The cybernetic brain

sketches of another future

526 pages

English language

Published Aug. 7, 2010 by University of Chicago Press.

ISBN:
9780226667898

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5 stars (2 reviews)

Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.

The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering …

2 editions

Fantastic survey of British Cybernetics

5 stars

A really nice book that digs into the work of the first and second generations of British Cybernetics. The author's background in Science/Technology Studies, means he approaches from a sociological perspective, but is perfectly happy digging into some of the more dense technical stuff (which he explains very well).

In a book of this size there will always be things left out, but he manages to provide enough pointers for the interested reader to dig into random art projects, or how exactly a pond could be made into a computer.

If you want an intro to the work of Stafford Beer (though all of them are interesting), this is the best primer for his work that I know of.