User:Natasa Siencnik/notes/holmes/

Abstract

Brian Holmes: Future Map. Or: How the Cyborgs Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Surveillance. In: http://brianholmes.wordpress.com, September 9, 2007.[1]

Key Points

1. Norbert Wiener
   • God & Golem, Inc. > Can god play a significant game with his own creature?, 1964
   • Teleological Society to study intersections of neurology and engineering
   • this transformed into the famous Macy Conferences > term Cybernetics, 1947
   • about "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems"
   • renounced any direct collaboration with the military brass and giant corporations
   • anti-militarist stance placed him next to anti-communist and matematician Van Neumann
2. Van Neumann
   • central figure in the creation of the atom bomb and developer of two-person game theory
   • attended the Atomic Energy Commission meetings on a wheelchair
   • thought to have been among the models for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
3. Wiener – God and Golem
   • worked on a closed-loop information system called an antiaircraft predictor, 1940
   • inscription of the human element into a system > servomechanism and feedback loop