User:Dave Young/rm/barbrook-imaginary-futures

Reference

Barbook, Richard - Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (2007) Pluto Press.

The Human Machine

In The Human Machine, Richard Barbrook describes the importance of military funding to the initial development of computer technologies. During the World War II, Alan Turing and his team at Bletchely Park developed Colossus: a computer built specifically to decode encrypted messages transmitted through German military networks. Going back further, Babbage's Difference Engine was funded by the English government as it “promised to produce more accurate navigation tables” for the British Navy. [41]

Barbrook describes how, in the United States, the military became the dominant patrons of IBM during the Cold War: "When the survival of the nation was at stake, technological excellence wasn't constrained by financial limitations." [40] The rapid developments in computer technologies were applied as a mass-control interface, enabling the US military to “plan the destruction of Russian cities, organise the invasion of 'unfriendly' countries, […] and pay the wages of its troops and manage its supply chain.” [41] In the U.S, the computer was also seen as an important political tool to analyse the rapidly increasing quantities of data from sources such as the U.S census. With the use of computers, the statistics could be processed much quicker, and be presented in a more comprehensible manner to the policy-makers.

Barbook's central argument in this chapter is that the computer was initially developed as a governmental tool to control a political agenda. The computers of the 1950s did not have a domestic function – they were sinister objects capable of plotting missile trajectories and simulating crisis situations. To relate this to our current seminar series on interfaces: The computer could be understood as being a tool to manage 'political conditions' – it was the interface between the military and nuclear warfare, or between the politicians and managing the economy.

Cold War Computing

Like the innovations in computer technology discussed in the previous chapter, Norbert Wiener's development of cybernetics was also driven by military purposes. Barbook describes how Wiener invented an anti-aircraft gun mechanism that could correct the aim of its operator through a system of feedback, by understanding the operator as a mechanical extension of the gun itself. Wiener was one of many scientists working on military projects – to quote Barbook: “In the early 1940s, almost every American scientist had believed that developing weapons to defeat Nazi Germany benefited humanity.” [48] While cybernetics was quickly adopted as an important tool in a broad array of scientific disciplines after the Macy Conferences in 1946, Barbrook describes how Wiener became increasingly vocal in his opposition to the Cold War.

While Wiener adopted a socialist understanding of cybernetics, the mathematician John von Neumann developed a right-wing alternative. Barbrook writes about how Turing's theories of artificial intelligence greatly influenced von Neumann: “Just like Turing, this prophet also believed that continual improvements in hardware must eventually culminate in the emergence of artificial intelligence.” [51] Barbook is heavily critical of the involvement of scientists such as von Neumann in the development of military technologies, writing that “scientific curiosity had led them into complicity with high-tech barbarism.” [52] He continues: “Technological fetishismhad absolved computer scientists of any responsibility for the consequences of their own actions.” [53]

The sinister and dangerous implications of the computer were not overtly visible to the American public during the Cold War, hidden under the guise of artificial intelligence research, cybernetic theory development, or pure technological novelty. To cite Barbook's example of IBM's pavillion at the 1964 World Fair in New York: “The only hint of the corporation's massive involvement in fighting the Cold War was the presence of the computer which could translate Russian into English.” [53] Barbook argues that the paranoid drive of technological innovation was masked by a science-fiction illusion – an 'imaginary future' that would put astronauts on the moon and create flying automobiles.