Philosophical critique of cybernetic theory and historical computing development

inadequate for describing the mechanisms underlying biological systems, and so he missed out on how similar mechanisms might eventually be embodied in technological computational systems—as now they have been. Today’s dominant technologies were developed in the world of Turing and von Neumann, rather than the world of Wiener. In the first industrial revolution, energy from a steam engine or a water wheel was used by human workers to replace their own energy. Instead of being a source of energy for physical work, people became modulators of how a large source of energy was used. But because steam engines and water wheels had to be large to be an efficient use of capital, and because in the 18th century the only technology for spatial distribution of energy was mechanical and worked only at very short range, many workers needed to be crowded around the source of energy. Wiener correctly argues that the ability to transmit energy as electricity caused a second industrial revolution. Now the source of energy could be distant from where it was used, and from the beginning of the 20th century, manufacturing could be much more dispersed as electrical-distribution grids were built. Wiener then argues that a further new technology, that of the nascent computational machines of his time, will provide yet another revolution. The machines he talks about seem to be both analog and (perhaps) digital in nature; and he points out, in The Human Use of Human Beings, that since they will be able to make decisions, both blue-collar and white-collar workers may be reduced to being mere cogs in a much bigger machine. He fears that humans might use and abuse one another through organizational structures that this capability will encourage. We have certainly seen this play out in the last sixty years, and that disruption 1s far from over. However, his physics-based view of computation protected him from realizing just how bad things might get. He saw machines’ ability to communicate as providing a new and more inhuman way of exerting command and control. He missed that within a few decades computation systems would become more like biological systems, and it seems, from his descriptions in chapter 10 of his own work on modeling some aspects of biology, that he woefully underappreciated the many orders of magnitude of further complexity of biology over physics. We are in a much more complex situation today than he foresaw, and I am worried that it is much more pernicious than even his worst imagined fears. In the 1960s, computation became firmly based on the foundations set out by Turing and von Neumann, and it was digital computation, based on the idea of finite alphabets which they both used. An arbitrarily long sequence, or string, formed by characters from a finite alphabet, can be encoded as a unique integer. As with Turing Machines themselves, the formalism for computation became that of computing an integer-valued function of a single integer-valued input. Turing and von Neumann both died in the 1950s and at that time this is how they saw computation. Neither foresaw the exponential increase in computing capability that Moore’s Law would bring—nor how pervasive computing machinery would become. Nor did they foresee two developments in our modeling of computation, each of which poses a great threat to human society. The first is rooted in the abstractions they adopted. In the fifty-year, Moore’s Law-fueled race to produce software that could exploit the doubling of computer capability every two years, the typical care and certification of engineering disciplines was thrown by the wayside. Software engineering was fast and prone to failures. This 52 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016855