Discusses the scientific potential represented by intelligent machines and their social implications.

This essay proposes a cultural and historical explanation for the American Military's fascination with computing. Three key elements of post-WWII US political culture — apocalyptic struggle with the USSR, subsuming all other conflicts: a long history of antimilitarist sentiment in American politics; and the rise of science-based military power — contributed to a sense of the world as a closed system accessible to American technological control. A developing scientific systems discourse, centrally including computer science and AI, was adopted for strategic (...) thinking and military technology. The Strategic Computing and Strategic Defense Initiatives are discussed as contemporary examples of this conjunction. (shrink)

Continuing his exploration of the organization of complexity and the science of design, this new edition of Herbert Simon's classic work on artificial ...

(1990). Perfecting the machine: Instrumental rationality and the bureaucratic ideologies of the state. World Futures: Vol. 28, Cross-Cultural Dialogue, pp. 141-161.

This dissertation considers the relationship of computers to American cultural politics. Using both philosophical and historical approaches, I develop a theory of tools and metaphors as integrally related elements of cultural interchange--"discourse." I argue that computer tools can have profound unrecognized effects on the distribution of social power in their environments. Similarly, systematic computer metaphors such as the computer/brain analogy have political significance through their effects on self-understanding--ethical effects--and their reinforcement or weakening of other metaphorical systems. The dissertation describes the (...) history, structure, and political implications of two major computer-supported discourses. ;Closed-world discourse names the interaction of systems analysis and related disciplines with American political values and practices during the 1950s and 1960s. The roots of closed-world discourse lie in WWII systems science and technology--computer science, cybernetics, systems analysis, and others. I explore its relationship to postwar American historical consciousness, including four salient elements of postwar political culture: traditional American antimilitarism; WWII as paradigm for the exercise of global power; the conundrum of nuclear strategy; and the rise of high technology military forces. I contend that the combination of systems sciences and postwar historical conditions helped generate a conception of the political world as a closed system amenable to technical control. ;Second-self discourse labels the collection of disciplines involved in the agonistic process of constructing the concept of mind. This conceptual production is not merely intellectual, but historical, cultural, and political in nature. Generated by wartime interdisciplinary collaboration, new social networks and institutions spread information theory rapidly throughout the sciences in the decade after 1945. These movements culminated in psychology's "cognition revolution" and in artificial intelligence. The genealogical ties of psychological knowledge to military technology exemplify a kind of "cultural politics": the embodiment of political values in concepts and tools. ;The two discourses are both historically and conceptually related. Their effects on culture include changes in conceptual boundaries between humans and machines; science and politics; and gender roles. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of high technology war as an active, pervasive American cultural phenomenon. (shrink)