Showing posts sorted by relevance for query CYBERNETICS. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query CYBERNETICS. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, August 05, 2021

PROJECT CYBERSYN


Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile - 
by E MEDINA - ‎Cited by 116 - ‎Related articles in Allende's Chile*. EDEN MEDINA. Abstract. This article presents a history of 'Project Cybersyn', an early computer network developed in Chile during the .... 9 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine .... by this new application of his work, invited Beer to visit him at MIT.


PROJECT CYBERSYN #SOCIALIST #SELFMANAGEMENT THROUGH #AI, #CYBERNETICS, #ROBOTICS,. WORKERS CONTROL OF PRODUCTION THROUGH #AUTOMATION IN THE #GRUNDRISSE #MARX POSTULATES THAT WITH THE ADVENT OF TECHNOLOGY FREEING PEOPLE'S TIME, AND HIS THEORY OF VALUE IS BASED ON TIME NOT SKILL, THAT IS SPENT IN PRODUCTION OF EXCHANGE VALUE.

 AS PEOPLE HAVE MORE TIME TO THEMSELVES WITH THE EIGHT HOUR DAY THE CONTRADICTION BECOMES NOT JUST THAT CAPITALISM IMPOVERSHIVES YOU ECONOMICALLY BUT IT STEALS YOUR TIME AS WELL AND USES IT AGAINST YOU INSTEAD OF UNEMPLOYMENT BY AI AND ROBOT WE SHOULD HAVE THE FOUR HOUR DAY, FOUR DAY WEEK, FORTY HOURS PAY IN FACT WE COULD ABOLISH MONEY WITH THE NEW FINTECH AND WE COULD FREE UP EVEN MORE TIME TO WORK ONLY TEN HOURS A WEEK FOR SOCIAL PRODUCTION FOR CREATING OUR COMMONWEALTH WHILE THE TECHNOLOGY CREATED COULD FREE US FROM TIME SPENT IN THE MACHINE, INSTEAD WE COULD WORK LESS AND PLAY MORE. BUT CAPITALISM PREVENTS THAT, IT SLOWS US DOWN AND INSTEAD OF FREEDOM WE GET UNEMPLOYMENT HERE IS THE SOCIALIST VIEW OF #TECHNOLOGY AS AN AID FOR SELF MANAGEMENT OF OUR WORKPLACES IT WAS AN EXPERIMENT CONDUCTED IN ALLENDE'S CHILE BY NORBERT WIENER AND STAFFORD BEER



 HERE IS THE PDF OF EDEN MEDINA'S BOOK 
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
However, the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, one of the originators of the field, offers one of the most-cited definitions. In 1948 he described cybernetics as the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine.”14 Cybernetics often mixed metaphors from engineering and biology to describe the .

 HER PHD THESIS WHICH THE BOOK IS BASED ON ]The State Machine: Politics, Ideology, and Computation in Chile ... - Core
 https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/4403874.pdf The MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society generously provided three years of tuition and ... to Allende's Chile and several years later allowed me to teach this history to his undergraduate ...... Allende period. 8 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. 

 The Cybersyn Revolution -
 Jacobin 
Apr 27, 2015 - Project Cybersyn was a bold technological project tied to a bold political project. It emerged in the context of Chile's peaceful road to socialism: Salvador Allende had won the Chilean presidency in 1970 with a promise to build a fundamentally different society. His political program would make Chile a ... 

 Cybernetic Revolutionaries | The MIT Press https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries 
Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina ... 

 Andy Beckett: The forgotten story of Chile's 'socialist internet ... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile Sep 8, 2003 - In the many histories of the endlessly debated, frequently mythologised Allende period, Project Cybersyn hardly gets a footnote. Yet the personalities involved, the amount they achieved, the scheme's optimism and ambition and perhaps, in the end, its impracticality, contain important truths about the most ... 

 Project Cybersyn - Stafford Beer's Cybernetic Science Fictions ... Video for project cybersyn
▶ 23:08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCO3vXyR-c4 Apr 20, 2012 - Uploaded by Malthus0

Free As In Beer: Cybernetic Science Fictions - A paper delivered at the 2009 Pacific Ancient and Modern ... Project Cybersyn: Chile & the Socialist Internet - YouTube Video for project cybersyn▶ 2:09:34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGTEoJI5-Y4 
Jan 31, 2015 - Uploaded by CybrSalon Cybersalon & Centre for the Study of Democracy 6th December - University of Westminster, London In Chile ... 

 Cybersyn: Control the economy from one central room - 
Video for project cybersyn▶ 22:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7_ylHj-AUA
Oct 31, 2015 - Uploaded by Max Zamora Under Salvador Allende's socialist government, a project was under way called Project CyberSyn or Proyecto ... 

 Project Cybersyn: Chile 2.0 in 1973 | iRevolutions https://irevolutions.org/2009/02/21/project-cybersyn-chile-20-in-1973/ 
Feb 21, 2009 - My colleague Lokman Tsui at the Berkman Center kindly added me to the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholars working group and I attended the second roundtable of the year yesterday. These roundtables typically comprise three sets of presentations followed by discussions. Introducing Cybersyn 

 - Marginal REVOLUTION
Dec 7, 2009 - Cybersyn was a project of the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and British cybernetic visionary Stafford Beer; its goal was to control the Chilean economy in real-time using computers and "cybernetic principles." ... The two computers supposedly used to run the ... 

 Project Cybersyn – A failed experiment in Big Data and Socialism in ... https://www.peerlyst.com › Explore › Posts Feb 21, 2018 - private, systems, free - I read about this a few months back or maybe a year, I read way too much to remember all the details. It is a story about a new governm. 

 Before '73 Coup, Chile Tried to Find the Right Software for Socialism ... www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/world/americas/28cybersyn.html 
Mar 28, 2008 - 
Cybersyn, a project that included a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines, was in the early 1970s a part of an experiment to help manage Chile's economy. What were the general motivations of Project Cybersyn? 



