On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Part 2, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Part 2, Chapter 2: The Regulative Function of Culture in the Relation between Man and the World of Technical Objects. Current Problems.

In this chapter Simondon makes his case for mechanology as a corrective to the historical and cultural failure to properly make sense of the relationship between humans and machines. He starts back again with the Encyclopedists: they did not understand machines as fully automata; instead, they still thought of them as assemblages of devices, in other words, at the level of the element. This led to a false sense of, and belief in, continuous progress (because it is possible to see such continuous progress in the saturation/concretization of elements; if they had been thinking at the level of individuals or ensembles (I think he would say), progress would not only appear “serrated” in S’s terminology, it would also not be misunderstood as some mystical process that happens by itself).

In any event, it is the way change happens at the level of the element in the 18^th century, which characterizes that period’s mix of euphoria and anxiety regarding technology. Euphoria arises from the experience of continuous improvement ongoing during that time; anxiety in this period regards “those transformations that provoke a break within the rhythms of everyday life, making the old habitual gestures useless” (130). S delineates an interesting distinction between tools and instruments, “if by tool one understands the technical object enabling one to prolong and arm the body in order to accomplish a gesture, and by instrument the technical object that enables one to prolong and adapt the body in order to achieve better perception.” He gives an interesting discussion on how many tools will be both tool and instrument, for instance a hammer also gives feedback to the user on the resistance and movement of the nail being driven; his point is though that in this case the hammer is still primarily a tool, since its quality as an instrument is subordinate to its use as a tool; he holds that this is still the case even when a mason uses a hammer to tap a wall to get a sense of its composition. In contrast, telescopes, microscopes, etc. are instruments, pure and simple.

With the advent of “complete technical individuals” in the 19^th century, the previous anxiety with technological change becomes much more acute, as there are now machines which replace humans.

It is not necessarily through its size that the factory distinguishes itself from the craftsman’s workshop, but through the change in relation between the technical object and the human being: the factory is a technical ensemble that is comprised of auto­matic machines, whose activity is parallel to that of human activity; the factory uses true technical individuals, whereas, in the workshop, it is man who lends his individuality to the accomplishment of technical actions. (131)

The progress of the nineteenth century can no longer be experienced by the individual, because it is no longer centralized with the individual as the center of command and perception in the adapted action. (132)

The notion of progress thus “splits in two,” as humans lose their earlier “kinesthetic” contact with technology, and alongside the sense of progress exists a growing anxiety due to the disconnection with technology and its growing incomprehensibility of scale.

Progress is henceforth thought of as cosmic, at the level of its overall results. It is thought abstractly, intellectually, in a doctrinal manner. Progress is no longer thought by craftsmen, but by mathematicians, who conceive of progress as man taking possession of nature.

“The individual who thinks progress is not the same individual as the one who works,” S argues – note that, in contrast to, e.g., Braverman, or Bookchin, who made the same historical observation, S attributes this differentiation between the thinker and the worker to the effects of the societal experience of this stage of technological development (viz., of the technical individual), rather than to the social or economic order per se. For all S’s disavowal of having any dialectic going on in his account of history, his model does feel like it has the somewhat dissociated clockwork effect of an idealist dialectic, in which stages just somehow follow each other (his invocation of context, experience, etc. being too a priori to be properly termed materialist, imho).

S in fact goes on to argue that his account provides a deeper understanding of alienation than that of the Marxist concept, which is, in S’s view, superficial, merely “juridical and economic”:

Beneath this juridical and economic relation exists an even more profound relation, that of the continuity between the human individual and the technical individual, or of the discontinuity between these two beings. … The alienation of man in relation to the machine does not only have a socio-economic sense; it also has a physio-psychological sense; the machine no longer prolongs the corporeal schema, neither for workers, nor for those who possess the machines. (133)

He goes on to state that bankers, etc., are just as alienated as anyone else, despite not being exploited for their labor – and quickly dismisses Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as an explanation for this – his ultimate point being, basically, that everyone is alienated and has only a partial understanding of contemporary technology and its relation to the human. It could be quite easily demonstrated that Simondon is not accurately representing or engaging with the full elaboration of the process of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (and the first kind, alienation from nature, would pretty much cover the “machinic alienation” or whatever you might call it, that he is trying to outline; he could also be said to be describing what Marx would see as the role of automation as an aspect of real subsumption). But his agenda is actually, once again, to explain away any given subject-position within society as partial and alienated, thus showing the need for a new mechanological perspective.

The perspectives of both labor and capital are “late” (presumably meaning “outdated”) with regard to the modern technical individual; and the “dialogue” or struggle between the two is “false because it is of the past” (134). [To the extent that there is a validity to the stages of technical development and awareness that S elaborates, his error is the presentist one, in supposing that each stage completely displaces or supplants the previous stages, instead of layering over and interacting with the previous stages complexly]. [And this is an aspect of how his account reads like an old-fashioned, simplistic idealist dialectic (like, say, Stirner’s (sorry, Max!)) instead of, say, more nuanced Bakhtinian dialogism).]

S concludes this discussion with a much clearer exposition of his concept of finality (which I confess I was a bit confused by in the previous chapter). It is, basically, instrumentalism, and it shapes and limits the perspectives of both the worker and the capitalist. They understand machines, thus, in terms of the purpose for which they are put to work; this [external condition?] prevents them from understanding the “internal coherence” of the machine, and thus its true nature. The development of which understanding will, of course, be the goal of the mechanologist.

He goes on to discuss the ideal form of coupling between human and machine as equals, in other words with the human “not merely as a being who directs or utilizes it through the incorporation of ensembles, or as a being who serves it by supplying matter and elements. … There is an inter-individual coupling between man and machine when the same self-regulating functions are better and more subtly accomplished by the man-machine couple than by man or machine alone” (135).

