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Author: Eden Medina Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262525968 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.
Author: Eden Medina Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262525968 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.
Author: George Zarkadakis Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262360128 Category : Technology & Engineering Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
Science and tech expert George Zarkadakis presents an indispensable guide to making liberal democracies more inclusive, and the digital economy more equitable in the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution. Around the world, liberal democracies are in crisis. Citizens have lost faith in their government; right-wing nationalist movements frame the political debate. At the same time, economic inequality is increasing dramatically; digital technologies have created a new class of super-rich entrepreneurs. Automation threatens to transform the free economy into a zero-sum game in which capital wins and labor loses. But is this digital dystopia inevitable? In Cyber Republic, George Zarkadakis presents an alternative, outlining a plan for using technology to make liberal democracies more inclusive and the digital economy more equitable. Cyber Republic is no less than a guide for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Author: Ralph Parkman Publisher: Elsevier ISBN: 1483159841 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 415
Book Description
The Cybernetic Society brings together facts and ideas which help give perspective to man's role in a cybernetic society. Emphasizing the transforming power of technological innovation and the ties between technology and society, the book explores the impact of industrialization on the working man, systems design for social systems, the relevance of cybernetics, and machine translation and self-reproducing machines. The effects of technology on government, education, and science and the arts are also given consideration. This volume consists of 10 chapters and begins with an introduction to the transforming power of technology before turning to the nature and significance of important technological innovations (with some emphasis on the role of the computer) and their connection to a variety of human concerns, many of which are strongly rooted in the history of technology and science. Emphasis is placed on energy and its transformation, organization or synchronization, and information. Attention then shifts to the problems of industrial job displacement, unemployment (or underemployment), and poverty from the time of the first Industrial Revolution to the present cybernated era. Some of the economic and political solutions which have been proposed are highlighted. The chapters that follow focus on how technology contributes to patterns of social change, the potential of cybernetics to elucidate relationships between organic and inorganic systems, and the uniqueness of the human mind versus ""intelligent machines."" The book concludes with a look at the ""futurists"" and their forecasting activities. This book will be useful to students from all disciplines.
Author: Fred Turner Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226817431 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place. From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers. Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.
Author: Norbert Wiener Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262537842 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 353
Book Description
A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.
Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262512394 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 239
Book Description
An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science.
Author: Peter Winn Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
A major reinterpretation of the Salvador Allende era in Chile, Weavers of Revolution is also a compelling drama of human triumph and tragedy that exemplifies "the new narrative history" at its authentic best.
Author: Muller Karl H Publisher: World Scientific ISBN: 9813226277 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 404
Book Description
In almost 60 articles this book reviews the current state of second-order cybernetics and investigates which new research methods second-order cybernetics can offer to tackle wicked problems in science and in society. The contributions explore its application to both scientific fields (such as mathematics, psychology and consciousness research) and non-scientific ones (such as design theory and theater science). The book uses a pluralistic, multifaceted approach to discuss these applications: Each main article is accompanied by several commentaries and author responses, which together allow the reader to discover further perspectives than in the original article alone. This procedure shows that second-order cybernetics is already on its way to becoming an idea shared by many researchers in a variety of disciplines. Contents: Prologue: A Brief History of (Second-Order) Cybernetics (Louis H Kauffman & Stuart A Umpleb)Mapping the Varieties of Second-Order Cybernetics (Karl H Müller & Alexander Riegle)Part I: Exploring Second-Order Cybernetics and Its Fivefold Agenda: Second-Order Cybernetics as a Fundamental Revolution in Science (Stuart A Umpleby)Obstacles and Opportunities in the Future of Second-Order Cybernetics and Other Compatible Methods (Allenna Leonard)Connecting Second-Order Cybernetics' Revolution with Genetic Epistemology (Gastón Becerra)Shed the Name to Find Second-Order Success: Renaming Second-Order Cybernetics to Rescue its Essence (Michael R Lissack)Beware False Dichotomies (Peter A Cariani)Second-Order Cybernetics Needs a Unifying Methodology (Thomas R Flanagan)Viva the Fundamental Revolution! Confessions of a