25. Januar

Prof. Dr. em. Willard McCarty (King’s College London): Feedback and reciprocity: The freight of ‘interactivity’ from the mythology of cybernetics

Covid has reminded us of how integral face-to-face, person-to-person communication is to who and what we are, at a level so basic that no technology we have or know how to develop would do. The ‘social intelligence’ hypothesis suggests that our effectiveness in the world, indeed survival as a species, depends on it (Goody 1995). Using its early history I want to question the role of artificial intelligence in this vital human activity. In particular I will suggest that we take a step back from all the predictions and claims of current AI to ask whether its majority programme, to imitate if not duplicate human functions—especially those which impinge on human relations—is the right way to go. We learn a lot that way (as children do from their parents); we make some aspects of life more convenient; lives are saved. But substitution of these functions by automata is highly problematic, except, of course, when physiology has failed and medical techniques and devices step in.

The problem is that such substitution tends to rebound on us in the longer term by insinuating the general idea of a cybernetic equivalence of machine for human, hence obscuring basic differences. Both are thus impoverished. These differences are crucial for two reasons: (1) they point towards enormously promising research programmes in artificial intelligence and human self-knowledge, and (2) they alert us to the dangers of being reshaped into less than what we are by the smart machines we have made.

In his last lecture, John von Neumann took up the subject of human versus artificial cognition, concluding that the brain eludes the best formal means we have for describing how it works (von Neumann 1958, 82). Thus our models necessarily fall short. We have very good reason to think that, as Jonathan Benthall wrote, “the computer is an anomalous entity” and whatever place we assign it in our world, “its anomalous nature will assert itself” (Benthall 1972, 44f). So what do we do with the anomalies that result? Commenting on Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has argued that seeking them out is the point, and that the question to ask is “the kind of connection one might conceive between entities that are made and reproduced in different ways – have different origins in that sense – but which work together” (Strathern 2004, 37).

This is mostly not what we have done. But why turn to the history of admittedly primitive artificial intelligence rather than to its cutting edge? My aim is this: to rescue the formative period, when people were trying to figure out what it was for, rather than to accept AI as a given and try to fit into its agenda.

Consider, for example, the history of communication technologies, specifically telephony, from which came Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948). We owe to it inter alia not just noiseless telephone calls but also Boolean switching circuits that make digital computing possible. When Warren Weaver sought to explain Shannon’s theory

in Scientific American in 1949, he began by asking, “How do men communicate, one with another?” (11)—and answered with that theory. Do you see what is happening?

A few years before that, when Norbert Wiener and colleagues made the servomechanism central to cybernetics and feedback its basic idea (Wiener 1948, 7-39), the concept of communication took on the fleshy mechanics of the turret gun (Life 1944) and the spooky intelligence of the anti-aircraft predictor (Mindell 2002; Galison 1994), which in turn became the anthropomorphic design for the Americans’ first intercontinental defence system (ADSEC 1950). Note its metaphors. Note also the mechanised anthropomorphism of the earliest designs for the automated factory (Fortune 1946).

In Rise of the Machines (2016) Thomas Rid provides a very helpful account of cybernetics as a ‘mythology’ which infused popular, professional and academic discourse with servomechanical meaning (cf. Craik 1948; Schegloff 1988). In a nutshell, by equating “the animal and the machine” cybernetics subtracted reciprocity from human relations (do ut des), leaving only the mechanics as model.

Historians and others wanting to stress the importance of history will sometimes quote George Santayana’s dictum that ‘Those who ignore history are compelled unknowingly to relive it.’ (2011/1905, 172) A boring fate, no doubt. But actually, ignoring the questions which arise from studying the past has far more serious consequences for us all, in our daily lives and in our relationships. Consider Klara’s fate (Ishiguro 2021).

References

  • ADSEC [Air Defense Systems Engineering Committee, U.S. government], Final Report, 24 October 1950. Cambridge MA: MIT Lincoln Laboratory. <https://archive.org/search.php?query=adsec>.
  • Benthal, Jonathan. 1972. “The Computer—or Information Processing Technology”. In Science and Technology in Art Today. 40-84. London: Thames and Hudson.
  • Goody, Esther N. 1995. “Introduction: Some implications of a social origin of intelligence”. In Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence, ed. Esther N. Goody. 1-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Haraway, Donna. [1985]. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism”. Undated and unattributed, from https://archive.org/details/1985.-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto.-science-technology-and- socialist-feminism (26/11/22); published in Socialist Review 80: 65-107.
  • Mindell, David A. 2002. “Introduction: A History of Control Systems”. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics. 1-18. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Rid, Thomas. 2016. Preface and introduction. Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. ix-7. New York: W. W. Norton.
  • Santayana, George. 2011/1905. The Life of Reason. Introduction and Reason in Common Sense. Ed. Marianne S. Wokeck and Martin A. Coleman. Volume VII of The Works of George Santayana. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
  • Schegloff, Emmanuel A. 1988. “On an Actual Virtual Servo-Mechanism for Guessing Bad News: A Single Case Conjecture”. Social Problems 35.4: 442-57.
  • Shannon, C.E. 1948. “A Mathemaical Theory of Communication”. Bell System Technical Journal 27.3: 379-423.
  • Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial Connections. Updated edn. Walnut Creek CA: AltaMira Press.
  • von Neumann, John. 1958. The Computer and the Brain. Silliman Milestones in Science. New Haven CN: Yale University Press.
  • Weaver, Warren. 1949. “The Mathematics of Communication”. Scientific American 181.1: 11-15.
  • Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley and Sons.