Hacker News Reader

Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics was based on automated killing — which he beautifully disavowed in peacetime [1]. Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept).

[1] “A Scientist Rebels,” 1947 http://lanl-the-back-story.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-scientist-...

View on HN

> Which historically is one of the main reasons we think about “Artificial Intelligence” instead of cybernetics (Wiener kind of pissed off the defense dept).

Cybernetics and artificial intelligence are two distinct fields, though? I have friends with degrees in both, it's not some long lost alternative name for AI (though we're unlikely to see something like Project Cybersyn using cybernetics today instead of some overly deep neural net).

Cybernetics is a precursor to AI and has a different intellectual tradition. Is it a long lost alternative name for AI? Kind of. I mean, if you look at how Sutton and Norvig define AI systems, it’s just goal directed agents with sensors and actuators.

That said, yes, they are different fields and traditions. Cybernetics is much broader, because it studies feedback control systems in natural/biological phenomena as well as the design of artificially intelligent systems.

Before the rise of modern LLMs, when both AI and cybernetics were just futurists’ speculation, some people saw parallels.

For example, thinking humans wouldn’t be displaced by super intelligent machines, but would instead be augmented by them cybernetically, becoming super intelligent while still having a human soul and body.

Sometimes I feel rather superhuman when my meat head commands my meat hands to invoke Claude on my iPhone.

I shouldn’t have to weld to my flesh to be called a cybernetic organism.

It’s like our exocortex

> For example, thinking humans wouldn’t be displaced by super intelligent machines, but would instead be augmented by them cybernetically, becoming super intelligent while still having a human soul and body.

If human adoption of brain-machine interfaces progresses fast enough, I don't see why this future can't still happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com