,
information theory, and the social
sciences of sociology and anthropology. While cybernetics as an
independent discipline has largely
vanished from the scene, many
concepts and disciplines that are
still with us today were born in, or
at least influenced by, the chaotic
and exciting times when the term
held great promise and unlocked
the coffers of research foundations
of the 1950s. Even when research
is funded as part of a fad, it can
still do some good, and that may
be the best lesson to be learned
from The Cybernetics Moment.
Reviewer Information
Karl D. Stephan obt a ined the
B.S.E.E. degree from Caltech, the
M. Eng. degree from Cornell, and
the Ph.D. degree at the University
of Texas at Austin in microwave
engineering. After sixteen years
at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst, he joined Texas State
University-San Marcos in 2000,
where he is now Professor in
the Ingram School of Engineering. He has published widely in
the fields of microwave engineering, atmospher ic physics, the
history of technology, and engineering ethics. His email address
is kdstephan@txstate.edu.
∕
june 2016
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