What were the general motivations of Project Cybersyn?
- Quora 
 https://www.quora.com/What-were-the-general-motivations-of-Project-Cybersyn Dec 10, 2016 - Cybersyn was an ambitious project in technology and design meant to help Chile's socialist economy succeed. It's objectives have an interesting backstory. President Salvador Allende had recently become president after a free election. Allende hope... 

 Good ideas that didn't pan out, part 2: Project Cybersyn
Sep 18, 2014 - Part 2: Project Cybersyn. Around the time the first email was sent, not long after ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, was first connected, a group of high-minded computer scientists in Chile tried to run their country's economy by computer. In 1971, the Chilean government of Salvador Allende signed a ... 

 Project Cybersyn and the Origins of Algorithmic Life | Open Geography https://opengeography.wordpress.com/2015/03/09/cybersyn-and-algorithmic-life/ Mar 9, 2015 - One of the left's commonly accepted stories about neoliberalism is that it got some of its first real-world tests in Pinochet's Chile in the early 1970s. Following a coup and the violent end to socialist Salvador Allende's government (in which Allende took his own life in the Presidential Palace), probably with the ...

 Project Cybersyn | “At last, el pueblo” | dpr-barcelona https://dprbcn.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/project-cybersyn-2/ Aug 27, 2010 - According to the research project CYBERSYN, Cybernetic Synergy, internationally, the country was viewed with curiosity and mistrust, and in terms of internal affairs, different political groups wasted no time in planning a strategy to produce the debacle of the Socialist government, joining forces with the ... 

. Computers and the Internet: A global history. Chile — Project Cybersyn. Today. ▻ Review. ▻ Homeostasis: a fundamental cybernetic principle. ▻ Chile, Stafford Beer, and Project Cybersyn.

 CYBERSYN/Cybernetic Synergy
 “Dear friends, I should like to greet you personally to this place, in the development of which I have taken enormous personal interest, and for this reason I am asking you to take a special interest in it. What you see is the outcome of 18 months of hard work on the part of a group of extremely professional Chilean engineers ... 

Project Cybersyn, Beer, Stafford, Hand written in black fountain pen., March 1972, Image, application/pdf, Liverpool John Moores University, Special Collections and Archives: Stafford Beer Collection, Box 60 (Chile), English, JMU, 

 Santiago dreaming https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/08/sciencenews.chile When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer Project Cybersyn Project Cybersyn, Beer, Stafford, Hand written in black fountain pen., March 1972, Image, application/pdf, Liverpool John Moores University, Special Collections and Archives: Stafford Beer Collection, Box 60 (Chile), English, JMU, 

 The Socialist Origins of Big Data | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine 
Oct 13, 2014 - The consultant, Stafford Beer, had been brought in by Chile's top planners to help guide the country down what Salvador Allende, its democratically .... Norbert Wiener's classic “Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1948) discussed human behavior by drawing on his ... Writings on Norbert Wiener - Thinking Machines in the Physical World ... 21stcenturywiener.org/writings-on-norbert-wiener/ The writer's critical perspective regarding military technology leads to a co-biography supportive of Wiener but not of von Neumann. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile E. Medina (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2011). Wiener dubbed Stafford Beer the father of management cybernetics. 

Rethinking algorithmic regulation | Kybernetes | Vol 44, No 6/7 www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/K-02-2015-0052?fullSc=1 
A discussion of Project Cybersyn requires a discussion of Stafford Beer, whom Norbert Wiener described as “the father of management cybernetics.” Beer conducted ....

 M.I.T. Scholar's 1949 Essay on Machine Age Is Found - The New York  Times
May 20, 2013 - The Machine Age,” an essay written for The New York Times by Norbert Wiener, a visionary mathematician, languished for six decades in the M.I.T. ... 1948 he had published “Cybernetics,” a landmark theoretical work that both foreshadowed and influenced the arrival of computing, robotics and automation.

 The Lost 1949 Essay That Predicted The Computerized World We Live In http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-lost-1949-essay-that-predicted-the-computerized-wor-509540334? [PDF]

The Machine Age, version 3, 1949 - Monoskop https://monoskop.org/images/3/31/Wiener_Norbert_The_Machine_Age_v3_1949.pdfPage 1 of 8. The Machine Age, by Norbert Wiener, version 3, 1949. Copyright Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 Courtesy of MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, Norbert Wiener Papers, 

 Cybernetic Revolutionaries - 
P2P Foundation wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cybernetic_Revolutionaries May 1, 2015 - Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile. By Eden Medina. MIT Press, 2011. URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries ... Computers that merely enabled factory automation were of little use; what Beer called the “cussedness of things” required human involvement. It's here that ... 



 Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the ... https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cybernetics-Second-Control...Machine.../B002XUKWLC Rating: 5 - ‎4 reviews Cybernetics, Second Edition: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press) eBook: Norbert Wiener: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store. ... Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (MIT Press). Prodigy of probability | MIT News news.mit.edu/2011/timeline-wiener-0119 Jan 19, 2011 - Norbert Wiener gained fame as the father of cybernetics, but his earlier work on statistical descriptions of complex systems may prove more important. 

“Who believed in a second industrial revolution? 'the age of computers ... https://repub.eur.nl/pub/50302/Explaining-computers-v4-juli-13.pdf by D van Lente - ‎2013 for the second industrial revolution we could quote luminaries like Norbert Wiener, J.D. Bernal,. CP Snow and many others. ... computers and automation spread very quickly during the fifties and sixties, and one may expect that they raised ... Technology and politics in Allende's Chile (Cambridge, Mass: MIT. Press 2011). 

