Culled from the Vaults - My Secret Museum of Cybernetics

 A rewrite

My Secret Museum of Cybernetics

i.

Intellectual pretensions were welcome around my house growing up in Racine. I got a job at an after-school job at the library, and found  a book for every imagining I might have.

At the point where Bob Dylan and Summer of Love mysticism was passing cars and rockets in my personal hit parade, I chanced upon the notion of feedback. It had a scientific aspect and a musical aspect [the latter in the hands of Jimi Hendrix, the Velvet Underground and Canned Heat].

I was assigned to write a thesis that could serve as an essay for college admission. So I had a mind to study. With Bronski's Science and Human Values in hand I began a piece on The Humanization of Science, in part a Renaissance study. In part a look at the history of alchemy. I'd often begin at the beginning of things and hardly get any further.

At the same time I found out about Norbert Weiner and Claude Shannon - about cybernetics and information theory. Cybernetics, closely related to Automation [a boogie man at the time - 1968-69], and feedback became a life long dabble.

In a long stint as a blogger I'd pull notes together, as I read library books on the topic.

ii.

Wiener - The efforts of Norbert Wiener’s biographers always will be shadowed by I Am a Mathematician. This, his own biography, is likely to overwhelm other attempts to write his story - He was able as a writer, engaging personally, and he ably perceived threads of significance as he viewed his own life.

One can find threads in his work, but they are somewhat disparate, reflecting a mind that jumped at ideas. Wiener’s work, which ranged from estimations of Brownian motion to artillery shell trajectories may appear even topsy-turvy, in the light of history. [Re Brownian motion: Gemini tells me In essence, Einstein provided the physical insight, and Wiener provided the mathematical tools to describe and analyze it. And it was a proof of existence of atoms.]

Wiener’s life was both blessed and vexed by the fact of his prodigiousness, which he handled in greater depth in another autobiographical installment. As much as he finally was to become the iconic image of the absent minded professor, he had a grounding in real life. That, he somewhat credited to growing up for a time in Fitchburg Mass where the kids treated him as different but still a kid. 

As the years went passing by his was a delicate dance of pure science and [mostly mathematical] thought partnered with an engineer’s, and sometimes, a medical doctor’s quest.

Ending up at MIT rather than Harvard might have been a cause or effect of this quest. His work on harmonic analysis fed readily into work on electronic valve implementations of Fourier transforms, and [thence] to the study of harmonics.

He discusses early interest and work in Harmonic Analysis and the Fourier Transform; and sees similarity of thread in these. Discusses his important work on Brownian Motion and his later work in feedback estimation and cybernetics.

iii.

WIENER. more - Norbert Wiener was born in Kansas City, Missouri on November 26, 1894, and died on a lecture swing of Sweden and Norway in Stockholm on March 18, 1964, after having fathered the field of cybernetics, which seeks to study the nature of control in animals and machines.

Cybernetics, 40 years after Wiener’s death, is not so much a science or even segment of science – although the issues considered in cybernetic man-machine interaction are still at the heart of most considerations in science fiction and many other types of fictions. [Still I subscribe to a Google alert on the topic of "feedback biology". Work is slow to put it mildly.]

Of course, the 1990s term cyberspace [and more recent siblings such as cybersecurity] derives from cybernetics. So Wiener’s influence in the public arena continues in a fashion.

The mature Norbert Wiener with a pince-nez and coke-bottle eye-glasses looked the very emblem of the European intellectual. [Stories of absent mindedness, too, are offered. ] But he was a son of the Midwest and New England. His father moved from Missouri to Massachusetts in 1895 and eventually became a teacher at Harvard. His son was prodigious. He was to finish high school at 11, and receive a Harvard PhD at 17.

Wiener the younger wolfed-down literature and was interested especially in natural scientism, although he admits in one of his biographical writings, ‘Ex-Prodigy,’ that he was as much occupied in the ‘diagrams of complicated structures...’ as in the adventure of naturalism. Turn-of-the-Century Norbert’s interests straddled the philosophical and the mathematical in way that is hard to imagine today.

Awkward – not physically dexterous among sportsman schoolmates, he was. In his own terms he was a combination of ‘mental quickness and physical slowness.’ In a way, this sets the scene for future studies of human and machine control systems.

