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of it as the most despicable of the sciences. Why is that? I do not have a panop-
tic grasp of the reasons for this antipathy, and it is hard to find any canonical
examples of the critique, but I can speak to some of the concerns.
6
One critique bears particularly on the work of Walter and Ashby. The idea
is that tortoises and homeostats in fact fail to model the human brain in im-
portant respects, and that, to the degree that we accept them as brain mod-
els, we demean key aspects of our humanity (see, e.g., Suchman 2005). The
simplest response to this is that neither Walter nor Ashby claimed actually to
have modelled anything approaching the real human brain. In 1999, Rodney
Brooks gave his topic on neo-Walterian robotics the appropriately modest title
of
Cambrian Intelligence
, referring to his idea that we should start at the bottom
of the evolutionary ladder (not the top, as in symbolic AI, where the critique
has more force). On the other hand, Ashby, in particular, was not shy in his
speculations about human intelligence and even genius, and here the critique
does find some purchase. His combinatoric conception of intelligence is, I
believe, inadequate, and we can explore this further in chapter 4.
A second line of critique has to do with cybernetics' origins in Wiener's
wartime work; cybernetics is often thought of as a militarist science. This
view is not entirely misleading. The descendants of the autonomous antiair-
craft guns that Wiener worked on (unsuccessfully) in World War II (Galison
1994) are today's cruise missiles. But first, I think the doctrine of original sin
is a mistake—sciences are not tainted forever by the moral circumstances of
their birth—and second, I have already noted that Ashby and Walter's cyber-
netics grew largely from a different matrix, psychiatry. One can disapprove
of that, too, but the discussion of Bateson and Laing's “antipsychiatry” chal-
lenges the doctrine of original sin here as well.
Another line of critique has to do with the workplace and social inequality.
As Wiener himself pointed out, cybernetics can be associated with the post-
war automation of production via the feedback loops and servomechanisms
that are crucial to the functioning of industrial robots. The sense of “cybernet-
ics” is often also broadened to include anything to do with computerization
and the “rationalization” of the factory floor. The ugly word “cybernation”
found its way into popular discourse in the 1960s as part of the critique of
intensified control of workers by management. Again, there is something to
this critique (see Noble 1986), but I do not think that such guilt by association
should lead us to condemn cybernetics out of hand.
7
We will, in fact, have the
opportunity to examine Stafford Beer's management cybernetics at length.
The force of the critique turns out to be unclear, to say the least, and we will
see how, in Beer's hands, management cybernetics ran into a form of politics