 Towards a Rhizomatic Technical History of Control By Goffey, Andrew | New Formations, Summer 2015 |https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-435637263/towards-a-rhizomatic-technical-history-of-control 

 On Socialist Cybernetics, Accelerationist Dreams, and Tiqqun’s Nightmares 

 Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas 
 Algorithms Dec 18, 2016 - “One day, it's going to no longer be arbitrary to reframe 20th century proposal and its clever machines as a quest for the confident definition of blunders, abnormality, trauma, and catastrophe—a set of ideas that must be understood of their cognitive, technological and political composition. it can be ...

  1. AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE TRAUMAS

    https://library.oapen.org/.../978-3-95796-066-5-Alleys_of_Your_Mind.pdf · PDF file

    Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas. ... Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas


 Norbert Wiener’s Vision: The Impact of “the Automatic Age” on Our Moral Lives 
Terrell Ward Bynum Southern Connecticut State University http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/bynum.pdf 
Foreseeing the Information Age During the Second World War, while working to design a new kind of antiaircraft cannon, mathematician Norbert Wiener and several of his colleagues developed a new branch of applied science — the science of information feedback systems — which Wiener named “cybernetics”. With impressive foresight, Wiener realized that this new science, when combined with the electronic digital computers that were being developed to support the war effort, had enormous social and ethical implications. Soon after the Second World War, therefore, Wiener began to write and lecture about the social and ethical challenges of the coming “automatic age”, which he also called “the second industrial revolution”


Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic
 Front Cover Seb Franklin MIT Press, Sep. 4, 2015 - Philosophy - 211 pages 1 Review https://books.google.ca/books?id=j4OICgAAQBAJ&dq=MIT+CHILE+ALLENDE+AUTOMATION+NORBERT+WIENER&source=gbs_navlinks_s https://www.amazon.ca/Control-Digitality-as-Cultural-Logic/dp/0262029537/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522280369&sr=1-1&keywords=9780262029537&dpID=41gMUHsF2KL&preST=_SY264_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch Is there a cultural logic of what we have come to call the information age? Have the technologies and techniques centered on the computer provided not only tools but also the metaphors through which we now understand the social and economic formation of our world? In Control, Seb Franklin addresses the conditions of knowledge that make the concept of the "information economy" possible while at the same time obscuring its deleterious effects on material social spaces. In so doing, Franklin traces three intertwined threads: the relationships among information, labor, and social management that emerged in the nineteenth century; the mid-twentieth-century diffusion of computational metaphors; and the appearance of informatic principles in certain contemporary socioeconomic and cultural practices. Drawing on critical theory, media theory, and the history of science, Franklin names control as the episteme grounding late capitalism. Beyond any specific device or set of technically mediated practices, digitality functions within this episteme as the logical basis for reshaped concepts of labor, subjectivity, and collectivity, as well as for the intensification of older modes of exclusion and dispossession. In tracking the pervasiveness of this logical mode into the present, Franklin locates the cultural traces of control across a diverse body of objects and practices, from cybernetics to economic theory and management styles, and from concepts of language and subjectivity to literary texts, films, and video games.


 How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
 Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation -- to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American precursor to the Internet, went online in 1969. Why did the Soviet network, with top-level scientists and patriotic incentives, fail while the American network succeeded? In How Not to Network a Nation, Benjamin Peters reverses the usual cold war dualities and argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments and the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others. The capitalists behaved like socialists while the socialists behaved like capitalists. After examining the midcentury rise of cybernetics, the science of self-governing systems, and the emergence in the Soviet Union of economic cybernetics, Peters complicates this uneasy role reversal while chronicling the various Soviet attempts to build a "unified information network." Drawing on previously unknown archival and historical materials, he focuses on the final, and most ambitious of these projects, the All-State Automated System of Management (OGAS), and its principal promoter, Viktor M. Glushkov. Peters describes the rise and fall of OGAS -- its theoretical and practical reach, its vision of a national economy managed by network, the bureaucratic obstacles it encountered, and the institutional stalemate that killed it. Finally, he considers the implications of the Soviet experience for today's networked world. 

 Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the
 by B Peters - ‎2016 - ‎Related articles May 2, 2016 - MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-not-network-nation .... Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948, concluding line ..... Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

Building the information society: A history of computing as a mass medium
 ProQuest


Folk Psychology as Mental Simulation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Introduction: The Mechanical Mind Philip Husbands, Michael Wheeler, and Owen Holland https://gpreview.kingborn.net/182000/98248e2a7b3a4326813d6ad7a7948ac5.pdf


Dreams in Cybernetic Fugue - Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences hsns.ucpress.edu/content/46/5/633.full-text.pdf 


 InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network
 Slava Gerovitch* Taylor and Francis GHAT_A_304641.sgm 10.1080/07341510802044736 History and Technology 0734-1512 (print)/1477-2620 (online) Original Article 2008 Taylor & Francis 
244000000December 2008 SlavaGerovitch slava@MIT.edu 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 


 Definition of Cybernetics | Blog | Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan bernardg.com/blog/definition-cybernetics by B Geoghegan - ‎Related articles Ever wonder what cybernetics was? Or maybe is? It's a baffling question and even the leading theorists of cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s could hardly agree on the definition. In the last few years historians Eden Medina and Andrew Pickering, for example, have shown that the understanding, definition, and use of cybernetics varied tremendously from one context to another. Even Norbert Wiener, who is widely credited with founding cybernetics, offered varying and contradictory accounts of the field. Recently communications theorist BEN PETERS and I wrote up our own definition and introduction to the field for the forthcoming JOHNS HOPKINS GUIDE TO DIGITAL MEDIA AND TEXTUALITY, edited by Lori Emerson, Benjamin Robertson, and Marie-Laure Ryan. The editors have put together a stellar volume with entries by Simon Penny, Jay David Bolter, Matthew Fuller, Matthew Gold, Johanna Drucker, Jussi Parikka, Eduardo Kac and other notable theorists of digital media. Below is the rough draft of the entry Ben and I prepared. For the final, more polished draft, pick up a copy of the guide when it comes out. 

