Cybernetics Across Cultures: The Localization of the Universal (original) (raw)
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Back and forth: cybernetics interrelations and how it spread in Latin America
AI & SOCIETY
Cybernetics is a science characterized by the utopian search for new relationships between different areas of knowledge. After the Second World War, the best-known references in Western academia were Norbert Wiener's approaches to this new discipline. However, there is another little-known hemisphere of this development that remains understudied and we claim is key for its history which refers to the pioneering work of scientists, engineers and cultural practitioners in Latin America, as well as the materialization of specific experiences that lead us to reflect on the role that some regional milestones could have had in the global context. This volume of AI & Society covers points of view that were structured in the various most emblematic stages of these trajectories with the participation of agents that went beyond the assimilation and interpretation of external models, transforming themselves into fundamental and pioneering experiences, among others, the work of Mexican scientist Arturo Rosenblueth, or the impact of the concept of Autopoiesis. Through this article we introduce the outcome of the research-presented in great length in the contributions of this volume-on some of the main stages and trends that constituted the evolution of cybernetics in Latin America. The particular contributions of the authors in this issue have helped to reconstituting these contexts while developing a continuous horizon which also explores future practices.
Recent Developments in Cybernetics, a Theory for Understanding Social Systems
2018
This article consists of three parts. In the first part we describe a short history of cybernetics and an effort, which has been undertaken by a group of scientists in the United States and Europe in recent years, to expand the conception of science so that it more successfully encompasses the social sciences. The intent is to aid communication among disciplines and improve our ability to manage social systems. The second part of the article presents an effort in Russia to develop reflexivity theory into a general theory of purposeful, self-developing systems, thus improving our understanding and management of social systems. Understanding Western and Eastern approaches to cybernetics can be difficult because of the very different histories and intellectual traditions of cybernetics in the United States and Russia. The article ends with a comparison of the two approaches to cybernetics comparing their features side by side. The differences suggest a great potential for ideas from Ru...
The Footprint of Cybernetics in the Emergence of Artificial Intelligence
Philosophy of Science (Falsafe-ye-Elm), 2022
Many attempts have been made in the history and philosophy of science to suppose machines as human beings. Sometimes they are attributed mind, sometimes emotions, and sometimes intelligence. All this is to make the border between humans and machines as narrow as possible, so that one day they may unite. But this effort can be made in another direction. It is possible to bring humans closer to machines as much as possible with a systematic view, which is what the cybernetic perspective has done. This approach has played a significant role in the emergence of artificial intelligence studies and along with the two approaches of computationalism and representationalism has been able to introduce artificial intelligence as the most important and functional field of science to the world.
A preliminary discussion on cultural variabilities in human-AI relation
The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2019
The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the possibility that iconographical analysis of the composition of humans and AI/robots would contribute to acquire new perspectives in cultural variabilities in public image and social epistemology of AI/robots. While placing humans and AI/robots side by side is preferred in Japanese pictures, Western photos tend to capture humans and AI/robots with gazing together. Applying the theory of "viewing together," or joint attention, we may suggest from the observed difference that Japanese society may regard AI/robots as more human-like agents, or may consider them in more anthropomorphic way than in Western countries We need more organized analysis of pictures on the internet, careful investigation of the concept of animism, as well more systematic comparative surveys of the public images of AI/robots within East-Asian countries which share many of ecological and cultural conditions.
Cybernetics and the human sciences
History of the Human Sciences, 2020
Cybernetics saturates the humanities. Norbert Wiener’s movement gave vocabulary and hardware to developments all across the early digital era, and still does so today to those who seek to interpret it. Even while the Macy Conferences were still taking place in the early 1950s, talk of feedback and information and pattern had spread to popular culture – and to Europe. The new science created a shared language and culture for surpassing political and intellectual ideas that could be relegated to a pre-computing tradition, and it refracted or channelled currents developing in fields from manufacturing to human physiology. It produced conceptions of the political world, as well as new forms of historical consciousness. It offered frameworks for structuralist thought, but also for policies regarding manufacturing and technology, international relations, and governmental decision-making. But the rising sense of the breadth, importance, and even shock of cybernetics long remained understud...
Recent Developments in Cybernetics, from Cognition to Social Systems
Cybernetics and Systems, 2019
This article consists of three parts. In the first part we describe a short history of cybernetics and an effort, which has been undertaken by a group of scientists in the United States and Europe in recent years, to expand the conception of science so that it more successfully encompasses the social sciences. The intent is to aid communication among disciplines and improve our ability to manage social systems. The second part of the article presents an effort in Russia to develop reflexivity theory into a general theory of purposeful, self-developing systems, thus improving our understanding and management of social systems. Understanding Western and Eastern approaches to cybernetics can be difficult because of the very different histories and intellectual traditions of cybernetics in the United States and Russia. The article ends with a comparison of the two approaches to cybernetics, comparing their features side by side. The differences suggest a great potential for ideas from Russian and Western scientists to enrich the further development of cybernetics and science in East and West.
Cybernetics and the Russian Intellectual Tradition
Russian Journal of Philosophical Sciences, 2018
Understanding the differences between scientific approaches to cybernetics is difficult because of the very different histories and intellectual traditions in Russia and the West, i.e. the U.S. and Europe. This paper, firstly, describes the peculiarities of the Russian style of scientific thinking, considering as an example Alexander Bogdanov’s theory (tectology) in context of the Russian intellectual tradition. Secondly, the paper compares Vladimir E. Lepskiy’s and Stuart A. Umpleby’s theories of cybernetics looking at them through the prism of Russian and American intellectual traditions. Western cybernetics of the second order includes biological and social versions. It arose from “experimental epistemology.” The goal was to understand the processes of cognition on the basis of neurophysiological experiments, as a result of which cyberneticians came to the conclusion that the observer cannot be excluded from science. Biological cybernetics is concerned with how the brain creates ...
IA & Society, 2022
Cybernetics is a science characterized by the utopian search for new relationships between different areas of knowledge. After the Second World War, the best-known references in Western academia were Norbert Wiener's approaches to this new discipline. However, there is another little-known hemisphere of this development that remains understudied and we claim is key for its history which refers to the pioneering work of scientists, engineers and cultural practitioners in Latin America, as well as the materialization of specific experiences that lead us to reflect on the role that some regional milestones could have had in the global context. This volume of AI & Society covers points of view that were structured in the various most emblematic stages of these trajectories with the participation of agents that went beyond the assimilation and interpretation of external models, transforming themselves into fundamental and pioneering experiences, among others, the work of Mexican scientist Arturo Rosenblueth, or the impact of the concept of Autopoiesis. Through this article we introduce the outcome of the research-presented in great length in the contributions of this volume-on some of the main stages and trends that constituted the evolution of cybernetics in Latin America. The particular contributions of the authors in this issue have helped to reconstituting these contexts while developing a continuous horizon which also explores future practices.
A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Societal Impact of Artificial Intelligence
Objective of this paper is to explore the impact of Artificial Intelligence at a societal level through Hofstede's 6D cultural model in China, USA and Saudi Arabia. The three countries serve as an example which underlines how nations relate to the new, continuously morphing ecosystem created by technology across the geopolitical landscape. A cross-cultural perspective achieved within this paper is a remarkable reference for everyone interest to evaluate Artificial Intelligence and its potential in the context of changed global variables.