The Cybernetic Era - Digital Culture - page 38

of information was instrumental in enabling James Watson and
Francis Crick to unravel the structure of DNA and later helped
researchers to understand the information-like nature of its oper-
ations. The pervasive influence of the information paradigm on
such research has become more evident recently with the wide-
spread use of computers to 'map' the structure of DNA in ventures
such as the Human Genome Project. 9
Computers meanwhile were contributing to the development of
new understandings of consciousness and intelligence. Alan Turing's
experience with calculating machines during the War led him to
some radical conclusions later. In he composed a report for the

British National Physical Laboratory on 'Intelligent Machinery'. In
1950

1948

he published an article in Mind entitled 'Computing Machinery
and Intelligence'. 10 In it he suggested that in the foreseeable future
computers would be recognizably intelligent. He proposed a test,
which would ascertain whether a computer had in fact achieved
such intelligence. This, the so-called 'Turing Test', involved some-
body communicating via a teletype machine with an invisible corre-
spondent, who might be either a human or computer. He or she had,
by asking questions, to determine which one he was communicating
with. If the computer could fool its correspondent into believing
it was human, then it might be considered intelligent. To some
extent this resonated with the work of various researchers who had
begun to think of modelling the brain's operation in logical and
formalistic terms. The work of McCulloch and Pitts in the mid-
1940 s

Donald Hebb, in his topic The Organisation of Behaviour , 11 proposed
that the brain could be thought of in terms of a complex set of asso-
ciations without centralized control. But the emphasis in attempting
to understand such mental processes started to shift from a bio-
logical, embedded paradigm to one emphasising the disembodied
logical processes of the mind, which resonated with the potential
capabilities of the digital technology then being developed.

s mentioned above was an early example of this. In the late ' 40