The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age 
by Ronald R. Kline. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015, 352 pp. http://issues.org/33-4/book-review-a-coming-of-information-age-story/ 
What was cybernetics? As Ronald Kline tells it in his new intellectual history, The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age, cybernetics suffered from being too many things at once: an interdisciplinary field of study, a philosophical worldview, a popular buzzword, an intellectual fad, and a theory of automation and control. That it could be all these things and not be wholly incoherent is a testament to the genius of its creator, the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener. In charting the rise, fall, and legacy of cybernetics, Kline attempts to prove, mostly successfully, that it was cybernetics that gave rise to the coinage and conception of our “information age.” 


 The Cybernetics Society
Web site of The Cybernetics Society, the UK national learned society and professional body promoting pure and applied cybernetics information archive news events. 


 Here Lies Project Cybersyn aedhgsa.ca/docs/Strata/Volume_7/STRATA_vol7_ROSE_CLANCEY.pdf
 by R CLANCEY - ‎Related articles Interrompu par le coup d'État qui mit fin au gouvernement .... President Salvador Allende sought to bring great change to Chile, and. Project Cybersyn was a part of his program for a modern, independent, socialist Chile. .... 19 See: Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics; or, Control and communication in the animal and the machine.

 the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener - WordPress.com
Apr 29, 2013 - sciences: the strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener, Russian Journal of Communication, 5:1,. 31-43. To link to this article: ...... Cybernetic revolutionaries: Technology and politics in Allende's Chile. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York: Oxford University ... [PDF]

Mechanical Mind in History - EPDF.TIPS
https://epdf.tips/download/the-mechanical-mind-in-history-bradford-books.html interest in the subject carried over into peacetime. In the early 1940s a circle of scientists intent on understanding general principles underlying behavior in animals and machines began to gather around the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). Inspired by. Wiener's classified work on automatic gun aiming, ...

 EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
 By Orit Halpern Duke University Press
ISBN electronic: 978-0-8223-7632-3 
Publication date: 2015 
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption. 


 Human Control and Autonomy in Cybernetic Systems
 David Shen Georgetown University 
Abstract This paper is meant to question the idea that humans in cybernetic systems are autonomous in the traditional western liberal conception. Examination of the history of cybernetics reveals conflicts over the role of humans within human/machine systems over a larger period than is traditionally associated with the field of cybernetics. By comparing cybernetic systems from before the 20th century and through the Cold War, it becomes apparent how cybernetics served as an experimental testing ground for political ideologies to express themselves in the budding information age. Comparing cybernetics systems in this manner suggests that cybernetics as a discipline does not inherently support or contradict the ideals of freedom and agency, but rather, cybernetic systems become extensions of the organizations they serve and adopt their parent organizations beliefs. 


Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media
November 24, 2016 Abstract Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve (among others) two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly larger groups. I then explore some recent efforts towards using the Internet and social media to provide alternative means for addressing these scalability challenges, under the banners of crowdsourcing and computer-supported argumentation. I present some lessons from those efforts about the limits of technology, and the research directions more likely to bear fruit merging the natural with the artificial: the nature of a ... 

 by AJ Malapi-Nelson - ‎2015 - ‎Related articles Abstract This thesis is concerned with the rise and fall of cybernetics, understood as an inquiry regarding the nature of a machine. The collapse of this scientific movement, usually explained by external factors such as lack of funding, will be addressed from a philosophical standpoint. Delving deeper into the theoretical core of cybernetics, one could find that the contributions of William Ross Ashby and John von Neumann shed light onto the particular ways in which cybernetics understood the nature and behavior of a machine. Ross Ashby offered an account of the nature of a machine and then extended the scope of “the mechanical”. This extension would encompass areas that will later be shown to be problematic for mechanization, such as learning and adaptation. The way in which a machine-ontology was applied would trigger effects seemingly contrary to cybernetics’ own distinctive features. Von Neumann, on the other hand, tinkered with a mechanical model of the brain, realizing grave limitations that prompted him to look for an alternative for cybernetics to work on. The proposal that came out of this resulted in a serious blow against the theoretical core of cybernetics. Why did cybernetics collapse? The contributions coming from both thinkers, in their own ways, spelled out the main tenets of the cybernetic proposal. But these very contributions led to cybernetics’ own demise. The whole story can be framed under the rubric of a serious inquiry into the metaphysical underpinnings of a machine. The rise and fall of cybernetics could thus help us better understand what a machine is from a philosophical standpoint. Although a historical component is present, my emphasis relies on a philosophical consideration of the cybernetic phenomenon. This metaphysical dissection will attempt to clarify how a machine-based ontology remained at the core of cybernetics. An emerging link will hopefully lead towards establishing a tri-partite correlation between cybernetics’ own evolution, its theoretical core, and its collapse. It will hopefully show how cybernetic inquiries into the nature of a machine might have proved fatal to the very enterprise at large, due to unsolvable theoretical tensions. 

 Claus Pias 
In Defense of Cybernetics. A Reminiscence
One cannot speak of defense without also speaking of cybernetics. From a historical point of view, it recommends itself as the science of defense par excellence, and in two respects. On the one hand, it owes its modern form essentially to the air defense systems of World War Two, i.e. automatic target prediction and enemy tracking. Peter Galison was right in particularly emphasizing this point and developing it into a broad contemporary-history diagnosis (Galison 1994). On the other hand, however, the question of system stabilization, the establishing of dynamic balances, can also be seen from the perspective of defense. After their being modeled, by which the relevant factors for their regulating activity is determined, cybernetic systems stabilize themselves through continuous defense against everything that might constitute a threat to their continuity. Cybernetic systems are constantly threatened with destabilization and constantly legitimized by defense. Hence, perturbation constitutes their right to exist, and defense appears as a positive force. Perturbation is what causes a permanent need for intervention, and defense is what permanently fulfills it. Therefore, cybernetics is to be characterized as a technical as well as a political science. And this brings back into focus that cybernetics – long before its neurologically and computer technologically inspired reinvention towards the end of WW II – has a double origin. In Greek antiquity, it means technology and politics at the same time: it designates both procedures of controlling missiles and procedures of controlling history; it names the control of material things and of historical events; it repels intruding enemies and adverse conditions, in both cases maintaining a paradoxical relationship with the future.