To illustrate this, he posits a difference between how the memories of machines and humans work, and how they can work together combining their distinct strengths. Machines can only record; their memory does not even strictly speaking contain forms (because this would require an awareness of these forms), “but merely a translation of forms, by means of an encoding in a spatial or temporal distribution” (136). Humans are required to perceive the forms recorded in machine memory. This indifference to form is a strength of machine memory, in that it allows it to record “elements without order;” human memory, in contrast, requires a sense of order in order to remember. Also, though machine memory has a certain plasticity, this is the plasticity of being able to be written and erased. Human memory, less reliably “monomorphic” and reliable than machine memory, nevertheless also has the ability to infer and interpret, aka the “plasticity of integration” (137), and thus is able to draw on experience and memory to make predictions and fill in gaps in its knowledge. Thus, the proper context for the “coupling” of human and machine memory is those complex procedures in which both are needed.

This leads to a reiteration of S’s insistence that “Despite appearances, it is, on the contrary, the truly automatic machine that least replaces man” (139); this is still true a priori, because (in previous chapters) he has defined automata as lacking any “margin of indeterminacy” or openness (and machines which do have such a margin of indeterminacy are not “automata”); human interlocutors are thus necessary in any operation more complex than pushing a button to start and end an automatic process.

It becomes a reasonable question as to whether the development of machine learning has led this aspect of Simondon’s thought to become outdated, with potential consequences for his entire model of ideal human-machine interaction. Surely, Simondon is aware that automata can involve sensors and actuators, and thus be open to outside information; it is just that they are limited in their ability to respond. Thus, an air-conditioner can turn on and off in response to ambient temperatures, but it cannot turn itself off because the water-drain line is backing up – unless such a capacity has been built into the machine. A human observer, in contrast, needs no previous specific programming to go “oh shit, the water is backing up” and take some action in response. [Though it still seems to me, that the difference between closed/automatic system and open/ad hoc system should be a continuum, not a binary as S treats it.]

Briefly reviewing a few recent articles which discuss machine learning in a theoretical context informed by Simondon, we can see Rantala and Muilu (2023: 8) asserting that machine learning does have a “margin of indeterminacy” but that learning machines are still limited by their programming in terms of their ability to respond. Haworth (2020), discussing the “possibility of independently creative machines,” argues that the very idea of these machines as “independently creative” is based on the “fantasy of absolute autonomy” whereby we imagine ourselves as sovereign subjects instead of as parts of complex human-machine ensembles (and then, in a nightmarish vision, transfer this autonomy to the uncanny action of machines, instead of recognizing that they, as well, are more accurately understood as also embedded in such ensembles). Haworth thus seems to follow the Simondonian line of dismissing “the Robot” as a nonsensical figment, instead of addressing the question directly as to whether machine learning can or could render learning machines independent of any need for human interaction.

In any case, machines need humans as servants, technicians, or organizers; the self-regulation of automata is not enough for the machine to comprehend “the whole of the milieu,” for which both human and machine are required (139-40).

S criticizes the “autocratic philosophy” of the technocrats, who seek to use machines as slaves; the human should be at the same level as the machine, not an inferior, nor a superior. He embarks on a discussion of the limitations of 19^th century understanding of machines; “The nineteenth century could produce only a technological techno­cratic philosophy because it discovered engines and not regulations” (i.e., feedback/information theory). He discusses examples of 19^th century technology in which there is no distinction between the energy channel, and the information channel; understanding the different needs of these, and developing distinct channels, is the key aspect of progress in 20^th century technics; this changes even the concept of efficiency, which is different for the flow of information than it is for energy used in production, motive force, etc.

This leads him into an interesting discussion of information, which requires that its channel of transmisson be capable of variability – consistent order, always the same, cannot transmit new information. Thus, information bears a resemblance to chance, yet it must, ultimately, be distinguishable from both order/form and pure chance, as a sort of intermediate entity (150). The distinction between form and information is linked to that between the machine and the human:

There is, in effect, an important gap between the living thing and the machine, and consequently between man and machine, which comes from the fact that the living thing needs information, while the machine essentially uses forms, and is so to speak con­stituted with forms. …

The human individual thus appears as having to convert the forms deposited into machines into information; the operating of machines does not give rise to information, but is simply an assemblage and a modification of forms; the functioning of a machine has no sense, and cannot give rise to true information signals for another machine; a living being is required as mediator in order to interpret a given functioning in terms of information, and in order to convert it into the forms for another machine.

[Returning us again to the question as to whether this stark opposition is still valid, and/or whether this is a useful way to define “automata.”]

He goes now into reiterating the difference between his view and that of the cyberneticians, based on the progress of his discussion to this point. “The machine is a deposited fixed human gesture that has become a stereotypy and the power to restart” (151). The cyberneticists overemphasize the analogy between machines and living organisms, but the truth is that the former “neither nourishes itself , nor perceives, nor rests,” like an actual living organism. He continues for several pages with a discussion of the distinction (from Bergson with some amendments) between open and closed machines, the former allowing for some margin of indeterminacy, and the latter are true automata, per his definition.

