Cybernetics

Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics - the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of communication, feedback, and control in both animals and machines. Cybernetics was first defined in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) and aimed to find a shared universal language which could be used across disciplines. The name drew on an Ancient Greek word for steersman, the person who stands at the helm of a ship to steer or govern its course. Cybernetics saw the world as systems which used loops of information and feedback to adjust their own course of action. Those ideas could be applied to anything from thermostats to the human brain, and arguably laid foundations for the information age.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Jacob Ward No other episodes
  Historian of science and technology at Maastricht University
• Professor Jon Agar 2 episodes
  Professor of Science and Technology Studies at University College London
• Professor Orit Halpern No other episodes
  Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universitat Dresden

Reading list

• The ontology of the enemy: Norbert Wiener and the cybernetic vision
  Peter Galison (Critical Inquiry, 1994)
• From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
  Slava Gerovitch (MIT Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason
  Orit Halpern (Duke University Press, 2015) Google Books →
• The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique
  Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (Grey Room, 2017) Google Books →
• Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets
  Orit Halpern (e-flux, March 2023)
• How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
  N. Katherine Hayles (University of Chicago Press, 1999) Google Books →
• John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death
  Steve J. Heims (MIT Press, 1980) Google Books →
• The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age The Information Age
  Ronald R. Kline (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
  Eden Medina (MIT Press, 2011) Google Books →
• Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics
  David A. Mindell (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) Google Books →
• The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future
  Andrew Pickering (University of Chicago Press, 2010) Google Books →
• The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
  Norbert Wiener (Da Capo Press, 1988) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m002vmk4

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002vmk4

Auto-category: 629.8 (Cybernetics)