Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstruction

by Andrew Pickering, Yuk Hui (editor), Katherine Hayles

Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject - which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the Soviet Union, Latin America, France, Poland, China and Japan. The reconstruction shows the various paths of cybernetics and their socio-political implications, which remain unfamiliar to us today. It reveals more than what we thought we knew -- and yet we hardly know - and allows us to understand where we are and to reflect on the future of technology, ecology and planetary politics.



With texts by Brunella Antomarini, Slava Gerovitch, Daisuke Harashima, N. Katherine Hayles, Yuk Hui, Dylan Levi King, Michal Krzykawski, David Maulen de los Reyes, Andrew Pickering, Dorion Sagan and Mathieu Triclot.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

274 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2024

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book provides an overview of Cybernetics, a field essentially lost to time whose principles have been absorbed by more prominent fields today. Its objective is to resuscitate the principles that Cybernetics brought into forbearance in a manner most applicable to imminent issues like geopolitics, data concentration, and its relationship with power, as well as AI.

Cybernetics (as defined by Norbert Wiener) is the study of communication and control in animals, machines, and systems more broadly. It seeks to take a more biological and humanistic approach in its focus on systems. It readily embraces uncertainty and encourages trial and error (performance) rather than knowledge acquisition when approaching systems. With Cybernetics one gets along with systems updating belief in a Bayesian-like manner rather than actively trying to get to the crux of what a system is.

At the core of this is the belief that the world is fundamentally unknowable. Cybernetics realizes that complex systems are subject to the interpretation of the observer and that they are very rarely ever static or readily interpretable.

I find this thinking fascinating as it clashes (or at least I think it does) with my belief about how progress(especially scientific progress) in our world today has been achieved. My current belief is that it is more likely that a desire to reduce uncertainty is what leads us to make sense of the world and as a result scientific progress. And that the world is fundamentally comprehensible.

That said, thinking more granularly about unknowability and trial and error, we find that a lot of reasoning does generally include a significant component of trial and error. The degree to which it is universal in the best of thinking is unbeknownst to me. The scientific method and its use of hypothesis testing fundamentally integrate unknowability. So maybe, Cybernetics does have a point? Maybe the point here is that we should try as much as possible to leave our interpretations of phenomena out of the equation and simply experience the systems we participate in.

Regardless I believe this book presents the history, participants, and philosophical movement in a manner that's relevant for today's context and for that, it has my appreciation.

[Massimo Atracco · Rating 5 out of 5]

De mis lecturas favoritas del año. Compilación super interesante de artículos explorando una disciplina olvidada y cómo nos puede ayudar a mantener una mejor relación con nuestro presente. Es una pena que la cibernética, como el positivismo o el pragmatismo, fuese objeto de críticas tan injustas y acabase viéndose reducida por el público general a un intento simplón de sobrerracionalizar nuestra realidad y subordinarla a intereses puramente capitalistas. Espero que estos esfuerzos consigan limpiar el nombre de la cibernética como se ha hecho en las últimas décadas con el pragmatismo y el Círculo de Viena.

Me parece una lectura mucho más fecunda que toda la trilogía de la recursividad para entender el vínculo que pretende establecer Yuk Hui entre tecnología y filosofía, sobre todo por la inclusión de Máquina y ecología, qué buen artículo, coño. La única pega que le veo es que algunos artículos de la parte de los "Territorios" abarcan demasiado en muy pocas páginas (pienso, por ejemplo, en el de la cibenética china y en el de la cibernética latinoamericana).