The European Dream by Jeremy Rifkin Read Free Book Online Page B

anticipating novelty in their surrounding environment and making adjustments to those changes in order to secure their duration—what we now call “feedback.” Whitehead called this anticipation-response mechanism “subjective aim” and said that it was really what “mind” was about.
    A half century after Whitehead’s insight, Norbert Wiener introduced a mechanical analogue of process philosophy with the concept of cybernetics. Wiener and his colleagues were working on improving the sighting and targeting of anti-aircraft gunnery in World War II. Wiener’s engineering insights on how machines and humans communicate transformed process philosophy into a new technological format, which soon thereafter gave birth to modern information and communications technology.
    Wiener inaugurated the new field of cybernetics research. Cybernetics comes from the Greek word kyberneties, which means “steersman.” Cybernetics reduces purposeful behavior to two components, information and feedback, and postulates that all processes can be understood as amplifications and complexifications of both. Wiener defined information as
    the name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. 3
    Cybernetics is the theory of the way these messages or pieces of information interact with one another to produce predictable outcomes.
    According to cybernetics theory, the “steering mechanism” that regulates all behavior is feedback. Anyone who has ever adjusted a thermostat is familiar with how feedback works. The thermostat regulates the room temperature by monitoring the change in temperature in the room. If the room cools off and the temperature dips below the mark set on the dial, the thermostat kicks on the furnace, and the furnace remains on until the room temperature coincides once again with the temperature set on the dial. Then the thermostat kicks off the furnace, until the room temperature drops again, requiring additional heat. This is an example of negative feedback. All systems maintain themselves by the use of negative feedback. Its opposite, positive feedback, produces results of a very different kind. In positive feedback, a change in activity feeds on itself, reinforcing and intensifying the process, rather than re-adjusting and dampening it. For example, a sore throat causes a person to cough, and the coughing, in turn, exacerbates the sore throat.
    Cybernetics is primarily concerned with negative feedback. Wiener points out that “for any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.” 4 Feedback provides information to the machine on its actual performance, which is then measured against the expected performance. The information allows the machine to adjust its activity accordingly, in order to close the gap between what is expected of it and how it in fact behaves. Cybernetics is the theory of how machines self-regulate in changing environments. More than that, cybernetics is the theory that explains purposeful behavior in machines.
    Today’s intelligent technologies all operate by cybernetic principles. Continuous negative feedback—and occasional positive feedback—take us from a much slower technological era organized around linear, discrete, and discontinuous actions to a vastly sped-up age of pure process and uninterrupted flows.

Process Politics
    Smart technologies were coming of age in the early 1980s, just at the time when governments everywhere were under intense scrutiny by an increasingly leery and cynical public. Government bureaucracies were accused of being bloated, inept, uncaring,