He returns to the key concept of transduction, with the example of a continuous relay that converts (transduces) potential into actual energy; information is also linked to this moment of transduction: “It is during the course of this passage from potential to actual that information comes into play; information is the condition of actualization” (155). The concept of transducer is expanded to “a regulative function in all machines having a certain margin of localized indeterminacy in their func­tioning;” in turn, humans, and all living creatures, are also transducers, as convertors/modulators of potential into actual energy. This capacity as transducer is part of what ensures a particular role for humans in the human/machine assemblage:

It is in fact very easy to construct machines that ensure a much greater accumulation of energy compared to that which man can accumulate in his body; it is equally possible to use artificial systems that constitute effectors that are supe­rior to those of the human body. But it is very difficult to construct transducers comparable to the living thing. (156)

In fact the “transducers” found in machines are not actually fully “transducers,” according to Simondon’s definition [arguably, this is a result of his practice of constructing definitions from presumed essences; cf. my earlier criticisms of his definition of “automata”], because of the role of information; machines must be given information, while living things can give themselves information [this seems to be relevant to the example I gave above with the air conditioner]. Machines can only approach problems according to the way they have been programmed; they cannot “solve” problems because this involves that extra, human, step of inference/transduction:

To solve a problem is to be able to step over it, to be capable of recasting the forms that are given within the problem and in which it consists. The solution of real problems is a vital function presupposing a recurrent mode of action that cannot exist in the machine: the recurrence of the future with respect to the present, of the virtual with respect to the actual. There is no true virtuality in a machine; the machine cannot reform its forms in order to solve a problem.

Machines can generate information but they cannot understand it unless it is presented or “given” to them, and this requires the human as a “witness,” transducing this information and representing the machines to each other (157). S concludes this section with a discussion of culture’s current inability to think correctly about the human-machine relation; “culture is unjust toward the machine” (158), and this is illustrated by comparison to cultural stereotypes of foreigners, etc., which are the product of limited familiarity and experience; with greater familiarity and experience these stereotypes can be unlearned, and a better understanding achieved.

Finally S turns to his main point, which is the conditions giving rise to an improved cultural understanding of the relationship between humans and machines, a la mechanology:

The advent of the conditions allowing man to see the technical relation functioning in an objective way is the prime condition for the incorporation of the knowledge of technical reality and of the values implied by its existence into culture. Now, these conditions are realized in the technical ensembles employing machines that have a sufficient degree of indeterminacy. For man, the action of having to inter­vene as a mediator in this relation between machines grants him a situation of independence in which he can acquire a cultural vision of technical realities. … Only a situation in which there is a concrete link with machines and a responsibility toward them, but which is liberated vis-à-vis each one taken individually, can provide this serenity of having technical awareness. (159)

This perspective will not be achieved from a practical use of machines (governed by an instrumental “finality”), nor from the partial perspectives from below (viz., the workers) or above (owners, overseers, etc.):

It is rather difficult for a worker to know technicity through the aspects and modalities of his daily work on a machine. It is also difficult for a man who is the owner of machines and who considers them productive capital to know their essential technicity. It is the mediator of the rela­tion between machines alone who can discover this particular form of wisdom. (160)

However, there is not yet a “social place” or role corresponding to this mediating perspective; it would be that of the production planning engineer, except that this role is also, like those of the owners and workers, governed by the limitations of “finality.” So what is needed is—surprise!--a “psychologist” or “sociologist” of machines, “what we might call a mechanologist.”

He ends with a discussion of the relation of this mechanology to its precursor, cybernetics. Cybernetics is clearly a first step, full of promise, but hampered by several limitations, which is why it needs to be transcended. In passing, S criticizes Wiener’s simplistic opposition of information to noise [S having, in this chapter, identified information as being, rather, intermediate between form and chance] and for his faith in homeostasis [as opposed to S’s serrated evolution]. More importantly, S takes issue with Wiener’s pessimism, as W has mistakenly, and unsuccessfully, been trying to get cybernetic understanding into the minds of the powerful. S sagely advises:

For it is difficult to make philosophers kings and kings philosophers. It often hap­pens that philosophers who have become kings cease to be philosophers. The true mediation between technics and power cannot be individual. It can be realized only through the mediation of culture. For there is something that allows man to govern: the culture he has received; it is this culture that gives him significations and values; it is culture that governs man, even if this man in turn governs other men and machines. (161)

The power of culture comes from the “great mass” of the governed; power in this model flows upward, not downward from the elites. [This may sound at first like an almost anarchist or democratic sentiment, but it is rather that of the enlightened elite, who recognize the source of their power; cf. Ruskin.]

In a time when the development of technics was poor, the elaboration of culture by governed men was enough for the government to think the problems of the group as a whole: because it went from human group to human group via the government, the recurrence of causality and information was complete and accom­plished. But this is no longer true: the basis of culture is still exclusively human; it is elaborated by the group of men; however, having gone through government, it returns and applies itself to the human group on the one hand and to machines on the other: machines are ruled by a culture that has not been elaborated according to them, and from which they are absent; this culture is inadequate for them and does not represent them. (162)

So culture, as the source of power and of understanding, fails to prepare us for the technical reality of our age because it has not caught up. Machines have yet to be properly “represented” in culture the way humans are (e.g., in literature, as S discusses). Thus, the task of the mechanologist is to transform culture by means of this more accurate representation, and to do this they need to understand the essence of technicity, not via “inductive study” [which led the cyberneticists astray] but by “a direct examination of technicity according to a genetic method that must be attempted, by employing a philosophical method” (163).

Haworth, Michael, (2020) “Automating Art: Gilbert Simondon and the Possibility of Independently Creative Machines.” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 7:1, 17-32.

Rantala, Juho; and Mirka Muilu, (2023) “Simondon, Control, and the Digital Domain.” Theory, Culture & Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02632764231201337

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 10

Summary of Chapter 10: Some Communication Machines and Their Future

Whereas the last chapter was about automata replacing workers, this one will address “a variety of problems concerning automata,” more specifically, automata of three categories: 1) some which “serve either to illustrate and throw light on the possibilities of communicative mechanisms in gen­eral,” 2) a few which serve as “the prosthesis and replacement of human functions which have been lost or weakened in certain unfortunate individuals,” and finally 3) those with a more sinister potential (163).