Case Writer (T Grandon Gill)Author's Response: Struggling to Define an Identity for Second-Order Cybernetics (Stuart A Umpleby)Cybernetics, Reflexivity and Second-Order Science (Louis H Kauffman)Remarks From a Continental Philosophy Point of View (Tatjana Schönwälder-Kuntze)Finally Understanding Eigenforms (Michael R Lissack)Eigenforms, Coherence, and the Imaginal (Arthur M Collings)Conserving the Disposition for Wonder (Kathleen Forsythe)Author's Response: Distinction, Eigenform and the Epistemology of the Imagination (Louis H Kauffman)Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology (Bernard Scott)Wielding the Cybernetic Scythe in the Blunting Undergrowth of Psychological Confusion (Vincent Kenny)To What Extent Can Second-Order Cybernetics Be a Foundation for Psychology? (Marcelo Arnold-Cathalifaud & Daniela Thumala-Dockendorff)The Importance — and the Difficulty — of Moving Beyond Linear Causality (Robert J Martin)Obstacles to Cybernetics Becoming a Conceptual Framework and Metanarrative in the Psychologies (Philip Baron)The Social and the Psychological: Conceptual Cybernetic Unification vs Disciplinary Analysis? (Eva Buchinger)Second Thoughts on Cybernetic Unifications (Tilia Stingl de Vasconcelos Guedes)Cybernetics and Synergetics as Foundations for Complex Approach Towards Complexities of Life (Lea Šugman Bohinc)Author's Response: On Becoming and Being a Cybernetician (Bernard Scott)Consciousness as Self-Description in Differences (Diana Gasparyan)On the Too Often Overlooked Complexity of the Tension between Subject and Object (Yochai Ataria)Where Is Consciousness? (Urban Kordeš)Theorizing Agents: Their Games, Hermeneutical Tools and Epistemic Resources (Konstantin Pavlov-Pinus)How
Author: Ronald R. Kline Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421416719 Category : Computers Languages : en Pages : 351
Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title Cybernetics—the science of communication and control as it applies to machines and to humans—originates from efforts during World War II to build automatic antiaircraft systems. Following the war, this science extended beyond military needs to examine all systems that rely on information and feedback, from the level of the cell to that of society. In The Cybernetics Moment, Ronald R. Kline, a senior historian of technology, examines the intellectual and cultural history of cybernetics and information theory, whose language of “information,” “feedback,” and “control” transformed the idiom of the sciences, hastened the development of information technologies, and laid the conceptual foundation for what we now call the Information Age. Kline argues that, for about twenty years after 1950, the growth of cybernetics and information theory and ever-more-powerful computers produced a utopian information narrative—an enthusiasm for information science that influenced natural scientists, social scientists, engineers, humanists, policymakers, public intellectuals, and journalists, all of whom struggled to come to grips with new relationships between humans and intelligent machines. Kline traces the relationship between the invention of computers and communication systems and the rise, decline, and transformation of cybernetics by analyzing the lives and work of such notables as Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, and Herbert Simon. Ultimately, he reveals the crucial role played by the cybernetics moment—when cybernetics and information theory were seen as universal sciences—in setting the stage for our current preoccupation with information technologies. "Nowhere in the burgeoning secondary literature on cybernetics in the last two decades is there a concise history of cybernetics, the science of communication and control that helped usher in the current information age in America. Nowhere, that is, until now . . . Readers have in The Cybernetics Moment the first authoritative history of American cybernetics."—Information & Culture "[A]n extremely interesting and stimulating history of the concepts of cybernetics . . . This is a book for everyone to read, relish, and think about."—Choice "As a whole, the book presents a comprehensive in-depth retrospective analysis of the contribution of the American scientific school to the making, formation, and development of cybernetics and information theory. An unquestionable advantage of the book is the skillful use of numerous bibliographic sources by the author that reflect the scientific, engineering, and social significance of the questions being considered, competition of ideas and developments, and also interrelations between scientists."—Cybernetics and System Analysis "Dr. Kline is perhaps uniquely situated to take on so large and complicated [a] topic as cybernetics . . . Readers unfamiliar with Wiener and his work are well advised to start with this well-written and thorough book. Those who are already familiar will still find much that is new and informative in the thorough research and reasoned interpretations."—IEEE History Center "The most comprehensive intellectual history of cybernetics in Cold War America."—Journal of American History "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 engineering, information theory, and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology."—IEEE Technology and Society Magazine "Ronald Kline’s chronicle of cybernetics certainly does what an excellent history of science should do. It takes you there—to the golden age of a new, exciting field. You will almost smell that cigar."—Second-Order Cybernetics "Kline’s The Cybernetics Moment tracks the rise and fall of the cybernetics movement in more detail than any historical account to date."—Los Angeles Review of Books
Author: Eden Medina
Author: Eden Medina
Author: George Zarkadakis
Author: John Rose
Author: Ralph Parkman
Author: Fred Turner
Author: Norbert Wiener
Author: Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Author: Peter Winn
Author: Muller Karl H
Author: Ronald R. Kline