Academic Discussion of Cybernetics Theory Provides No Investigative Leads

fact, enabling to it. What was constraining to cybernetics was the presumption of an analogy of structure between the controller and the controlled. By the 1930s, Kurt Gédel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing had all described universal systems of computation, in which the computation required no structural analogy to functions that were computed. These universal computers could also compute the functions of control. The analogy of structure between the controller and the controlled was central to the cybernetic perspective. Just as digital coding collapses the space of possible messages into a simplified version that represents only the difference that makes a difference, so the control system collapses the state space of a controlled system into a simplified model that reflects only the goals of the controller. Ashby’s Law does not imply that every controller must model every state of the system but only those states that matter for advancing the controller’s goals. Thus, in cybernetics, the goal of the controller becomes the perspective from which the world 1s viewed. Norbert Wiener adopted the perspective of the individual human relating to vast organizations and trying to “live effectively within that environment.” He took the perspective of the weak trying to influence the strong. Perhaps this is why he was able to notice the emergent goals of the “machines of flesh and blood” and anticipate some of the human challenges posed by these new intelligences, hybrid machine intelligences with goals of their own. 126 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016346