Cybernetics

In The Man From The Future, cybernetics is the milieu in which John von Neumann’s thinking about brains and computers took shape. From 1944, meetings instigated by Norbert Wiener — the short-lived “Teleological Society” and later the “Conferences on Cybernetics” — put von Neumann “at the heart of discussions on how the brain or computing machines generate ‘purposive behaviour.’” He would, the book recounts, “whizz in, lecture for an hour or two on the links between information and entropy or circuits for logical reasoning, then whizz off again,” leaving attendees to puzzle out the implications. The book situates cybernetics as a foundational current of what later became artificial intelligence: von Neumann, Alan Turing, Wiener and others “did think about computers as ‘electronic brains,’” modeling computation on an idealized neuron “shorn of its physiological complexities.”

Context: Cybernetics, named by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s, is the study of control and communication in animals and machines — feedback, information, and self-regulating systems — and is widely regarded as an intellectual ancestor of computer science, AI, and control theory.

Where this appears

• The Man From The Future — Wiener’s Teleological Society and Conferences on Cybernetics as the forum where von Neumann’s brain-computer ideas formed.