Primary influences on young W. were philosophers Spinoza and Leibniz - Spinoza for his somewhat mathematical approach to religion, and Leibniz for being a universalist [the last universal thinker – the last individual to hold the existent world of knowledge in his own head, so they say.]

After Harvard, Wiener took a travelling fellowship and met with Bertrand Russell, where he met up with Einstein’s works, and just basically became imbued in the heady environment around Russell. Russell built upon Boole, to forge a link between mathematics and philosophy [logic] that became a foundation work for modern computing. I take it Boole was a math cult thing until the days of Turing and Shannon.

Wiener never lost a fond attachment to Harvard, Mass., and its surroundings, where his father had a farm, and where Norbert grew up. Harvard the town is 16 mi. from Fitchburgh. He liked the fact that he could return there, and be himself, an eccentric genius, but a part of the order of things there. As his career continued at M.I.T. , he seemed to mix both theory and practice, and not to stray too far from one or the other. His basic practicality, neither conservative nor liberal, is seen in his critical comments on Russell’s personal 'preenings' [libertinisms] .

He differed from Russell, in another, more pointed, way. He was far from a Pacifist, and Russell was one of the most famous pacifists of all time. When he returned to the U.S. prior to the country’s entry into World War I, he repeatedly tried to join the army – but indexterity, poor vision, and bad marksmanship mitigated against his initial conscription. Early after his return he worked at the GE Factory in Lynn, Mass., and then in Albany, N.Y. at the Encyclopedia Americana [echoes of Jorge Borges!]. In 1918, math friend Veblen hired him as ‘computor’ at the U.S. Army Proving Grounds at Aberdeen, Maryland.

There he worked on range tables, which would ultimately lead, in World War II, when aircraft became the [moving] target, to his vision of cybernetics.

Wiener wrote autobiographically at some length. The notes here come upon reading “Norbert Wiener” by Pesi R. Masani.

iv.

Reading Player Piano. And remembering the factory cybernetic. A lot of these idea were in my head when I got a summer job on assembly lines at Johnson's Wax [if you ever get to Wisconsin, be sure in visit the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Johnson's Wax building - the factory moved many years ago.]

When I worked the Paste Wax line at Johnson's, we placed the lids on the cans (two of us) by hand. It could well have been the oldest line in the old factory. With so much cybernation around, it seemed primitive - something that could be automated. And I would look at the other lines (the Jubilee line with its ear shattering glass jostling was adjacent) and wonder how. Earl, the engineer, I remember him now in crew cut, white short sleeve shirt, tie, glasses and pocket protector, would come by and eye the process as well. This was me entering the world. When I worked the line, one day, my compatriot, Pedro did not come back from lunch. His girl friend shot him over his paycheck. Well, he was just 'winged' - and he was back in work the next day (hilariously using just one arm to put lids on cans).

When I worked the line: they would pump-in Muzak. Then by syndicated radio. Once a week, in some alternating pattern related to pay day: "Whistle While you Work."

Player Piano by Vonnegut describes the factory and the rise of automation in a dystopian but whimsical future. Machinists with their blackened hands. Great description of the punch press sound: 'Aw grump. Tonka Tonka. Aw grump. Tonka Tonka.' Vonnegut was something of a technical writer [a press release and story writer for GE in Schenectady, NY after WW II] and was quite aware of "Cybernetics" because Weiner's writings were prominent. Norbert Weiner appears on page 14 of Player Piano, he comes up in conversation about time and motion.  [See more on this below.

Adding to Wiener miscellany : Novelist Thomas Pynchon noted that he was influenced by Norbert Weiner's then popular "The Human Use of Human Being" which discussed entropy in relation to communication. Yet as far as I can tell, Pynchon 's interest in entropy - his title for a short story that garnered him award and attention ahead of V -  was in physics terms (Universal Heat Death) which Weiner had studied considerably  and not related to  Wiener's communications research.

 

v.

Norbert Weiner [1894? -1964?] is definitely the father of cybernetics – and an influential thinker on the phenomenon of feedback. He was a brilliant mathematician, and, just like a movie math genius in his day and others, he was a little batty -  he was absent of social artifice - as he would creatively and readily follow lines of thought and forgo the important social and practical niceties. He as thus unlike in manner to a lot of his more competitive colleagues during the defining experience of World War II.[Thinking of Vannevar Bush, inventor of most powerful analog computer, most especially.

