Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 7.7.
eucrates: detail showing settings. (
©
2002 by Paul Pangaro.)
from the late 1950s onward centered on the development of adaptive teaching
and training machines and information systems, as discussed further below.
And again this episode illustrates some of the social oddity of cybernetics—a
chance meeting at an exhibition, rather than any more formalized encounter,
and, again, the protean quality of cybernetics, as a peculiar artwork metamor-
phosed easily into a device for teaching people to type. From an ontological
point of view, we can see machines like SAKI as ontological theater much like
Musicolour, still featuring a dance of agency between trainee and machine,
though now the dance had been domesticated to fit into a market niche—the
machine did now have a predetermined goal: to help the human to learn to
type efficiently—though the path to the goal remained open ended (like cou-
pled homeostats searching for equilibrium). Interestingly from an ontological
angle, Beer recorded witnessing a version of the Turing test carried out with
Eucrates. As articulated by Turing, this test relates to machine intelligence:
the textual responses of an intelligent machine would be indistinguishable
from those of a human being. Pask's demonstrations with Eucrates were a
performative rather than representational version of this: “So my very first
exposure to Gordon's science was when he sat me in a room with a monitor,
in the capacity of metaobserver, and invited me to determine which screen
