The Information - James Gleick [113]
We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness.… This heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethics of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system.… Like the Red Queen, we cannot stay where we are without running as fast as we can.♦
He was concerned for his place in intellectual history, and he aimed high. Cybernetics, he wrote in his memoirs, amounted to “a new interpretation of man, of man’s knowledge of the universe, and of society.”♦ Where Shannon saw himself as a mathematician and an engineer, Wiener considered himself foremost a philosopher, and from his fire-control work he drew philosophical lessons about purpose and behavior. If one defines behavior cleverly—“any change of an entity with respect to its surroundings”♦—then the word can apply to machines as well as animals. Behavior directed toward a goal is purposeful, and the purpose can sometimes be imputed to the machine rather than a human operator: for example, in the case of a target-seeking mechanism. “The term servomechanisms has been coined precisely to designate machines with an intrinsic purposeful behavior.” The key was control, or self-regulation.
To analyze it properly he borrowed an obscure term from electrical engineering: “feed-back,” the return of energy from a circuit’s output back to its input. When feedback is positive, as when the sound from loudspeakers is re-amplified through a microphone, it grows wildly out of control. But when feedback is negative—as in the original mechanical governor of steam engines, first analyzed by James Clerk Maxwell—it can guide a system toward equilibrium; it serves as an agent of stability. Feedback can be mechanical: the faster Maxwell’s governor spins, the wider its arms extend, and the wider its arms extend, the slower it must spin. Or it can be electrical. Either way, the key to the process is information. What governs the antiaircraft gun, for example, is information about the plane’s coordinates and about the previous position of the gun itself. Wiener’s friend Bigelow emphasized this: “that it was not some particular physical thing such as energy or length or voltage, but only information (conveyed by any means).”♦
Negative feedback must be ubiquitous, Wiener felt. He could see it at work in the coordination of eye and hand, guiding the nervous system of a person performing an action as ordinary as picking up a pencil. He focused especially on neurological disorders, maladies that disrupted physical coordination or language. He saw them quite specifically as cases of information feedback gone awry: varieties of ataxia, for example, where sense messages are either interrupted in the spinal cord or misinterpreted in the cerebellum. His analysis was detailed and mathematical, with equations—almost unheard of in neurology. Meanwhile, feedback control systems were creeping into factory assembly lines, because a mechanical system, too, can modify its own behavior. Feedback is the governor, the steersman.
So Cybernetics became the title of Wiener’s first book, published in the fall of 1948 in both the United States and France. Subtitle: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The book is a hodgepodge of notions and analysis, and, to the astonishment of its publishers, it became the year’s unexpected bestseller. The popular American news magazines, Time and Newsweek, both featured it. Wiener and cybernetics were identified with a phenomenon that was bursting into public consciousness just at that moment: computing machines. With the end of the war, a veil had been lifted from the first urgent projects in electronic calculation, particularly the ENIAC, a thirty-ton monster of vacuum tubes, relays, and hand-soldered wires stretching across eighty feet at the University of Pennsylvania’s electrical engineering school. It could store and