Now, cybernetics - the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems - never became much of a science unto itself, except, for a while, in the Soviet Union. Some of its interests informed AI which never became much of a science either. But regulatory system study continues, and people continue to find out things, and they generally should thank Weiner for in some way setting the stage.

[Cybernetics has a moment in the brief Socialist regime [1970-1973?] of Salvador Allende. Before CIA 'influencers' sponsored Augusto Pinochet and company's junta, Allende's democratically government was trying to bring a new form of socialism that was data driven. In those days, what might pass for the big data enterprise today would be called cybernetics. This school of technology, founded by Norbert Wiener, studied feedback in systems, be they animal or machine. The automatic pilot was perhaps cybernetics crowning achievement. In the Chile case, technologist Stanford Beers was enlisted to bring the magic of realtime feedback to state planning. It was way ahead of its time, and burdened by lethal sniping.]

My take on reading Dark Hero of the Information Age, a biography of Weiner, is that Weiner could best be considered as a theorist although one who was most interested in practical applications. He worked with engineers, but he wasn’t really of them.

Together with Bigelow in 1942 he worked to build a statistical predictor, or anti-aircraft firing system. Out of such efforts much significant technology arose. But my reading of Dark Hero leads me to conclude Weiner’s efforts were influential but not effectual. His predictor did not improve much on a Bell Labs predictor, although it may have been more elegant and forward looking in design in aspects. Still for me he is crucial.

Vonnegut and Weiner

Reading and so it goes for Kurt Vonnegut a life by Charles J Shields page 97 vonnegut is working at General Electric in Schenectady the job he got through his brother a company scientist who among other work experimented with seeding clouds to create rain. Kurt fudged his application form saying he graduated from college. In fact,  he had attended Cornell and another school without graduating.

 

We will find him at the GE Schenectady works among full time publishing staff that created manuals examinations and visual aids and promotional stories on GE advances in all kinds of publications. He had previously worked as a newspaper man, and readily found targets for story ideas about the company’s progressive technology.

 

The author Shields says Vonnegut was initially very positive about working at the company he wrote for example about sodium lights. Among favored projects was an oral history with some of GE famed long time researchers headed to retirement.

 

General Electric was all about progress. The company motto was “Progress is our most important product.” [Recalling tonight a train trip from Chicago to Boston, and an interminable evening’s wait in Schenectady [for a NY train to connect] near GE which was a limitless industrial complex of otherworldly sodium lighting.]

 

He bemoaned on occasion his classification as a science fiction writer, saying the fact that he had technology in stories should not consign him to such a category.

 

But the experience was to sour and in the end would see Schenectady serving as a setting for his first novel - Player Piano.

 

Page 123 play it piano saw a cameo [of sorts] appearance by Norbert Weiner - the father of cybernetics. Player Piano [a droll title choice as the paper punch-roll programmed instrument put a few ticklers out of work in its day.

 

Player piano was very much about automation and dehumanization as a result of computerization. Kurt sent a copy of player Piano galleys to Weiner who bridled at the books  insertion of a John von Neumann character. Why don't you change the name? he asked.

 

Later on Cape Cod, It was a struggling artist version of KV that was to follow. Writing novels. Trying to pay for his family's needs by selling stories to Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. Knowing the different magazines of the day that placed short fiction would come to an end with the Golden Age of television emerging. He quickly realized that work orders for magazine fiction would have to give way to television show scripts that he couldn’t quite hit with. 

That he may have been able to swim in the same lane as a Playhouse writer and Twilight Zone founder Rod Serling is clear in such works as "Harrison Bergeron" a short story that ran in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's set in the year 2081, when everyone is equal. As described by Shields, this future worked because "Nobody was any smarter than anybody else." Ballerinas must wear disabling weights, for example. Something amusing to liberals of those days, and libertarians of today, I'd guess.

When his father died he inherited money which mostly was wasted on the effort to start a foreign car dealership in Osterville on the Cape. The hope was it would work magically, and he could just write. The bottom feeder market of paperback reprints sold in ‘dime stores and bus stations’ would have to serve as his golden path.