On 2 February, 1949, the New York Times ran an article headlined “ELECTRONICS SEEN DIRECTING THE WORLD”. With tongue perhaps somewhat in cheek, the opening paragraph announced that:
“A new scheme to control the world with electronic devices invented by electrical engineers was unfolded yesterday afternoon during an otherwise uneventful session of the annual meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at the Statler Hotel.”
The engineers in question – members of the predecessor organisation to today’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – met to discuss the potential market for electronic computers, which they imagined might one day be used for tasks such as “flying airplanes, tuning television sets, running manufacturing processes, forecasting the weather, and performing many other highly complex operations.”
Dr. Jay W. Forrester of the Servomechanisms Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was present at the meeting, and cautiously predicted a bright future for electronic digital computers:
“Present efforts in digital computer development are only exploratory. The engineering which will ultimately be justified may exceed that devoted to the wartime development of radar. Corresponding research and personnel training programs must provide a sound foundation and the eventual manufacturing volume may be an important part of the electronics industry.”
The previous year, in 1948, the New York Times reported on a similar symposium on electronic computers, this one attended by Dr. John Von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in which Von Neumann “and other participating scientists spoke casually of the likelihood that within a few years the country’s battery of high-speed computers, now in a half dozen centers, would be so great, and the demand for their services so great, that problems would be continuously ‘fed’ to them by a teletype network from all parts of the country.”
If we squint, we can just about recognise today’s digital computers and networks in the predictions of scientists like Forrester and Von Neumann in the late-1940s. However, there were important events in the development of key digital technologies that they failed to anticipate. For example, they did not predict miniaturisation and a market for minicomputers in offices and universities, nor microcomputers (i.e. “personal computers”) in homes, nor nanocomputers (i.e. smartphones) in pockets. They assumed electronic digital computing would be top-down and hierarchical, mostly restricted to large public institutions and private corporations that could afford room-sized mainframes to automate manufacturing processes (“automatic factories”), corporate payroll, and other centralised information processing tasks. This was the computer as automatic manager or top-down “governing machine.”
In 1948, Claude Shannon published his two-part article A Mathematical Theory of Communication, formalising one of the first quantitative theories of information. That same year, the mathematician Norbert Wiener also published a quantitative theory of information, but this time as part of a more general theory of control and communication in both technological and biological systems. Wiener’s book, Cybernetics (a neologism coined to evoke the sense of a “Science of Governing”), met with unexpected international success and was widely used around the world to support visions of both utopian and dystopian futures, including a warning in the French newspaper Le Monde that this new science of governing might one day construct a planetary ‘’governing machine” to make “Hobbes’s Leviathan [seem like] nothing but a pleasant joke.”
Dystopian fears of a governing machine were not limited to the US and France. In 1949, the English cybernetician W. Ross Ashby imagined a governing machine as an “electronic brain” (a popular metaphor for computers at the time) accepting as input “volumes of scientific facts and other data” and outputting instructions to solve the world’s political and economic problems, until the day the machine inevitably turned against humanity.
In 1957, the Polish writer Stanisław Lem published Dialogues, a book “conceived under the spell of cybernetics,” as he wrote in the preface to the second edition. In Lem’s book, two characters – Hylas and Philonous (drawn from George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues) – discuss the “possibility of constructing a ‘governing machine,’ an electronic network that would steer all social processes as a supreme authority.”
Lem was writing around the time Soviet cyberneticians were seriously starting to explore the possibility of a nationwide socialist computer network to control economic production and distribution, as Benjamin Peters sets out in his 2017 book How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet. Here is how Lem has Philonous respond to Hylas’ question about the feasibility of creating a dystopian cybernetic governing machine (which Lem – writing from behind the Iron Curtain – equates with “the capitalist system”):
“PHILONOUS: It has been discussed by some cyberneticists but not as a practical possibility. The thing is that human coexistence in the capitalist system is not so much a collaboration as a competition; therefore, it manifests numerous elements of a game — John von Neumann studied behavior in this way. Rivalry or competition is a feature of a game where winning is wealth and success in life and losing is poverty and failure in life. Obviously, I am simplifying. A ‘governing machine’ would be one of the players in the game, with the advantage that it would have access to information about all the ‘moves being played’ and about all parameters of the game. The human players would not have that access. The machine could therefore predict the statistically most probable next state and, on the basis of that knowledge, make moves that would force the other players to submit, because otherwise they would lose (i.e., fail in life).
The governing machine thus acts on the principle of economic coercion like the capitalist system, which is no coincidence. According to some, it could save what the capitalist economists cannot, namely, the capitalist system itself. Others see in it a kind of ‘electronic Antichrist,’ a Moloch that would cause total social uniformity and create a state in which ‘statistical well-being’ would be achieved at the cost of individual identity. Such a machine could be built someday, but one could just as well consider building a machine for psychological torture, so I do not see any sense in doing that. People need not an electronic governor but a better social system.”
However, anxieties around governing machines were mostly speculative until the 1960s and 1970s, when the first attempts to actually build cybernetic information networks really began in earnest. I’ll look at these early experiments in greater detail in a future blog post.