GREY WALTER - The Cybernetic Brain - page 60

that this ad hoc organization contributed importantly to the way cybernetics
evolved. Academic disciplines are very good at holding neophytes to specific
disciplinary agendas, and it was both a strength and a weakness of cybernet-
ics that it could not do this—a strength, inasmuch as cybernetics retained an
undisciplined and open-ended vitality, an ability to sprout off in all sorts of
new directions, that the established disciplines often lack; a weakness, as an
inability both to impose standards on research and to establish career paths
for new cyberneticians left enthusiasts to improvise careers much as did the
founders.
These remarks return us to a topic broached above. Popular writing and, in
Walter's case especially, public performances assumed an importance in the
propagation of cybernetics that one does not find in established fields. In do-
ing the research for this topic I have been surprised to discover just how many
first and consequential contacts with cybernetics have been with popular
topics, articles and performances. We just saw that Wiener's Cybernetics was
central to the crystallization of the British cybernetics community, and Beer
fell into cybernetics after reading the same topic. Walter's cybernetics traveled
and mutated along the same lines. In chapter 7 we can discuss the adaptive ar-
chitecture of John Frazer, who tried to build his own robots after seeing a dis-
play of the tortoises as a schoolboy, before falling in with Pask (who declared
himself a cybernetician after meeting Wiener in person as an undergraduate).
Later in this chapter, we can see how William Burroughs laundered elements
of cybernetics into the counterculture after reading The Living Brain . And in
the following section I want to bring the discussion of robotics up to the pres-
ent by focusing on another Living Brain reader, Rodney Brooks. 32 The general
point to note here, however, is that the propagation of cybernetics was indeed
both unsystematic and undisciplined. Walter's cybernetics was addressed to
the brain, but Brooks understood it as robotics, Frazer took it into architec-
ture, and Burroughs transplanted it into the domain of altered states and that
classic sixties project, the exploration of consciousness. Hence the protean
quality of cybernetics, with individuals free to adapt it to their own interests
and obsessions, unconstrained by disciplinary policing. 33
rodney Brooks and robotics
Rodney Brooks is currently director of the MIT Computer Science and Ar-
tificial Intelligence Laboratory, Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT, and
past chairman and now chief technical officer of iRobot Corporation. 34 Brooks
began his career in robotics as a schoolboy in Australia when “I came across