He discusses his tropism machine, called alternately the Moth or the Bedbug depending on whether it has been programmed to seek or avoid light; this has been developed to illustrate the role of competing types of feedback in the tremors of people with Parkinson’s. [There is a website with photos and discussion.]

Such machines may appear to be “exercises in virtuosity” (167) but they have been actually useful to a degree; there is another class of machines which provide more direct health benefits: better prostheses, readers for the blind, etc. He discusses his idea for a machine to communicate language using touch, as better than visible speech; (the so-called “hearing glove” which was apparently later tried with Helen Keller, but did not meet with much success).

Wiener gives a cybernetic three-stage description of “language,” by which he means speech (168-9; cf. Chapter 4). He notes that “deaf-mutes” can easily learn lip reading, but speak harshly and this is “inefficient.”

The difficulties lie in the fact that for these people the act of conversation has been broken into two entirely separate parts. (170)

He discusses this in relation to the “sidetone” feedback of hearing one’s own voice in telephony, and also to the Vocoder speech synthesizer by Bell, which greatly reduces the information in human speech but is still understandable and recognizable, leading to a distinction between “used and unused information in speech:”

When we distinguish between used and unused in­formation in speech, we distinguish between the maximum coding capacity of speech as received by the ear, and the maximum capacity that penetrates through the cascade network of successive stages con­sisting of the ear followed by the brain. (172)

The reduction of information in the message is necessary to be able to transfer the information from the medium of speech through “an inferior sense like touch.”

From this point on, the chief direction of investigation must be that of the more thorough training of deaf-mutes in the recogni­tion and the reproduction of sounds. (173)

[In other words, his focus is on getting “deaf-mutes” to be able to speak more clearly; basically to invent a device to assimilate them to the speaking population, rather than using sign language (which he has not mentioned as a fascinating alternative medium, which loses certain capacities of speech but opens up many more).]

He gives the example of an artificial lung which uses “the nor­mal feedback in the medulla and brain stem of the healthy person will be used even in the paralytic to supply the control of his breathing. Thus it is hoped, that the so-called iron lung may no longer be a prison in which the patient forgets how to breathe, but will be an exerciser for keeping his residual faculties of breathing active, and even possibly of building them up to a point where he can breathe for himself and emerge from the machinery enclosing him.” (174)

He now turns to more sinister machines, beginning with his own idea for a chess machine, and discusses the limited possibilities of chess machines in his day: one that could plan two steps ahead was thought of as optimal, the idea of creating an actually perfect or good player was “hopeless.”

The number of combinations increases roughly in geometrical pro­gression. Thus the difference between playing out all possibilities for two moves and for three moves is enor­mous. To play out a game—something like fifty moves— is hopeless in any reasonable time. (175)

The problem is the slowness; Shannon has an idea to take the game further than two moves, but it would probably get slower and slower (and not make the time limits in the rules). Its play would be “stiff and uninteresting” but possibly good, and chance could be introduced to prevent humans from beating it methodically.

Though we have seen that machines can be built to learn, the technique of building and employing these machines is still very imperfect. (177)

He makes a comment that now seems prescient in regard to various recent chat AIs which turned racist, etc.:

A chess-playing machine which learns might show a great range of performance, dependent on the quality of the players against whom it had been pitted. The best way to make a master machine would probably be to pit it against a wide variety of good chess players. On the other hand, a well-contrived machine might be more or less ruined by the injudicious choice of its opponents. A horse is also ruined if the wrong riders are allowed to spoil it. (177)

[Though on stating this it occurs to me that I am treating racism the same way as I have accused Wiener of doing, as an irrational anomaly rather than as a central part of the functioning of social inequality.]

He notes two kinds of learning machines, those characterized by preference (“a statistical preference for a certain sort of behavior, which nevertheless admits the possibility of other behavior”) or by constraint (“certain features of its behavior may be rigidly and unalterably deter­mined”). [And the chess playing machine he mentions would be a hybrid of these, with the rules programmed in as constraints, but still learning “tactics and policies” through preference.]

Shannon has already pointed out the potential military applications of such learning machines, as has a Dominican priest Dubarle, in a review of Wiener’s Cybernetics. Wiener quotes Dubarle at length regarding the possible misuse of a machine à gouverner. Dubarle makes a point that machines can only understand human behavior through probability:

At all events, human realities do not admit a sharp and certain determination, as numerical data of computa­tion do. They only admit the determination of their prob­able values. A machine to treat these processes, and the problems which they put, must therefore undertake the sort of probabilistic, rather than deterministic thought, such as is exhibited for example in modern computing machines. (179)

The machines à gouv­erner will define the State as the best-informed player at each particular level; and the State is the only su­preme co-ordinator of all partial decisions. These are enormous privileges; if they are acquired scientifically, they will permit the State under all circumstances to beat every player of a human game other than itself by offering this dilemma : either immediate ruin, or planned co-operation.

[This is] the adventure of our century: hesitation between an indefinite turbulence of human affairs and the rise of a prodigious Leviathan. In comparison with this, Hobbes’ Leviathan was nothing but a pleasant joke. We are run­ning the risk nowadays of a great World State, where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind. (180)

Dubarle’s somewhat weak proposal in response:

Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters.

Wiener notes that the machine itself would not be all-powerful (because “too crude and imperfect”) but would enable those who control it to become so:

or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and in­different to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically. (181)

[or as it turns out so far, corporations focused only on manipulating partial identities for profit.]

