Richard Brodie RBrodie@brodietech.com +1.206.688.8600
CEO, Brodie Technology Group, Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie
Do you know what a "meme" is?
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
>----------
>From: David S. Bennahum[SMTP:davidsol@PANIX.COM]
>Sent: Thursday, August 22, 1996 8:39 AM
>To: Multiple recipients of list MEME
>Subject: MEME 2.09
>
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>meme: (pron. 'meem') A contagious idea that replicates like a virus,
>passed
>on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do,
>propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact
>between
>people. Root of the word "memetics," a field of study which postulates
>that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of
>memes
>include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.
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>MEME 2.09
>
>
>
>MACHINES TO GOVERN
>
>
>
> "The steps between my original suggestion of the chess playing
>machine, Mr. Shannon's move to realize it in the metal, the use of
>computing machines to plan the necessities of war, and the colossal
>state
>machine of Pere Dubarle, are in short clear and terrifying...
> The mechanical control of man cannot succeed unless we know
>man's
>built-in purposes, and why we want to control him."
>
> Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings,
>1950.
>
>
>
>I THINK THEREFORE I AM
>
>
>Norbert Wiener's popular legacy is the word "cybernetics", which he
>crafted
>in his 1948 book "Cybernetics," subtitled "Control and Communication in
>the
>Animal and Machine." Cybernetics, according to Wiener, described a new
>way
>of looking at life. Where once scientists imagined the universe as a
>giant
>clockwork where everything was set according to a pattern, Wiener
>postulated that the universe was a massively disorganized unpatterned
>place. Whatever order existed, Wiener thought, came from the exchange
>of
>information -- messages, coding, decoding -- between everything from
>the
>smallest atomic particle to galactic clusters. Information created
>order
>in a disorderly universe. The human brain was a message processor at
>its
>core.
>
>Wiener, by analogy, postulated that the human brain and the mechanical
>brain of the newly invented digital computer were similar. For Wiener,
>the
>modern computer was the closest thing to a mechanical brain ever
>invented.
>When Wiener invoked this theory, in 1947, the Cold War had not yet
>fully
>unveiled itself. The Berlin Blockade of 1948, the Soviet detonation of
>a
>nuclear weapon in 1949 -- these had yet to become history -- and little
>mention in "Cybernetics" appears concerning the potential dangers and
>temptations Wiener's cybernetics introduced.
>
>By 1950, when Wiener published a second book called "The Human Use of
>Human
>Beings", his work took an explicitly political and social tone. He
>wrote
>the "Human of Use Human Beings" for non-mathematicians; unlike
>"Cybernetics" there were no mathematical equations covering the pages.
>Instead, Wiener emphasized a fear. If information is the currency of
>life,
>controlling the shape of things, then wasn't it possible, in theory, to
>send out messages which would effectively control the way people
>perceive
>the world? Critics of Wiener's "Cybernetics" raised this issue,
>reading
>his work as the means to the creation of a theoretical machine, a
>"machine
>to govern." Wiener felt such an idea wasn't ludicrous, writing in the
>first edition of "The Human Use of Human Beings" that such a machine
>"is
>quite possibly being planned by a secret military project for the
>purposes
>of combat and domination." Then, mysteriously, that edition of "The
>Human
>Use of Human Beings" disappeared.
>
>All later editions of the book, after the first edition from which
>these
>quotes come, use a vastly different text, so different that no two
>pages
>are alike. The later editions are much less concerned with secret
>projects
>to control human behavior. Instead, Wiener focuses on the theory of
>cybernetics in relation to Newtonian physics and game theory. The
>passage
>concerning the "machine to govern" loses its tone of imminent doom.
>"The
>[machine to govern] is not frightening because of any danger it may
>achieve
>of autonomous control over humanity. It is far too crude and imperfect
>to
>exhibit a one-thousandth part of the purposive independent behavior of
>the
>human being." (From the ninth printing, 1967). Why Wiener so totally
>changed the thrust of his book is hard to say. Wiener died in 1964.