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Friday, August 07, 2026

AI before AI: The legacy of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics
 (3/3)


British mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics in the 1940s, may deserve a place alongside artificial intelligence founders Alan Turing and John von Neumann. FRANCE 24 revisits this overlooked visionary who was also one of the first to warn against the automation of society.


Issued on: 05/08/2026 -
FRANCE24
By: Sébastian SEIBT


Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, not only influenced research into artificial intelligence but was also one of the first to warn of the risks associated with automation. © FMM graphics studio

The story of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence almost always features British mathematician Alan Turing and his computing machine. John von Neumann is often presented as the mastermind behind programmable computers.
Summer serie: AI before AI

Names from the Dartmouth group – such as John McCarthy or Marvin Minsky – are also sometimes cited as the “inventors” of artificial intelligence.

However, another figure is often overlooked or relegated to the category of second-rate pioneers: Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics in the 1940s.

ChatGPT, Claude and other AI chatbots can be regarded as the offspring of his ideas.

But it's uncertain whether Wiener – with his particular moral, political and scientific convictions – would claim any credit for these modern large language models.
A young prodigy

Wiener was born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri, into a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

His father Leo Wiener, a highly strict professor of Slavic languages of Lithuanian origin, would “behave somewhat like Pygmalion and attempt to mould his son in his own image", said Pierre Cassou-Noguès, a philosopher at Paris 8 University and author of a fictionalised account of the mathematician’s life.

"At least, that is how Wiener describes it in his autobiography,” he added.

Thus, Wiener became “a young scientific prodigy moulded by his father”, agreed Mathieu Triclot, a philosopher specialising in the history of technology at the Belfort-Montbéliard University of Technology.

He learned to read before the age of four, graduated from high school at 11, earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at 14 and completed his PhD in mathematics at Harvard at 18.

A few years later, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) appointed him as one of its youngest professors.

It was in this role that, after World War II, Wiener developed his ideas which would “have an impact on many fields related to artificial intelligence such as robotics, control engineering and multi-agent systems”, said Philippe Mathieu, an artificial intelligence specialist at the University of Lille.

Weinter laid the foundations for the new field of cybernetics as early as 1943 in a seminal article and further developed his ideas in the book “Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”, published in 1948.

Cybernetics studies “certain phenomena of control and information transmission in the same way in humans, in the animal kingdom and in the world of machines”, Cassou-Noguès said.

In other words, for Wiener and “cyberneticists”, it is possible to draw parallels between the way human and animal brains and machines process information.
Cybernetics, a ‘super-science’ attracting the biggest names in AI

In practical terms, these principles inspired Wiener to work on a new kind of anti-aircraft defence system during World War II.

He aimed to create a system capable of adapting in real time to the movements of missiles or aircraft and of learning from its mistakes. These were the very first tentative steps towards what we would now call “machine learning”.

“The central theme of cybernetics is understanding how an entity adapts to its environment and to the information available. Intelligence is seen as the result of interactions between an entity [living or not] and its environment,” Mathieu said.

“Logic, mathematics and electrical engineering, information theory, brain research and psychology – a whole bundle of scientific disciplines influenced the events that led to AI," writes Rudolf Seising, who specialises in the history of science and technology at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

"In the first half of the 20th century, interdisciplinary considerations and, above all, transdisciplinary approaches to AI were mainly found under the umbrella of cybernetics, a ‘super science’.”

This “jack-of-all-trades” aspect of cybernetics may also explain why Wiener is less often seen as the “father of AI” than Turing or von Neumann, who had a more direct and immediate impact on the development of computer science.

READ MOREThe Dartmouth Workshop: The $7,500 investment that gave birth to AI (2/2)

But for Triclot, cybernetics’ “indirect influence” on AI is considerable.

A series of ten meetings known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics brought together scientists interested in Wiener’s ideas between 1946 and 1953.

Some of the biggest names in the history of AI, including von Neumann and Claude Shannon, took part and identified themselves with cybernetics at the time.

One of the founding members of the Macy Conferences was psychologist Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, “one of the central figures in the history of American computing”, Triclot said.

He later became the head of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Licklider "played a key role in the funding and development of the internet and also took an interest in human-computer interface technologies in the 1960s”, Triclot added.

At MIT, Wiener also supervised the work of Walter Pitts, a researcher and logician who was pivotal to the development of modern AI.

In the 1940s, Pitts laid the foundation for the first neural network model.
Against the Manhattan Project

This work, which is rooted in cybernetics, is essential to understanding today’s large language models.

While cybernetics itself may now seem to be a relic of the past, it paved the way, alongside neural networks, for the emergence of the branch of AI known as “connectionism”, which lies at the heart of the rise of ChatGPT and other 21st-century AI systems.

Wiener not only provided an “intellectual cradle” for AI, but “he was also one of the first to warn of its dangers”, Cassou-Noguès said.

Known for his strong-willed character and notorious outbursts of anger, Wiener understood why certain areas of scientific research were dangerous. Consequently, he refused to take part in the Manhattan Project, which led to the development of the first atomic bomb.

Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wiener even published a famous open letter in which he stated his intention to no longer publish research that could be misused for creating weapons of mass destruction.

