(2024-06-18) Sterling Futures Of Cybernetics

Bruce Sterling: Futures of Cybernetics (bad auto-transcript of video). Cybernetics might have a Revival

this is the Beloved image by from the Gartner futurist group... The Gartner hype cycle and in my opinion all philosophers of science ought to have this image tattooed onto themselves

Technologies don't really behave like this all the time and second this is how a technology might behave in a democratic capitalist Society with a uh rather centralized media structure which is not the society that we actually have at the present time

it's actually the philosophy that tends to last technology is made out of metal

the Gartner hype cycle is created for investors or Venture capitalists it's about the need to profit from Innovation as opposed to like observing Innovation and understanding what actually happens

maybe cybernetics never even reaches the plateau of productivity but it can return to the Agora of public ideas and there's already been a first order cybernetics in the 1940s and then a second order cybernetics in the 1970s

really especially common in the world of industrial computation it's very common for metaphysical ideas to be productized or Compu or or technologized in the information industry and then they just fail abjectly they just disappear in mass disillusionment and yet they spring up again you know consider not just cybernetics but virtual reality....

artificial intelligence began in the 1950s and it's very famous for having Winters it just dies horribly in some ways worse than cybernetics died all funding ceases

*the greatest success of this modern large language model AI means the mass extinction of traditional AI every AI that ever acted like an animal before

is just gone they're they're they're annihilated it's a it's a great Extinction of previous AIs and this is quite a Melancholy Story*

whenever novelists show up among scientists uh or technicians or Engineers or programmers or Venture capitalists even the novelists commonly have one truly useful thing to say which is the human condition is tragic

since they have self-learned how to talk they might be able to self-learn how to walk or self- learn how to move their arms I mean large language models talk all the time

they are defunct in that s-curve sense they are they are abandoned they have rusted they have rotted in just a few years months

robots are a theatrical invention from Czech theater

important to realize I mean and to internalize the idea how many of these models are already dead they're just defun they're discontinued no more money you go to their website there's a 404

even though human humanoid robots have never worked except as glamorous stage puppets there is a fierce investor interest in Reviving humanoid robots right now people are dropping hundreds of millions in venture capital on on far-fetched Notions to get these humanoid things to get up and walk

artificial intelligence was actually an attempt to Rebrand cybernetics with a more strict terminology and more prac techncal engineering approaches

cybernetics arose in the direct wake of World War II where there had been a deeply tragic Mass Slaughter

the people in cybernetics had somehow survived that very serious war and many of them were Veterans

tragic condition of these famous technical people

their human Fates were not pred so if you were telling yourself as you watch this video, well I I want to be become cybernetic I want to live like the the people of cybernetics volume one they they were they were full of Brilliance and Brio and and intellectual invention and and they were but this is the tragic lifestyle that you are asking for

then there were Margaret Mead and uh Gregory Bateson and these two were social scientists they were anthropologists just intensely charismatic people with tremendous personal skills

Gregory Bateson was the mentor of [[Stewart brand who was the publisher of whole earth review and Stewart brand was the mentor of Kevin Kelly who was the editor of Wired Magazine and Kevin Kelly used to hire cyberpunk science fiction writers as technology reporters that was his deliberate policy... really thought that science fiction writers should be acting as reporters for the digital information business uh and it worked I mean a lot of cyber punks were in the Wired Magazine

suppose that cybernetics were to revive again in the future

if I wanted to supply some serious in-depth answer to that question as opposed to like a brief video presentation let me tell you what I would try to do uh first I would get some help I wouldn't do it all by myself I would try to assemble a working group of interested people maybe 15 20 25 at most would simulate four different possible futures. (scenario planning)

examine the conflicts basically probably the conflicts between digital culture as we understand it now in a possible cybernetic culture and how they would be the same and different

one quadrant of these four possible worlds it's very digital and yet it's also very cybernetic they're just coexisting

another future world world it's very digital but cybernetics has been forgotten it's of little relevance

third world digital as we understand it has become obsolete... it's oldfashioned it's archaic while a reviv cybernetics has taken over the world and is and is dominant

and in the last World both cybernetics and digital Industries are both in Ruins they're just both archaic

and I would also have some deliverables for this exercise not just pictures of a world but something relatively concrete for the work you create together

objects like say a shoe like what does a cybernetic shoe look like in the year 2052

absurdly specific like a pair of shoes for a seven-year-old girl and she's from the city of cow and they are athletic performance shoes

I would use the techniques which are described in this book The Manual of design fiction

we might ask if there was a future cybernetic world you know the world the future world of cybernetics 3 what kind of objects and services might appear in there

this design school diagram next slide there please yeah the products and services and to confront a much bigger material culture world of possible products and services

you might see that this is a venn diagram and it Maps the production processes of a free market consumer Society we don't actually have one of those in the year 2024 that's not what consumers are actually living through instead they are in a techn feudal big Tech oligarchic Society (Big World) with a revived Cold War and a lot of blockades and embargos

it's clear to me that the founders of the original cybernetics were facing very similar problems

they would have conferences and meetings about it like the famous Macy conferences

mostly they just shouted past one another they struggled over semantics and definitions, they couldn't seem to get to a point

nobody was actually listening to anybody else with the possible exception of Margaret mead who would listen to everybody cybernetics never became a unified discipline of its own

however these cyberneticians also took refuge in designing and building specific cybernetic objects

I still find these very remarkable like number 17 here the Norbert Wiener Paloma moth device

or number 18 the Claude Shannon Theus maze running device

William Ross Ashby homeostatic device that's number 18 there's Ross with actually four of his homeostats he he built one and then he continued to build other ones and Link them to the other four he really liked the way they interacted

number 19 the very famous Grey Walter tortoise probably the most famous cybernetic device ever made

they were all analog they were all cybernetic

it would likely arise from one of the areas where cybernetics was heavily involved but digital technology has not been much interested

cybernetics arose from a theoretical breakthrough and it might may be a breakthrough in say animal physiology or some medical neural discovery about the function of human brains like some exciting basic Revelation about human natural intelligence and if that were to happen then I think it could easily compete with the glamour of artificial intelligence and we'd we'd see a great deal of social interest in in natural human intelligence and how it might be altered or developed in some way

cybernetics also had political organizational aspects such as the Stafford beer project cybersyn so one might imagine some future business man management model or new political movement that renamed itself cybernetics

their political Manifesto might sound something like well we are technocrats but we have become unhappy with the established big Tech platforms

a third cybernetics might be of some genuine and practical use to me

in conclusion I will trouble my audience with some practical recommendations because I'm a novelist and yet I have the long habit of carrying personal tools

my last image is the Victorinox cyber tool

an analog multi-tool for someone who has computer interests or cyber interest these cyber tools were first introduced into the market in the year 2000

were named cyber because they was had specialized bits he in the little plastic holder there and the the bit driver screwdriver um and they were specialized for electronic devices

multi-tools are particularly interesting objects of analysis for philosophers of science

it's trying and failing to provide all Technical Solutions to all possible citizens all at once you know it seems to offer a comprehensive set of solutions but in actual practice this device is quite clumsy and awkward and difficult to grasp and even somewhat hazardous so for many years in the 21st century I was happy to be a cyberpunk with a cyber tool in my pocket I would even say that this was an act of identity Politics on my part

I would point out that multitools are really not much good for actual functional Engineers or construction trades people they're simply not big enough

however they're extremely good tools for critics and analysts because they're a set of keys of levers into the technological environment....