History of Cybernetics

In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.

The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev's political "thaw," however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as "science in the service of communism," but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into "CyberNewspeak."

American and Soviet AI specialists were seeking out general principles: universal, timeless mechanisms of thinking and behaviour. Their generalizations, however, were based on culturally conditioned cases. The examples that American and Soviet scientists had at their disposal, were, in fact, culturally specific patterns of social organization and decision-making. When trying to grasp universality, AI models manifested just the opposite: the specificity of cultural patterns.

Big Brother, who wanted to see everything and know everything, became overwhelmed with information that was often distorted by lower-level officials trying to present a rosy picture. Vast clogs of inaccurate information paralyzed the decision-making mechanism, while accurate information was exchanged only locally, like black-market goods or forbidden books in the samizdat. Computers, once vilified and now championed, were constant in one thing: They amplified the virtues and deficits of the system that implemented them. After all, the key idea behind cybernetics was control via feedback. In the hands of self-motivated free agents, it was a powerful economic engine. In the hands of a single controlling agency, it brought stagnation. Or, as computer scientists like to say, “garbage in, garbage out.” Called in to prove the superiority of socialism, information technology eventually proved the ineffectiveness of the Soviet regime. 

For Kolmogorov, his ideas neither eliminated chance, nor affirmed a fundamental uncertainty about our world; they simply provided a rigorous language to talk about what cannot be known for certain. The notion of “absolute randomness” made no more sense than “absolute determinism,” he once remarked, concluding, “We can’t have positive knowledge of the existence of the unknowable.” Thanks to Kolmogorov, though, we can explain when and why we don't.

For Kolmogorov, his ideas neither eliminated chance, nor affirmed a fundamental uncertainty about our world; they simply provided a rigorous language to talk about what cannot be known for certain. The notion of “absolute randomness” made no more sense than “absolute determinism,” he once remarked, concluding, “We can’t have positive knowledge of the existence of the unknowable.” Thanks to Kolmogorov, though, we can explain when and why we don't.

This story is profoundly ironic: America rejected cybernetics but implemented the cybernetic vision, while the Soviet Union did just the opposite: it paid lip service to cybernetics and stalled practical cybernetic projects. The cybernetics scare both focused the attention of U.S. science administrators on human-machine interaction and made explicit cybernetic references ideologically suspect. As a result, Americans pursued a narrowly defined but viable technical project, while the Soviets aimed at a utopian grand reform. This teaches us something about the power of discourse: it resides not so much in overt declarations but in subtle metaphors that change our mode of thinking and ultimately reshape our world.

This article examines several Soviet initiatives to develop a national computer network as the technological basis for an automated information system for the management of the national economy in the 1960s–1970s. It explores the mechanism by which these proposals were circulated, debated, and revised in the maze of Party and government agencies. The article examines the role of different groups – cybernetics enthusiasts, mathematical economists, computer specialists, government bureaucrats, and liberal economists – in promoting, criticizing, and reshaping the concept of a national computer network. The author focuses on the political dimension of seemingly technical proposals, the relationship between information and power, and the transformative role of users of computer technology.

The main difference between Soviet cybernetics and its American and French counterparts is not to be found in the range of cybernetic applications or the types of mathematical models used. In this sense, there was a great similarity across the borders, due to the systematic Soviet efforts to appropriate the latest American and Western European techniques and technologies. The main difference lies in the political and cultural meanings attached to cybernetic ideas.

This article reinterprets the debate between orthodox followers of the Pavlovian reflex theory and Soviet “cybernetic physiologists” in the 1950s and 60s as a clash of opposing man-machine metaphors. While both sides accused each other of “mechanistic,” reductionist methodology, they did not see anything “mechanistic” about their own central metaphors: the telephone switchboard metaphor for nervous activity (the Pavlovians), and the analogies between the human body and a servomechanism and between the human brain and a computer (the cyberneticians). I argue that the scientific utility of machine analogies was closely intertwined with their philosophical and political meanings and that new interpretations of these metaphors emerged as a result of political conflicts and a realignment of forces within the scientific community and in society at large. I suggest that the constant travel of man-machine analogies back and forth between physiology and technology has blurred the traditional categories of the “mechanistic” and the “organic” in Soviet neurophysiology, as perhaps in the history of physiology in general.

Soviet science in the post-WWII period was torn between two contradictory directives: to ‘overtake and surpass’ Western science, especially in defence-related fields; and to ‘criticize and destroy’ Western scholarship for its alleged ideological flaws. In response to this dilemma, Soviet scientists developed two opposite discursive strategies. While some scholars ‘ideologized’ science, translating scientific theories into a value-laden political language, others tried to ‘de-ideologize’ it by drawing a sharp line between ideology and the supposedly value-neutral, ‘objective’ content of science. This paper examines how early Soviet computing was shaped by the interplay of military and ideological forces, and affected by the attempts to ‘de-ideologize’ computers. The paper also suggests some important similarities in the impact of the Cold War on science and technology in the Soviet Union and the United States.

In the Soviet Union cybernetics became the subject of a true “Russian scandal.”  Literally, in Soviet public discourse in the early years of the Cold War cybernetics acquired the scandalous reputation of a “modish pseudo-science.”  Figuratively, the mechanism of a Soviet anti-cybernetics campaign resembled the “Russian scandal” game, for it involved profound discursive transformations, similar to those in  Frederic Bartlett’s experiments. While this campaign has been traditionally viewed as an intentional product of human agency (in this case, the party and government agencies), this article will attempt to interpret it as a sequence of events spontaneously generated by self-perpetuating Cold War propaganda discourse.

Automation is the conversion of a work process, a procedure, or equipment to automatic rather than human operation or control. Automation does not simply transfer human functions to machines, but involves a deep reorganization of the work process, during which both the human and the machine functions are redefined. Early automation relied on mechanical and electromechanical control devices; during the last 40 years, however, the computer gradually became the leading vehicle of automation. Modern automation is usually associated with computerization.