Albert Einstein supported the move at the time.

But with cybernetics, "as early as 1948" Weiner also foresaw “the possibility of a fully or almost fully automated society – a development which, in his view, could just as easily lead humanity to a world free from the constraints of work or the social hell of mass unemployment,” Cassou-Noguès said.

Wiener concluded that he should continue his work in order to influence the direction research in the field was taking.

Often labelled as politically left-wing – US authorities suspected that he was sympathetic to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War – Wiener was thus one of the first to warn of the risk of social upheaval linked to the advent of machines.

In this sense, “cybernetics is a profoundly political endeavour, preoccupied with the fear of technological unemployment caused by machines that could replace workers”, Triclot said.


Cover image: The Debate © France24
02:02




For him, it is “striking to read this as early as 1947”, a time when computers were still very rare.

But for Wiener, this risk would only materialise “if we fall into the trap of treating human beings inhumanely”, said Triclot.

In other words, according to Wiener, robots would only be able to replace humans if humans were reduced to having the status of robots by denying everything that distinguishes them from machines.

Although the term “cybernetics” seems to have fallen out of use, the ideas of its founder are relevant today, at a time when companies are citing the triumph of AI to justify layoffs.

This article has been translated from the original in French.



















The era of the machine: Silicon Valley shows off humanoid robots

Cover image: Focus © France 24

Issued on: 05/08/2026 - 
05:07 min

For decades, humanoid robots belonged to the realm of science fiction. But today, they're one of Silicon Valley's hottest markets. According to consulting firm McKinsey, automation could transform up to 30 percent of all hours worked across the US economy by 2030. Dozens of companies are already developing robots that can interact with people and even help with everyday tasks. FRANCE 24's Pierrick Leurent and Valérie Defert report, with Wassim Cornet.





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Tuesday, June 01, 2021

Why the Soviets didn’t start a PC revolution
by Vilius Petkauskas
29 May 2021
in Editorial



Data processing workers with a Bulgarian ISOT EC 1035 in 1981.

First in space, Venus and Mars, the USSR did not lack engineering prowess. Why then, a revolution in personal computing happened westward of the Iron Curtain? Ideology played a role, of course, but computers were also just not cool enough.

Long before computers became phones, cameras, or TVs, their primary purpose was war. The power to calculate missile trajectories, nuclear impacts, and resource distribution within hours instead of months was, and still is, a crucial advantage over an enemy.

People in charge of the USSR were fully aware that the British and the Americans employed artificial machines to do their math for them. The official line on cybernetics was hostile, and computer science was denounced as ‘dehumanizing capitalism.’ Secretly, however, catching up was in full swing.
Mera CM 7209 in Chernobyl, Pripyat. Image source.

In 1962, President Kennedy’s top aid warned that if the Soviets manage to turn things around, ‘by 1970, the USSR may have a radically new production technology’ with self-teaching computers and concluded that without a change in pace on the American side ‘we are finished.’

As we now know very well, that did not materialize. So much so that there’s hardly anyone able to name at least a single Soviet computer brand. Understanding the benefits computing provides, it seems exceptionally odd.

According to Slava Gerovitch, science historian and director of the Program for Research In Mathematics, Engineering, and Science (PRIMES) at MIT, the history of computing in the USSR happened in waves. Computers were frowned upon, loved, and distrusted in 40 years.

“Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it,” Gerovitch told CyberNews.

I sat down with Gerovitch to discuss how ideology might have affected the cyber race, how different Soviet computing was, and why the said socialist revolutionaries did not champion the digital revolution that benefited the West so much.


Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it,Slava Gerovitch.

Looking back at the early days of the Cold War, the Soviet Union seemingly had technical capabilities to be on par with the United States. I’m talking about the rapid development of the atomic bomb, advanced aviation, and space capabilities. Would it be unreasonable to assume that the Soviets were not far behind the US, at least early on in terms of computing?

The first electronic digital computers were built in the US for the atomic bomb calculations in the mid-forties. The Soviets learned about them and started constructing their own. So, there was a definitive lag from the start.

With rocket development, the Soviets learned a lot from German scientists, so there was some technology transfer. There was a lot of ingenuity on the Soviet side, of course, but the Russians appropriated new technology, developed it, and improved it.

Also, the process of launching new technological initiatives was very different from the US. In the States, the military would present a problem and open funding for qualified academics to submit proposals to solve the problem using that funding. In the Soviet case, it was a top-down decision to assign someone to work on an issue.

So, there was little competition. Later on, as competition emerged when they had established institutions, there was competition among institutions, even in the Soviet system. But in the 1940s, like the work of Sergey Lebedev in Kyiv on the first Soviet electronic digital computer, the MESM machine, was initially his own initiative.
Mera CM 7209 terminal computer. Image source.

Essentially, using the resources he had personally under his control as director of the Institute of Electric Technology in Kyiv. It took a while before the proponents of electronic digital computers won the argument with the proponents of an analog computer in the Soviet Union and could get resources to launch a massive project of building a large electronic digital computer.

So even though the Soviets had had an Institute established for the development of large computers in 1948, initially, the champions of analog computer computers controlled the institute.

For two years, that Institute had had lots of resources. Still, they pulled all those resources into analog computing, and only in 1950, the proponents of electronic digital computing won that argument.

What you said paints a picture that there was a path dependency that started from the initial lag. Is it correct to assume this? Meaning the Soviets were always catching up instead of leading the race in computing?

In one sense, yes. The Soviets already knew that the Americans and the British had working machines, whereas they were trying to build the machines. But they did not know many details about the Western machines. So, they had a fair amount of room for their own invention rather than just coping Western machines. There was some room for interesting, genuine developments.


Cybernetics became a victim of the entire ideological campaign by Soviet journalists, ideologues, and people who are not in any way connected with actual computer development,Slava Gerovitch.

