on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
It’s interesting to see this power-struggle between “cybernetics” and “AI” so frankly addressed by Heinz von Foerster.
From Vienna to California: A journey across
disciplines: An interview with Heinz von Foerster
Article in Kybernetes · January 2005
DOI: 10.1108/03684920510575717
(…)
[FG] Indeed, it seems that classical artificial intelligence researchers tend to refrain
from getting into such paradoxical matters. Seymour Papert once said of Perceptrons—the very
influential book he wrote with Marvin Minsky—that if their work was so critical of cybernetics
and neural nets research it was because there was too much romanticism and too little
mathematical rigor in the field. Do you think he was trying to separate AI research from what
he perceived as an overly “philosophical” pursuit?
[HvF] I think you touch an important point here; however, I would put it differently. It
seems to me that there are different styles of thinking which, in Warren McCulloch, were still
the two sides of the same coin. Let me cite the titles of some of what I would call his
“metaphysical” papers, for instance, “What Is A Number That A Man May Know It, And A
Man That He May Know A Number?” or “A Logical Calculus Of The Ideas Immanent In
Nervous Activity” or “Through The Den Of A Metaphysician”; and then the titles of some
embryonic AI papers: “Machines That Think And Want,” “Toward Some Circuitry Of Ethical
Robots,” “Biological Computers,” “The Brain As A Computing Machine,” etc., etc.
(McCulloch, 1965).
As you probably guessed, I was touched by Warren’s metaphysics, while others were
stimulated by his computer metaphors or, as von Neumann put it, by “Warren’s Turing side,”
with reference to Alan Turing’s invention of the machine that can compute all computable
numbers.
There were, of course, other separating forces that pulled these two styles apart. One of
which, I sense, may have been the prevailing funding strategies. If I remember correctly, lucky
Marvin Minsky succeeded in getting a ten million dollar grant for an Artificial Intelligence lab
as a byproduct of MIT operations. There was almost no other money available for any other
studies which were not AI-ish, afterwards.
[FG] What year was that, do you remember?
[HvF]’62, ’63 something like that.
[FG] So, there was actually a kind of funding war?
[HvF] A tremendous funding war, yes. And that happened because although science is a
wonderful thing, there is a public relations side to it. Whether or not you address yourself to it,
public relations are a very important component of scientific activity, and I must confess that as
a greenhorn in America I did not realize that. I was so happy being allowed to do some research
which I felt was interesting and important to the people sponsoring it that I thought it was a
paradise. I thought you didn’t have to do the politics, and I was so glad to have shed political
concerns. It was only much later that I realized that politics was there, all along.
8/14/
Anyway, I think there was a bifurcation of these two fields, cybernetics and Artificial
Intelligence, which turned out to be detrimental. Cybernetics was unfortunately interpreted in
too narrow a way, and I sometimes get the feeling that this was on purpose, to push it away
from another big branch which became Artificial Intelligence. And Artificial Intelligence was
promising so much, at the time; it was absolutely incredible. And if you promise something,
then of course everybody hopes that this promise will be realizable.