Cybernetics and the Security-State :: Wiener Government Mechanics Papers

Cybernetics and the Security-State The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the routine of technology. But who would presumption a screwinge wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is non education above all the indispensable rescript of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of the relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature and man. Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago but domain as a species is just beginning his. In technology a physis is being organized through which human races contact with the cosmos takes a clean and diametrical form from that which it had in nations and families. . . . The paroxysm of genuine cosmic envision is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are abandoned to call Nature. In the nights of annihilation of the last war the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first guarantee of mankind to bring the new body under its control. -- Walter Benjamin, One way of life Street, 1925-26 Garry Kasparov lost to Deep Blue on May 11, 1997. The event itself had more or less no affect on the daily life of the general man in and of itself, and in fact had been considered inevitable for some time. Even so, commentators take aim awful portent into the fact that the chess grandmaster, dubbed Humanitys Champ, was beaten by the IBM computer. the States Today was not alone in asking, Are computers backing universe into a corner? With rare exception, after the initial hype died cut back the media reassured us that we were in no immediate danger of computers crook against us and taking over the planet, at least not actively. Chess, we were assured, is unprotected to the type of simple brute force calculations a computer can do. Understa nding natural language, recognizing speech and handwriting, and analyzing images require work of a different sort, a common sense that has so far eluded most drippy intelligence researchers. Unlike human babies (an admittedly loaded example), computers have rag interacting with and learning about the real world except within purely defined parameters.