In your book From Newspeak to Cyber-speak, you talk about the Soviet refusal to accept cybernetics. You discuss how the computer in the Soviet Union was taken as a ‘giant calculator’ while the Americans saw it as a ‘giant brain.’ How did that ideological strain limit Soviet advances in computing, if they did at all?

There were two parallel developments. On one side, electronics engineers were working on new calculating machines for the military. This was a respectable activity, with a high priority for the defense industry, meaning the military provided necessary resources.

A parallel development, totally independent of this, was an ideological campaign in the Soviet media against all sorts of ideological targets in the West associated with American imperialism. That included academic theories developed in the West, including cybernetics.

Cybernetics became a victim of the ideological campaign by Soviet journalists, ideologues, and people who were not in any way connected with actual computer developments.

It became clear to the Soviet engineers who were working on computers that they should not in any way associate their work on computers with ‘tainted’ cybernetics. That led to engineers talking about their work as purely technical. Computers were essentially large calculators rather than machines capable of performing a thinking function. That would have put them in danger of being linked with ideologically tainted cybernetics.

While this helped them avoid ideological attacks, it limited their vision for applications of computers. They preferred not to seek contact with scientists working in various fields who might’ve used those computers for running computer simulations to advance other scientific disciplines. The need to avoid ideological complications led to the limited area of applications of computers in this initial period in the early 1950s.
Computers on display in a parade in Eastern Germany, 1987. Image source.

Another factor, maybe even more important, was that computers were available only in defense institutions. So, scientists who could have used computers for simulations either didn’t know about those computers or didn’t have access to them. In essence, engineers were not interested in attracting users from the academy.

That ideological lag ties into the fact that by the late ’70s, the Americans witnessed a revolution in personal computing, while the Soviets could not meet the same speed of change. The Americans had Commodore, TRS, Apple, and all other sorts of machines. There wasn’t anything of that sort in the USSR up until 1983. Does it mean that ideology hindered the spread of computers in the Soviet Union?

The ideological complications with cybernetics and the applications of computers beyond pure calculation ended in the mid-50s when cybernetics was rehabilitated. Instead, it was pictured as a communist science. At that time, it became ideologically very beneficial to be associated with cybernetics.

Cybernetics was mentioned in the 1961 program of the Communist Party. It became ideologically acceptable to use computers for symbol processing and computer simulations. Naturally, scientists were very interested in using computers. And it was a very popular field from the mid-50s to the early-70s.

So, the cybernetics campaign of the ’50s did not have a long-term negative effect. There were other factors at play. By the early to mid-70s, the popularity of cybernetics began to look overreaching, claims started to seem too general, there were too many promises with little to show for it.

Skepticism began to creep in among serious scientists about those early claims of the usefulness of computers. There also was skepticism because cybernetics became ideologically correct. Many people in the Soviet Union were suspicious of the government. So, when cybernetics became popular and was approved officially, people started to think that maybe there’s something wrong with it.

That way cybernetics became a term associated with government-imposed efficiency-oriented control and not with novelty and reform in the sciences. That was particularly evident in economics, where people saw computers being used at various factories to control information and monitor people’s performance more effectively.

\\By the early to mid-70s, the popularity of cybernetics began to look overreaching, claims started to seem too general, there were too many promises with little to show,Slava Gerovitch.

Focusing on personal computing, other factors were at play. Computers are communication devices. You can easily store, transfer, copy, print, and distribute information. That means a computer is a tool for autonomous communication, not controlled by the suspicious government. Therefore, the Soviet government was not terribly keen for personal computers to get into many people’s hands.

Another thing was that PC manufacturing requires a consumer-focused industry which was not a priority for the Soviet Union. So, the quality of parts and components that were produced was not high. Take the Soviet automobile: when you bought one, the first thing you did was starting to fix it.

It was the same with computers. You had to be an engineer to use it. The very concept of personal computing in the West was that it was for general consumers, not necessarily computer scientists or engineers. There were very different environments in which PCs were introduced and to very different audiences.

However, something did change during the mid-80s. With Perestroika, there was an explosion of Soviet-made PCs. Some models were even meant for export. Can the change be linked only to policy changes, or have the Soviet Union increased its technological capabilities?

With Perestroika, the government controls on small economic activity became looser. People could import computers from the West, and suddenly people were allowed to resell computers from the Western countries. They could also buy spare parts in the West, assemble their computers, or assemble their own devices out of Soviet-made parts.

There was room for less controlled economic activity that somewhat met the popular demand for PCs. With less control over communications, people started exchanging emails with the outside world. The need for communication devices and information processing devices rose, and it was met by import and local manufacturing.

A prototype of a home automation system. Image source.

But with the general decline of the Soviet industry and the early post-Soviet period, when the government stopped subsidizing prices, the production collapsed very quickly. From then on, Russia essentially relied on foreign-produced personal computers.

Earlier, you’ve mentioned the divergence in technology development and the notion of cybernetics developing independently from Western ideas. Are there any Soviet contributions to computing that still are noticeable today? For people born after the Soviet Union collapsed, it’s very easy to think that no innovation came from the USSR.

There were some interesting innovations by Soviet computer engineers and software developers. Some of them were the results of necessity and scarcity of parts when the Soviets had to solve complex problems with minimal technological resources. So, they tried to invent new computer architectures that might be more efficient than traditional ones.

For example, our usual computers have zeros and ones, two states for each cell in computer memory. But in the fifties, the Soviets developed three-value machines. This required a different type of programming, a different kind of software. It was a much more efficient use of computer resources.

Also, the Soviets had a tradition of very efficient programming in low-level computer languages, which required many mathematical skills in designing efficient algorithms. Working with low-level computer languages, essentially machine codes, assembler codes, allowed programmers to use computer resources very efficiently. However, it was a very challenging mathematical and logical task to write those programs, debug them, and so forth. It requires a lot of expertise from programmers.