>
>
>THE INTERGALACTIC NETWORK
>
>
>Wiener's work and concerns, however, had a deep influence on several
>crucial computer scientists. Every Tuesday night throughout the 1950's
>Wiener held a kind of seminar-salon in his home, near MIT in Cambridge,
>Massachusets. In attendance at various points were a who's-who of
>computer
>science history, including junior MIT faculty who would go on and have
>a
>tremendous impact on the future of computer science. One of these was
>a
>young faculty member named J.C.R. Licklider. He studied the field of
>"psycho-acoustics" -- how sound travels -- funded in part by the US Air
>Force. Around 1957 Licklider used his first digital computer and got
>hooked, displaying the now-familiar symptoms of late nights hunched
>over a
>monitor in a dark room. He became so obsessed with computers that he
>effectively switched fields. In the then-nascent field of computer
>science
>he wrote a seminal paper which has Wiener's concerns all over it, but
>where
>Wiener sees no hope to the monolithic machine, other than the delay of
>time, Licklider finds an alternative -- "interactive computing".
>
>Titled "Man-Computer Symbiosis" (1960), Licklider postulates that the
>real
>use of the computer is not as a cold calculating engine, but as an
>intimate
>symbiotic partner in human activity. Licklider explicitly snubs the
>young
>A.I. community, dismissing the obsession with creating machines to
>replace
>people. His alternative is now dominant, and he shifted computer
>science
>towards the study of people interacting with computers as a partner.
>Licklider could have faded into obscurity were it not for the fact that
>in
>October 1962 he became Director of the Pentagon's Information
>Processing
>Techniques Office (IPTO). A division of ARPA (the Advanced Research
>Projects Agency), Licklider initiated the sequence of events which led
>to
>the ARPANET, Internet's parent. Had he not done so, there's a fair
>chance
>the Internet we're using today wouldn't exist.
>
>Back then, when this computer network was still just an idea, Licklider
>called it his "Intergalactic Network", and sent memos to the
>universities
>receiving IPTO money titled "To the members of the Intergalactic
>Network."
>But before he could open the financial sluice gates, he had to kill
>another
>project. The Air Force, working hard on Wiener's theoretical "machine
>to
>govern" had spent much of the fifties trying to use computers to
>simulate
>human behavior. In practice this meant feeding a computer seemingly
>random
>information -- on Thursdays Kruschev read Pravda, not Isvestia, and the
>night before the Soviet Air Force General drank a whiskey, not vodka --
>and
>somehow all these observations would produce an accurate scenario of
>what
>the Soviets were really up to. The computer would play Sherlock Holmes
>and
>conclude that the Soviets were building a new missile, or whatever.
>Licklider yanked away his budget from these "asinine projects" as he
>called
>them. It was Licklider who changed the name of the department from
>Command
>and Control Research to Information Processing Techniques.
>
>In the years that followed, an estimated 70% of all funding for
>computer
>science research in the United States came from ARPA, and much of it
>followed the path Licklider set in 1962. Licklider funded research
>leading
>to the creation of the first computer mouse, "windows" and "icons."
>His
>control of the purse led to the funding of America's first graduate
>programs in computer science, along the philosophical lines he favored.
>And, on top of all this, Licklider explicitly funded California
>schools,
>wanting to transplant his ethic to the West Coast. Two prime
>recipients
>were Berkely and Stanford, and their students, steeped in visions of
>interactive computers, contributed to the creation of Silicon Valley,
>and
>the ultimate manifestation of Licklider's intimate machine: the
>personal
>computer. But the crown jewel of Licklider's crusade was his
>initiation of
>the events leading to the Internet. Had Licklider not altered course,
>odds
>are that there would be no Internet and the seemingly silly musings of
>Wiener would, in hindsight, appear prescient.
>
>
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>
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