Gordon Pask: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961/1968)

“This book is not for the engineer content with hardware, nor for the biologist uneasy outside his specialty; for it depicts that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems. They regulate themselves and survive: They adapt and they compute: They invent. They co-operate and they compete. Naturally they evolve rapidly.

Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines to run must have energy available as work: and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to Thermodynamics and to its brother SUM(p) log p, called Information Theory, that we look for the distinctions between work and energy and between signal and noise.

For like cause we look to reflexology and its brother feedback, christened Multiple Closed Loop Servo Theory, for mechanical explanation of Entelechy in Homeostasis and in appetition. This is that governance, whether in living creatures and their societies or in our lively artifacts, that is now called Cybernetics.

But under that title Norbert Wiener necessarily subsumed the computation that, from afferent signals, forecasts successful conducts in a changing world.

To embody logic in proper hardware explains the laws of thought and consequently stems from psychology. For numbers the digital art is as old as the abacus, but i came alive only when Turing made the next operation of his machine hinge on the value of the operand, whence its ability to compute any computable number.

For Aristotelian logic, the followers of Ramon Llull, including Leibniz, have frequently made machines for three, and sometimes four classifications. The first of these to be lively computes contingent probabilities.

With this ability to make or select proper filters on its inputs, such a device explains the central problem of experimental epistemology. The riddles of stimulus equivalence or of local circuit action in the brain remain only as parochial problems.

This is that expanding world of beings, man-made or begotten, concerning which Ross Ashby asked, ‘How can such systems organize themselves?’ His answer is, in one sense, too general and its embodiment, too special to satisfy him, his friends or his followers.

This book describes their present toil to put his ideas to work so as to come to grips with his question.” (Warren S. McCulloch, Preface)

With a preface by Warren S. McCulloch
Publisher Hutchinson & Co, London, 1961
This edition March 1968
ISBN: 0090868102, 0090868110
128 pages
via pangaro.com

PDF (updated on 2012-7-16)

Jack Goldsmith, Tim Wu: Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (2006)

Is the Internet erasing national borders? Will the future of the Net be set by Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? Who’s really in control of what’s happening on the Net?

In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet’s challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It’s a book about the fate of one idea–that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves. We learn of Google’s struggles with the French government and Yahoo’s capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay’s struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events the original vision is uprooted, as governments time and time again assert their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them.

While acknowledging the many attractions of the earliest visions of the Internet, the authors describe the new order, and speaking to both its surprising virtues and unavoidable vices. Far from destroying the Internet, the experience of the last decade has lead to a quiet rediscovery of some of the oldest functions and justifications for territorial government. While territorial governments have unavoidable problems, it has proven hard to replace what legitimacy governments have, and harder yet to replace the system of rule of law that controls the unchecked evils of anarchy. While the Net will change some of the ways that territorial states govern, it will not diminish the oldest and most fundamental roles of government and challenges of governance.

Well written and filled with fascinating examples, including colorful portraits of many key players in Internet history, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2006
ISBN 0195152662, 9780195152661
226 pages

publisher
google books

PDF

Steven T. Usdin: Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley (2005)

Engineering Communism is the fascinating story of Joel Barr and Alfred Sarant, dedicated Communists and members of the Rosenberg spy ring, who stole information from the United States during World War II that proved crucial to building the first advanced weapons systems in the USSR. On the brink of arrest, they escaped with KGB’s help and eluded American intelligence for decades.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Barr and new archival evidence, Steve Usdin explains why Barr and Sarant became spies, how they obtained military secrets, and how FBI blunders led to their escape. He chronicles their pioneering role in the Soviet computer industry, including their success in convincing Nikita Khrushchev to build a secret Silicon Valley.

The book is rich with details of Barr’s and Sarant’s intriguing andexciting personal lives, their families, as well as their integration into Russian society. Engineering Communism follows the two spies through Sarant’s death and Barr’s unbelievable return to the United States.

Publisher Yale University Press, 2005
ISBN 0300108745, 9780300108743
329 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (images missing; updated on 2012-7-25)