The Soviet programmers are also well-known since, in those early years, they were able to pack compelling and efficient programs into computers that had very little memory. Due to efficient programming, the Soviets were able to solve the problems they needed.
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Friday, July 31, 2026

AI before AI: The forgotten Soviet programme (1/2)

ANALYSIS

Beginning in the 1950s, the Soviet Union launched an ambitious programme aimed at developing artificial intelligence. While the history of AI today seems to be shaped by the giants of Silicon Valley, ideas originating from behind the Iron Curtain had a significant influence, although they remain largely overlooked.


Issued on: 30/07/2026 - FRANCE24
By: Sébastian SEIBT

The Soviet Union took an interest in artificial intelligence as early as the 1950s.
ʩ Studio graphique France M̩dias Monde


American chess genius Bobby Fischer defeated the reigning world champion Russia's Boris Spassky in 1972 in what has been called "the most exciting world chess championship ever".

But the Eastern Bloc got its revenge on August 8, 1974, when Kaissa, a Soviet computer, checkmated its opponent, securing the very first World Computer Chess Championship title for the Soviet Union. Russian artificial intelligence had crushed its capitalist competitor.

The victory proved to the world that the Soviets also had a say in the field of AI, which had until then mostly been developed at top US universities.

AI, a ‘bourgeois science’?

In the early 1950s, AI – which was not yet known by that name – was viewed behind the Iron Curtain with suspicion. The Soviets viewed what was to become AI primarily through the lens of cybernetics, a field of research that was very much in vogue for studying human-to-machine or machine-to-machine behaviour.

Some saw cybernetics as a “false bourgeois science”, while others thought it held great promise for scientific advancement.

“Cybernetics almost became a sort of official philosophy of scientific research in the USSR,” said Olessia Kirtchik, a sociologist at the European Centre for Sociology and Political Science who has worked on the history of AI in the Soviet era.

The hallways of research institutes and universities were then filled with mathematicians, philosophers and other researchers, tasked with ensuring the communist regime reaped the benefits of cybernetics. While it fell out of favour in the US by the late 1950s, giving way to computer science and what eventually became AI, the Soviets remained committed to cybernetics, particularly the concept of the “thinking machine”.

The gold mine of Soviet AI

One of the leading figures in Soviet AI to go down in history was Alexander Kronrod, a mathematician who was, among other things, in charge of the team that developed the Kaissa chess programme. For some, Kronrod was even the Soviet “father of artificial intelligence”.

But before him, another mathematician had a considerable influence on the development of AI. His name was Dmitry Pospelov.

Pospelov brought prestige to the discipline by “fostering and supporting the artificial intelligence research community for years”, said Kirtchik. This “lobbying” work culminated in the creation of the Russian Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1989.

Pospelov’s pro-AI campaign within Moscow’s corridors of power also illustrates how the field was not immune to the ideological battle of the Cold War era. The Russian mathematician strongly criticised the Western approach to AI, which he deemed too “reductionist”. In his view, American researchers were reducing the human brain to a sort of supercomputer, performing rigorous but disembodied calculations. For him, intelligence had to be conceived as a social activity dependent on its environment, rather than as a purely logical process.

In the Soviet Union, AI was expected to solve practical problems, and the USSR primarily “used algorithms to optimise the management of the socialist economy”, according to Kirtchik.

The oil and gas industries, for example, used it to improve their operations.


Are we in an AI bubble?
Cover image: PEOPLE & PROFIT © FRANCE 24
11:59



Algorithms even proved to be a gold mine for Moscow – quite literally, given that in the 1960s authorities were trying to identify where to dig in Soviet territory to find gold deposits. To achieve this, Yuri Zhuravlyov, one of the most highly decorated mathematicians of the Soviet era, developed an algorithmic approach. Using data on the known locations of gold mines around the world, Zhuravlyov built a programme in 1966 that successfully identified where to find gold within the Soviet Union.

This may have been one of the first practical success of “machine learning”, the ability of an algorithm to learn from the data it is given. Others see it as proof that AI does not necessarily need huge datasets to find the right answers.

“With clever methods, small data can move mountains – or in this case, reveal them,” Valery Manokhin, a machine learning specialist, wrote in a blog post on Medium on the Soviet gold rush.

When Russian AI inspired Apple

Some of Silicon Valley’s big names also have Soviet AI to thank. Apple might never have released its Newton tablet in 1993 without the work of Shelia Guberman, the Soviet mathematician who solved a puzzle that had been troubling many Western AI specialists: how to get machines to recognise handwriting.

“He achieved this by adopting an approach known as Gestalt (a form of pattern recognition), which had been overlooked in the West,” Kirtchik said.

Guberman's solution was adopted by Soviet entrepreneur Stepan Pachikov for the Paragraph company. His handwriting recognition software was used by Apple to develop the Newton personal digital assistant; the technology was subsequently sold to Microsoft and used by the US Postal Service.

Other ideas that were developed in the Soviet Union are now enjoying a resurgence, including the “automaton” conceived by Michael Tsetlin in the early 1960s. These ideas inspired Norwegian computer scientist Ole-Christoffer Granmo, who in 2024 introduced the idea of the “Tsetlin machine”, designed to be a more energy-efficient alternative to today’s large language models like ChatGPT.

But Tsetlin's ideas would likely annoy tech bros of today like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, however. For Tsetlin, “the workings of these automata had to be perfectly transparent, unlike the black boxes that are today’s AI models”, Kirtchik said.

The Soviets were not short of ideas, but as was often the case during the Cold War, they simply did not have the same resources as the West.

The practical applications of Soviet research often remained “marginal", Kirtchik said, "since the computers at their disposal were often incapable of performing the necessary calculations”.

This article was translated from the original in French.



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