The Cybernetics Moment New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History Jeffrey Sklansky, Series Editor the Cybernetics Moment
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The Cybernetics Moment New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History Jeffrey Sklansky, Series Editor The Cybernetics Moment Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age RONALD R. KLINE Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kline, Ronald R., author. The cybernetics moment: or why we call our age the information age / Ronald R. Kline. pages cm. — (New studies in American intellectual and cultural history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4214-1671-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1671-9 (hardcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1672-4 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1672-7 (electronic) 1. Information theory. 2. Cybernetics—Social aspects. I. Title. II. Title: Cybernetics moment. III. Title: Why we call our age the information age. Q360.K56 2015 303.48'33—dc23 2014035091 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. To the memory of Alfred Motz, Margot Ruth Marcotte, Maggie Marcotte Mattke, Raymond Orville Kline, and Nellie Frank Motz Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 1948 I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955 contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 War and Information Theoryâ 9 2 Circular Causality 37 3 The Cybernetics Crazeâ 68 4 The Information Bandwagonâ 102 5 Humans as Machinesâ 135 6 Machines as Humanâ 152 7 Cybernetics in Crisisâ 179 8 Inventing an Information Ageâ 202 9 Two Cybernetic Frontiersâ 229 Abbreviations 245 Notes 249 Index 325 vii This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments t is my pleasure to acknowledge the many students, colleagues, and I institutions who assisted me during the decade and a half I spent re- searching and writing this book. I especially want to thank Terry Fine and Christina Dunbar-Hester for their advice, assistance, and support over the years. Terry, a professor emer- itus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Cornell University, a friend and colleague whose office was down the hall from mine for many years (in my joint appointment between ECE and the Science and Technology Studies Department in the Arts College), helped me understand the basic principles of information theory, discussed the often testy relation- ships between that field and cybernetics during his career, and critiqued my account of the field he loves. As a Ph.D. student in science and technology studies, Christina, now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, served as a sounding board and friendly critic of the ideas in this book when she was at Cornell, particularly when she took my seminar on cybernetics and helped me teach an undergraduate course on the history of information technology. In combing through the massive Warren McCulloch Papers at the American Philosophical Society as a research assistant, Christina deep- ened the research for the book at a critical time. Her comments on several chapters were insightful. I would also like to thank other former students for their research assis- tance: Alec Shuldiner, for finding material on the development of information theory in the extensive AT&T archives; Albert Tu, for copying newspaper and magazine articles on cybernetics and information theory; Lav Varshney, for researching the acceptance of information theory in American electrical engineering journals and for alerting me to obscure published sources on Claude Shannon; and Daniel Kreiss at Stanford University, for gathering material on NASA’s cyborg project at the Ames Research Center. Thanks also to Glen Bugos at NASA, for helping navigate the Ames Research Center archives, and to Rachel Prentice at Cornell and David Hounshell at Carnegie- ix Mellon University, for providing copies of archival material from their own research. Rick Johnson at Cornell and Julian Reitman, a former officer of the IEEE Society on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, shared their recollec- tions of that society in the 1960s and 1970s. The late Dick Neisser, a founder of cognitive psychology, painted a vivid picture for me of information studies in the 1950s. In addition to Terry and Christina, I wish to thank Bill Aspray, Michael Buckland, Peter Dear, Katie King, Daniel Kreiss, Kevin Lambert, Boyd Ray- ward, Eric Schatzberg, Phoebe Sengers, Suman Seth, Fred Turner, Ana Viseu, and Herb Voelcker for commenting on drafts of articles and presentations, and Arisa Ema, Bernard Geogehagen, Marge Kline, Lav Varshney, and Herb Voelcker for commenting on chapters of the book. I also thank audiences for commenting on presentations I gave at Bielefeld University in Germany, Cornell University, the University of Maryland, the University of Pennsylva- nia, Penn State University, Stanford University, the Chemical Heritage Foun- dation, and annual meetings of the Society for the History of Technology. Portions of chapters 6 and 8 appeared in an earlier form as articles in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Social Studies of Science, and Technol- ogy and Culture. I thank the publishers of those journals for permission to use this material and the editors and anonymous referees for their helpful comments at an early stage of my research. Conversations with colleagues in the Science and Technology Studies De- partment at Cornell helped me strengthen my analytical voice in this book. I appreciated the lively discussions on the history of cybernetics with Cornell graduate students and thank my former student Ph.D. Honghong Tinn for preparing the index. Outside of Cornell, I benefited from correspondence and conversations with Eden Medina, Mara Mills, David Mindell, Jérôme Segal, and Jonathan Sterne. The comments from an anonymous reader for Johns Hopkins University Press helped me to sharpen the argument in several places. Robert J. Brugger at the Press and Beth Gianfagna were exemplary editors. The book could not have been completed without the resources of the Cornell University Library and access to manuscript collections at many institutions. These include the Niels Bohr Library at the American Institute of Physics, the American Philosophical Society, the AT&T Archives and History Center, the College Archives at Imperial College, London, the Uni- versity of Illinois Archives in Urbana, the Library of Congress, the Institute Archives and Special Collections at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy, and the Rockefeller Archive Center. I thank the librarians at Cornell x Acknowledgments and the archivists in charge of those collections, especially Nora Murphy and Jeff Mifflin at MIT. Generous financial support for research and writing came from the Na- tional Science Foundation, grant SES80689, and the Bovay Program in the History and Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University. Acknowledgments xi This page intentionally left blank The Cybernetics Moment This page intentionally left blank Introduction argaret Mead sat in the front row, waiting for the group photo M to be taken. The most famous woman scientist of her time, an an- thropologist whose books on adolescents in the Pacific Islands spoke to child-raising anxieties in modern America, Mead had attended all of the conferences on humans and machines. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation and held from 1946 to 1953, the postwar meetings aimed to break down disciplinary barriers in the sciences. Mathematicians, engineers, biologists, social scientists, and humanists debated how the wartime theo- ries of communications and control engineering applied to both humans and machines. They discussed, for example, if the new digital computers, which the media had dubbed “electronic brains,” could explain how the human brain worked. After one of the group’s founding members, Norbert Wiener, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pub- lished the surprisingly popular book Cybernetics in 1948, the group ad- opted the term cybernetics as the title of its conference series. The proceedings of the Macy conferences, which Mead coedited, helped to establish the scientific fields of cybernetics and information theory in the United States. During contentious meetings filled with brilliant argu- ments, rambling digressions, and disciplinary posturing, the cybernetics group shaped a language of feedback, control, and information that trans- formed the idiom of the biological and social sciences, sparked the invention of information technologies, and set the intellectual foundation for what came to be called the information age. The premise of cybernetics was a pow- erful analogy: that the principles of information-feedback machines, which explained how a thermostat controlled a household furnace, for example, 1 Figure 1. Meeting of the last Macy Foundation Conference on Cybernetics, Princeton, New Jersey, 1953. The interdisciplinary Macy conferences, held from 1946 to 1953, developed and spread the new science in the United States. Leading lights included anthropologist Margaret Mead and neuroscientist Warren McCulloch (sitting in the front row) and anthropologist Gregory Bateson, mathematician Claude Shannon, and physicist Heinz von Foerster (standing in the back row). From HVFCyb, 10:6. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society. could also explain how all living things—from the level of the cell to that of society—behaved as they interacted with their environment. The participants waiting with Mead for the group photo to be taken form a who’s who in cybernetics and information theory at the time (fig.