The great weakness of the machine—the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it—is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that character­izes the human situation. The dominance of the ma­chine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state.

He provides an interesting reflection on how this sort of philosophical possibility becomes the foundation of a non-technological (per se) way of thinking in the context of the cold war:

A sort of machine à gouverner is thus now essentially in operation on both sides of the world con­flict, although it does not consist in either case of a single machine which makes policy, but rather of a mechanistic technique which is adapted to the exigen­cies of a machine-like group of men devoted to the formation of policy. (182)

Wiener echoes Dubarle’s call for getting some kinder, gentler experts in on the decision-making:

In order to avoid the manifold dangers of this, both external and internal, he is quite right in his emphasis on the need for the anthropologist and the philosopher. In other words, we must know as scientists what man’s nature is and what his built-in purposes are, even when we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and as statesmen; and we must know why we wish to control him.

[And so, the Macy conferences. But isn’t it this very, Dewey-esque or Kerr-esque view of the university/scholarly world that is currently dissolving, the idea that somehow the humanists and social scientists (and Dubarle perhaps hoped, the theologians) would temper the excesses of the technocrats?]

He emphasizes that “the machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it,” and distinguishes between “know-how” and “know-what:”

Our papers have been making a great deal of Amer­ican “know-how” ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than “know-how” and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is “know­-what” by which we determine not only how to accom­plish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be. (183)

Again, the problem is not actual exploitation or capitalism or anything like that per se, but a lack of sense of direction in where we want to develop technology, or thoughts on how it will actually affect the world (and this appears today in the “Oops, our bad” discourse on the accidental side effects of ChatGPT, art generators, etc.). Wiener turns to the lessons of fairy tales (e.g., you find a bottle with a genie in it, leave the genie in the bottle and don’t make wishes) as illustrations of “the tragic view of life which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess” and which Americans need to learn (183-4). The myth of Prometheus serves as an example of the ambivalent attitude of the ancient Greeks toward technology, which we moderns could learn from.

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. It is a dangerous world, in which there is no security, save the somewhat negative one of humility and restrained ambitions. (184)

If a man with this tragic sense approaches, not fire, but another manifestation of original power, like the splitting of the atom, he will do so with fear and trembling. He will not leap in where angels fear to tread, unless he is prepared to accept the punishment of the fallen angels. Neither will he calmly transfer to the machine made in his own image the responsi­bility for his choice of good and evil, without con­tinuing to accept a full responsibility for that choice.

Modern Americans, lacking a sense of “know-what,” continually get trapped by their blind faith in technology. He compares intelligent machines to two kinds of fairy-tale device, the magical monkey’s paw (which is always very literal-minded), and the genie in the bottle (which is mercurial and disinterested in human happiness). The former is the more constrained and thus literal device; the latter the kind which learns through preference. “For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind” (185).

Moving beyond literal machines, he returns to the point he had made earlier about the dangerous rise of machine-like organization and thinking in the Twentieth Century:

When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human be­ings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to ma­chines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right an­swers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. (185-6)

He ends with another reference to evil, perhaps meant to help accustom American readers to a “tragic” mindset:

The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door. (186)

 

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 9

 

Summary of Chapter 9: The First and the Second Industrial Revolution [sic]

In this chapter Wiener gives an overview of the history of technological development, with an eye to distinguishing between the First Industrial Revolution, which was primarily about machines replacing human and animal labor, and the Second Industrial Revolution, which he saw as commencing about his time and projected to continue over the next several decades, and in which “automatic control machines” will be increasingly used to automate more and more of the production process. He attempts to feel out the relationships between various determinants – technological determinism in the form of the material qualities and [affordances] of technology at a certain time (and path-dependency), as against social and historical context. One of the main points he insists on is the value of seeing communication as not simply something that happens between humans, but also between humans and machines, and between machines and machines (not to mention, within a machine).

He discusses the problem of longitude in the history of navigation, and the influence of this on clockmaking and optics, which later influenced the Industrial Revolution; in part because these required delicate instruments.

It is an interesting reflection that every tool has a genealogy, and that it is descended from the tools by which it has itself been constructed.  (138-9)

He connects this to the necessary role of machines in constructing many modern machines; the available skill and ability to invent exists in an [assemblage] of humans and tools, existing at any given point in time. This drives the form which the industrial revolution takes:

It is thus entirely natural that those who were to develop new inventions were either clockmakers or scientific-instrument makers themselves, or called on people of these crafts to help them. (139)

One of the first steps forward is the use of the Watt steam engine to pump water out of mines, replacing brutal and exhausting human and animal labor:

The use of the steam engine to replace this servitude must certainly be re­garded as a great humanitarian step forward. (140)

[as if was simply the older technology, not the concept or function of a silver mine per se, that had been inhumane]

In the textile industry, in contrast, Wiener admits, “here, the machine worsened the condition of workers” (141). This leads into a discussion of the cause of the brutalities of the early industrial revolution:

A great deal of this was due to the fact that new tech­niques had produced new responsibilities, at a time at which no code had yet arisen to take care of these responsibilities. There was, however, a phase which was of greater technical than moral significance.

[By that second sentence he means the brutality was due to how the machinery necessarily operated, rather than to "any moral obtuse­ness or iniquity on the part of those concerned." Such “moral obtuseness” and “iniquity” do play a role, and continue to today; his point is that it takes time for a “code” to “arise” and be embraced by industrialists, regulators, and so on, limiting such moral obtuseness. It is to be noticed that, while he is interested in materialist explanations for technological change, on the social side he is purely idealist.]

