Historical essay on AI and cybernetics by John Brockman

Introduction: On the Promise and Peril of AI John Brockman Artificial intelligence is today’s story—the story behind all other stories. It is the Second Coming and the Apocalypse at the same time: Good AI versus evil AI. This book comes out of an ongoing conversation with a number of important thinkers, both in the world of AI and beyond it, about what AI is and what it means. Called the Deep Thinking Project, this conversation began in earnest in September 2016, in a meeting at the Mayflower Grace Hotel in Washington, Connecticut with some of the book’s contributors. What quickly emerged from that first meeting is that the excitement and fear in the wider culture surrounding AI now has an analogue in the way Norbert Wiener’s ideas regarding “cybernetics” worked their way through the culture, particularly in the 1960’s, as artists began to incorporate thinking about new technologies into their work. I witnessed the impact of those ideas at close hand; indeed it’s not too much to say they set me off on my life’s path. With the advent of the digital era beginning in the early 1970s, people stopped talking about Wiener, but today, his Cybernetic Idea has been so widely adopted that it’s internalized to the point where it no longer needs a name. It’s everywhere, it’s in the air, and it’s a fitting a place to begin. New Technologies=New Perceptions Before AI, there was Cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four or five other young arts people to join him for a series of dinners—an ongoing seminar about media, communications, art, music, and philosophy that focused on Cage’s interest in the ideas of Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan, all of whom had currency in the New York art circles in which I was then moving. In particular, Cage had picked up on McLuhan’s idea that by inventing electronic technologies we had externalized our central nervous system—that is, our minds—and that we now had to presume that “there’s only one mind, the one we all share.” Ideas of this nature were beginning to be of great interest to the artists I was working with in New York at the Film-Makers’ Cinémathéque, where I was program manager for a series of multimedia productions called the New Cinema | (also known as the Expanded Cinema Festival), under the auspices of avant-garde filmmaker and impresario Jonas Mekas. They included visual artists Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman; kinetic artists Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik; happenings artists Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann; dancer Tricia Brown; filmmakers Jack Smith, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, and the Kuchar brothers; avant-garde dramatist Ken Dewey; poet Gerd Stern and the USCO group; minimalist musicians Lamonte Young and Terry Riley; and through Warhol, the music group, The Velvet Underground. Many of these people were reading Wiener, and cybernetics was in the air. It was at one of these dinners that Cage reached into his briefcase and took out a copy of Cybernetics and handed it to me, saying, “This is for 99 you. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016229