He sees great importance in the difference between early factories, with one power source powering all machines (connected by shafts, etc. to communicate/transform rotary motion) and the 20th century kind, in which machines have their own engines powered by electricity; an effect of the change from mechanical to electric/wired transmission of power. Power is no longer one of the reasons for machines to be grouped together, allowing for a potential "return to cottage industry" (143).

I do not wish to insist that the difficulties of mechan­ical transmission were the only cause of the shed factories and of the demoralization they produced. In­deed, the factory system started before the machine system, as a means of introducing discipline into the highly undisciplined home industry of the individual workers, and of keeping up standards of production. 

[Basically he is trying to argue the point of something like the material potential of a technological system, as against the effects of [social organization, though he just says "moral"]; if the "fractional horse-power motor" had been available at the start of the Industrial Revolution, centralized factories might not have had to have replaced the cottage industry.]

He has an interesting discussion of the effects of this technological development on the distribution of knowledge among different categories of workers and creators attempting to solve such issues as the loss of power through entropy, and the amplification problem. In the older, mechanical system, there was a need for all kinds of “dodges and devices” based on the cunning of craftsmen; these are no longer needed with the newer electrical transmission, based on scientific knowledge and theory:

The design of machines involving such parts has been transferred from the domain of the skilled shopworker to that of the research-laboratory man; and in this he has all the available tools of circuit theory to replace a mechanical ingenuity of the old sort. Invention in the old sense has been supplanted by the intelligent employment of cer­tain laws of nature. The step from the laws of nature to their employment has been reduced by a hundred times. (146)

[A good paragraph to consider in relation to Braverman, or to Detienne and Vernant.]

Wiener’s distinction between the promise he sees in technological development, and the failure of human societies to use those technologies to their full potential, can be seen in his discussion of the invention of radio:

Let not the fact that this great triumph of invention has largely been given over to the soap-opera and the hillbilly singer, blind one to the excellent work that was done in developing it, and to the great civilizing possibilities which have been per­verted into a national medicine-show. (147)

Another theme he returns to several times is the importance of war in driving technological change, for example in the use of vacuum tubes. Another is the knock-on effect of automation: improvements in computing machines since the war means they are faster than humans, and thus more aspects of their operation (and related operations) have also to be automated, to keep up with them:

Their speed has long since reached such a level that any intermediate human intervention in their work is out of the question. Thus they offer the same need to replace human capacities by machine capacities as those which we found in the anti-aircraft computer. (151)

The possibility of automation thus becomes a need for automation; this is achieved by [delegating] more aspects of communication and control to machine-machine relations, rather than to the older, slower, human-human relations:

The parts of the machine must speak to one another through an appropriate language, without speaking to any person or listening to any person, except in the terminal and initial stages of the process. Here again we have an element which has contributed to the general acceptance of the extension to machines of the idea of communication.

He outlines the differences he sees between the first industrial revolution, and the incipient/upcoming second industrial revolution:

except for a considerable number of isolated examples, the industrial revolution up to the present has displaced man and the beast as a source of power, without making any great impression on other human functions. (153-4)

This has led to the devaluation of human labor:

In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy.

[This is kind of nonsensical, because of course manual labor still exists, and someone is obviously paying for it; and he will even mention the continuing need for "low-grade labor" later on. It seems more of an unthinking ideological restatement of the cheapness of labor being some inherent factor due to the present technological context, rather than to its exploitation; Wiener is capable of saying smarter things, when he stops to think first.]

“Let us now go on to a picture of a more completely automatic age.” He discusses how computers will become cheap enough to be used to run factories, through the development of sensors and effectors. Unlike the computers of his day, these will not be disembodied brains, but “will correspond to the complete an­imal with sense organs, effectors, and proprioceptors” (157).

Again, part of the process of change is not merely within the capacities of computing machines, but in the way of organizing production; the concept of “programming,” he notes, comes from Taylorization of factories, and is then incorporated into computing, rather than the other way around. The simplification/rationalization of work processes and flows pre-adapts them to automation by computers:

That which can be done then by a technique so stand­ardized that it can be put in the hands of a statistical computer who does not understand the logic behind it, may also be executed by a computing machine. (158)

[“Statistical computer” in that sentence refers to a human (what we now call computers are “computing machines” to Wiener); an interesting application of the Chinese Room scenario]. The upshot is that clerical and accounting work in factories can also be done by computing machines. There still may be a use of "low-grade labor":

But even a large part of the outside correspondence may be received from the correspondents on punched cards, or transferred to punched cards by extremely low-grade labor. From this stage on, everything may go by machine. (159)

The managerial viewpoint of all this is quite evident (per Braverman, the more expensive skilled workers are the first to be replaced, leaving only “low-grade labor” if this is cheaper than machines. However, Wiener also notes that “the machine plays no favorites be­tween manual labor and white-collar labor” although, in contrast, it will be the less-skilled white collar workers, “performing judgments of a low level” who will be replaced by “machinery of judgment”[not MIT professors! Whew!]

Some jobs will be safe from automation, due to the costs or variability of work:

I cannot see automatic ma­chinery of the judgment-replacing type coming into use in the corner grocery, or in the corner garage, al­though I can very well see it employed by the whole­sale grocer and the automobile manufacturer. The farm laborer too, although he is beginning to be pressed by automatic machinery, is protected from the full pres­sure of it because of the ground he has to cover, the variability of the crops he must till, and the special conditions of weather and the like that he must meet.

These changes might take another ten to twenty years, or sooner if there is a war, because of the demands on labor supply of infantry in a major war, and thus the need to replace human production in industry:

Thus a new war will almost inevitably see the auto­matic age in full swing within less than five years. (161)

He turns to the economic and social consequences of the second industrial revolution:

In the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely repeti­tive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for man's full cultural development.

[This is the typical talk of automation as savior of workers from those “deadly uninteresting” jobs; Braverman again is the key corrective to this, having shown how deskilling was the result of the first part of this [control revolution], and how it continues to be skilled workers who are more likely to be replaced than “low-grade labor.”]

It may also produce cultural re­sults as trivial and wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the radio and the movies.

[This is Wiener’s suspicion of the capitalist system speaking, concerned more with its triviality and noise than with social inequality.]

There is also likely to be "an immediate transitional period of disastrous confusion." He provides a criticism of industrialists/entrepreneurs and their selfishness, which is legitimated by “the traditional American philosophy of progress.” A few prescient passages could have been written about the social media and "sharing economy" appsplosion of the 2010s:

We also know that they have very few inhibitions when it comes to taking all the profit out of an industry that there is to be taken, and then letting the public pick up the pieces.

Under these circumstances, industry will be flooded with the new tools to the extent that they appear to yield immediate profits, irrespective of what long-time damage they can do.

He interestingly compares automation to slave labor, and predicts this will have a disastrous effect on employment, in this case due not only to the capacity of the technology itself, but to the ways in which it is likely to be exploited by selfish capitalists:

Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor.  Any labor which competes with slave labor must ac­cept the economic conditions of slave labor. (162)

He predicts unemployment and a depression far outweighing that of the 1930s; in which context selfish capitalists may still be motivated to profit, leading to disaster:

Thus the new industrial revolution is a two-edged sword. It may be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough to enter a period in which such a benefit is possible. It may also be used to destroy humanity, and if it is not used intelligently it can go very far in that direction.

But Wiener is hopeful because he has been to two meetings at which managerial types were aware of the dangers. And so we are left again with the hope that some kind of “code” will be developed, among the powerful of course (John Mackey’s “conscious capitalism” comes to mind), to constrain the abuses by the coming computing revolution. [Wiener apparently fails to consider how the previous code of laws, regulations, etc. limiting the abuses of the first industrial revolution, was the product of long and hard-fought struggle from below.]

There are many dangers still ahead, but the roots of good will are there, and I do not feel as thoroughly pessimistic as I did at the time of the publication of the first edition of this book.

 

 

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 4

 

Summary of Chapter IV: The Mechanism and History of Language

In this chapter Wiener outlines his somewhat non-standard (and he later admits, "amateurish") theory of language. The key is that he sees three parts to language: 1) phonetic; 2) semantic; and 3) behavioral. The first part has to do with transmission; the second with interpretation. [From positing the semantic he turns immediately to memory and how this works in a machine model of the brain. The concept of culture, or of language/semantics as something which exists outside of the brain in relationships between thinkers, is not addressed that I can see]. The third is the problematic aspect because it refers to the behavior of machines, but presumably also non-humans of all kinds, which can be interpreted or received by another; any means by which information can be relayed. Wiener intends this to refer to the process of feedback, but I feel that, per his usage, if I look at my bookshelf and it appears black, this is its behavior in bouncing back the correct rays of light to appear black. This appears to fit his definition of behavior (though he applies it only to machines being controlled by remote operators); yet to call this “language” is a bit silly. Communication or interpretation or even just perception are already competent words for this phenomenon. Anyway this appears to be part of the reason he includes machines (or certain "new machines") as having language, but excludes, for example, ants:

It may seem curious to the reader that we admit ma­chines to the field of language and yet almost totally deny language to the ants. Nevertheless, in construct­ing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community. If the reader wishes to conceive this as a metaphoric extension of our human personalities, he is welcome to do so; but he should be cautioned that the new ma­chines will not stop working as soon as we have stopped giving them human support. (77)

[This is another example of his practice of slippage; the ants don't "stop working" when we stop giving them "human support," either, so what gives? And since when would treating the idea of machines having language in a human way, to be a metaphor, be a form of "human support," and "support" in what sense?]

[Nevertheless where he will probably go with this is: ants have instinctual "taping," but humans are [culturally] adaptive; language is an important aspect of humans' ability to learn and adapt without or beyond the constraints of taping. Old machines are programmed like ants but new ones can learn; therefore they must have something like language.] [Or, to stray further from Wiener, since he does not say this: machines take part in human culture (or whatever the similar term is, used by Stiegler?) and thus have "language" as part of this human interaction].

Because of the way Wiener has defined “language” as anything that carries information, he then ends up using the word "speech" for what would normally be regarded as language per se; with all the limitations that confusing speech with language involves. He explores the reasons why humans have language (or “speech”) and chimps don't, even though humans have to learn it (and chimps seemingly could, but don't). Wiener's solution to this is that chimps don't want to talk: it is not in their nature, they are chimpanzees [his argument for this is laced with moralizing implications: they are good chimpanzees instead of becoming bad humans by learning to speak. He ultimately makes an argument similar to that of the Language Acquisition Device: humans are driven to learn language, and chimps and other primates simply lack this “built-in mechanism” (84). [A reasonable conclusion at the time, though more recent evidence that chimps and orangutans can approach language in other ways (e.g. through sign language) complicates this somewhat].

Wiener ends with interesting observations on the history of Latin and the superiority, due to testing through evolution, of real languages over invented languages. He refers to language as a “joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion” (92). [It is interesting that for cybernetics "confusion" or entropy is a purely external force (to be resisted); the inside of meaning/subjects etc. is purely about order.] Moving away from Latin was a “sin of pride;” we now have no lingua franca suited for the demands of the present global era and the potential, due to technological advances, of a coming world state.

 

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 3

 

Summary of Chapter 3: Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior

 

In this chapter Wiener's point is to delineate two kinds of learning: one, with the example of ants, is rigid (instinctual or pre-programmed); the other, with the example of humans, is adaptive and capable of learning. He demonstrates with biology and actual bodily structures how and why the ant cannot develop the kind of memory and process of learning that a human can. Part of the point shows how human learning [and culture, though this is not raised] are made possible by our biology. There is a reversal going on in the language of this chapter: whereas in the previous chapter machines are being described as like living animals, now living animals are being described as like machines. Wiener talks about the importance of feedback, and that communication be a two-way phenomenon.

He briefly ventures into social organization with a simplistic typology from the Eskimo who are leaderless and apparently seen as living in a state of nature (though this is cooperative, not Hobbesian); through to the Indian caste system, and “oriental despots” (as the extreme example on the other end); to the US as a "moderately loose" structure somewhere in the middle. The US fails to achieve its potential because some people are psychologically attracted to fascism and "white supremacy.” In Wiener's account these seem to be individual psychological flaws, or errors in ways of thinking, rather than actually part of how US society works when it's at home.  Anyway these "worshippers of efficiency" want a society based on that of the ant, and fail to see that humans are distinct from ants.  Wiener details the differences between humans and ants, sticking in cybernetic pronouncements and lessons, such as “Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be ex­pected from it” (57). He talks about the wastefulness of telephone exchanges which take the same amount of time and technology to connect you with anyone on the network, instead of remembering who you call most frequently and connecting you more rapidly with them (60-1) [and from such thinking has been born so much that is crappy and manipulative about current internet design].

He talks about the difference between analogue machines that operate by analogy, and digital machines which work on a “yes-no scale;” the analogue are limited by their use of analogy while the more abstract and numerical operation of the digital frees it for more uses; however, pace Wiener this limitation seems to have more to do with the process of translating from the analogue into the digital. As an example of an analogue device he gives a slide rule; a slide rule is ultimately limited in precision because the numbers on it need to be large enough to read. However, this seems incorrect: the numbers on the slide rule are themselves digital, and so are in fact a translation from the analogic relationship into the digital language of numbers. So what is happening here is not in fact a demonstration of the limitation of analogue measurement per se (given for instance a more precise technology for reading it, than the human eye); but rather, a demonstration that translating from analogue into digital is inherently lossy.

Wiener provides a brief scheme of history, particularly the break between the old Aristotelian view in which the goal of science was to determine categories into which to put things, to the modern view that science conducts experiments and in fact breaks down old categories or invents new ones. Newton is the big figure of the change here. Wiener puts forward, then walks back, suggestions that the human brain could be seen as digital, or that emotions are similar to the responses also in machines (and thus may actually serve a purpose). One goal of what he is working towards: "I wish to give a method of constructing learn­ing machines, a method which will not only enable me to build certain special machines of this type, but will give me a general engineering technique for construct­ing a very large class of such machines" (66).

 

 

The Human Use of Human Beings, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Chapter 2: Progress and Entropy

 

As it moves onto chapter 2 it becomes clear this book is not so much a primer in cybernetics as a general discussion of philosophical topics related to cybernetics. Wiener starts with the observation that "we as humans are not isolated systems" and we not only need to eat, we also need information. For Wiener, information is more important than energy [perhaps because it has to do with how the energy is organized and thus resistant to entropy]. He embarks on a lengthy discussion of the hypothetical, non-existent "Maxwell demon," to what end, it is not clear; part of what he draws out of this is that 19th century Newtonian physics (out of which the concept of the Maxwell Demon arose) makes the error of thinking of information as free when in fact it involves energy. One of the great advances which render 20th century science better is that we understand this. He moves onto his criticism of words like "life" and "soul" as being poorly defined; he is leading to a discussion of the similarities of living beings and certain machines.

The first of his several apparently unintentional references to labor appears in his invocation of Humpty Dumpty making words work for him (“I pay them extra, and make them do what I want”). [So machines are alive in the same sense as words are for Humpty Dumpty? and how important is their "life" to his sense of being their "master"?]. Anyway both "life-imitating automata" and living animals are "pockets of decreasing entropy in a frame­work in which the large entropy tends to increase" (32). General features of these life-imitating automata: 1) effectors (to make something happen); 2) sensors (to take in information); 3) feedback (to learn from past actions, and this generates or transforms new actions). (33)

Wiener returns to the theme of the previous chapter of the scientist as one who fights against disorder, and thus against evil. The question of the Manichaean or Augustinian character of evil is revisited. The Manichaean devil would be a wily, manipulative opponent; there is an interesting link here to metis (and the opposition to metis or distinction therefrom, advocated by the philosophers for their "reason"). Anyway scientists fight the passive Augustinian devil, not the Manichaean one which is involved in games, etc. [And here Wiener’s argument links with the founding distinction between (truth-loving) philosophers and (wily) sophists.].

Wiener then  moves to a discussion of passive faith in progress, which he ties to the Enlightenment. It is passive faith he is talking about, so phenomena such as the French Revolution, and communism, etc., are exceptions and do not count (he calls the French Revolution “the crack in the fabric of the Enlightenment”). He points out that this way of thinking is new in world history, and goes into the various faiths and why they exemplify belief in a world without the possibility for progress. As a contrast to faith in progress he gives Darwin's theory of natural selection, which is not directed; this he links to a later breakthrough in learning machines with Ashby. The concept of "purposefulness" is apparently critiqued but then adopted into the discussion, this is mushy imho.  He finally turns to a pessimistic view in which "we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet" (40). His message is stoical, though; we must do the best we can with dignity. He discusses how modernity (rapid technological change and faith in progress) is very new in the history of the world, and quite different from what went before; it is also very destructive and unsustainable, leading to future collapse and the extinction of the species.