Book Notes: On the dissertation book of Paul N. Edwards
Preface:
- “The Closed World emphasizes linkages and problems ignored or downplayed by most extant texts. My ultimate goal is to prove to the utility of a more integrated historical approach by showing how ideas and devices are linked through politics and culture.”
Chapter 1 -
Scene 2 - Turing’s Machine
- Turing’s imitation game predicted correctly.
- Turing - Can machines think? A stupid question, but one the culture can ask/think about without being contradicted
- i.e., the cultural imagination - “Giant brains.”
- Description of computers “with thoughts, desires, and goals, and of the human self as a kind of computer or program, were commonplace” among “hacker subcultures
Scene 3 - Cyborg
- Rise of “cognitive” theories of mind and AI - come out of working to integrate “humans into combat machines”
- Within the field of psychology - rejecting the behaviorist approach which only looked at external conditions rather than the internal information processing of the individual.
- Self forming concepts:
- “the analogy between computers and mind” “simeltaneously deenter, fragment, and reunify the self BY reformulating self-understanding aound concepts of information processing and modular mental programs, or by consituting and IDEAL FORM for think toward which people should strive.
- Exteriorty vs Interiority - construction of inside vs outside:
- “At the same time they helped establish the sense of a vast and complex word INSIDE the machine” - pg. 20
- Led to cyberspace, which has become vaster and social with computer network plus virtual reality. (think metaverse, “reality +“)
- WWII weapon systems which integrated into large networks
- This neccisitated the “a theory of human psychology COMMENSURABLE with the theory of machine.”
- Traces two distinct discourses:
- “While closed-word discourse is built around the computer’s capacities as a tool of analysis and control, cyborg discourse focuses on the computer’s mind-like character, its generation of self-understanding through metaphor.” - pg 21.
- Scene - The Terminator:
- “The fictional world of the terminato draws out attention to the historical and capnceptual ways in which clopsed-world and cyborg discourses are linked. Just as facts - about military computing, artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, and powerful machines - give credibility to fiction, so do fictions - visions of centralized remote control, automated war, global oversight, and thinking machines - give credibiity and coherence to the disparate elements that comprise these discourses.”
Discourse:
- Establishes an epistemology - a “regime of truth”
General questions/thoughts?
- Technical Metaphors - an expert needs to explain their technical artefact to a non-expert. Often leads to use of a metaphor, that says something about it but is a simplification.
- Constructs concepts in order to study something. Often to accomplish a dialectical move when a distinction at a point is not useful.
Chapter 2 - Why Build (Digital) Computers?
- Analogy (specilized and sensors) were the standard, and at somepoint the digital aimed to get up to the precision of analog.
- Pretty dramatic alternatives to digital computers:
- Contingency of general purpose.
- ENIAC - plotting of missle balistic paths. Simulates the human activity plotting trajectories (ironically). Babbage tries to replicate the work of the human computers. Post war funding of computers. What was the effect?
- Still a culture of secrecy, even if it is nominally unlcassified. Discretion felt up on the reserchers and lab to decide if, and to what degree, they wanted to publish the result of their work in computing.
Chapter 3 - SAGE
- A failure of a defense system, obsolete before its completion (transitor and the integrated circuit), but immensly valuable as an idea.
- “The closed wold was a leaky containter, constantly patched and repatched, continunally sprouting new holes”
- WHY do we shift from tranditionalist managment? In the pre-nuclear era, there were infrequent mobilizations, so reliance on a decentralized model made sense. In the nuclear era, there had to be coordinated and large scale command executed in minutes, based on large amounts of sensor data.
- Conclusion:
- “Computerized nuclear warning and control systems both embodied and supported the complex, heterogenous discourse of closed world politics”
- SAGE embodied the metaphor of the enclosed space of the US, as a seperate “closed world” from the rest of the world and the Soviets.
- “Perhaps most importantly SAGE worked as an idealogoy, creating an impression of active defenseof active defense that assuaged some of the helplessness of nuclear fear” - pg 110
- ORGINATED from the academic science and engineering community, supported by public political support, AGAINST military, who in all situations saw the US striking first.
- SAGE changed the military from a traditional insitute around concept of centralized command.
- “In this light, SAGE was far more than a weapons sustem. It was a dream, a myth, a metaphor for total defense, a technology of closed-world discourse.” - pg 110
Chapter 4 - From Operations Research to the Electronic World
-
Tracks the increasingly “managerial” aspirations of the military.
-
Bringing mathematical modelling to questions of operations, became Operations Research. Optimism spurred by the mathematical modelling of U-boat patterns that led to tripple in the kill rate.
-
The success of mathematical modelling in WWII led to a greater focus in post War - mathematics “apothesized” . BUT big difference. OR techniques were developed using “real combat data”, whereas RAND nuclear / game theoretic simulations were not.
- “But since they were planning a war that had never been fought” (or ever could) “they seemingly had no chouce but to do their best with theories, models, simulations and games.”
-
RAND - think tank combined of natural, social scientisists used mathematical modelling at its core.
- “RAND straddlged the borders between academia, industrial research laboratories, and the military”
- “Center of civilian contribution especiallu the overarching issues of nuclear politics and strategy.”
- OR - how to make best use of existing resources
- Systems-analysis - what tools to get to accomplish a task (“cost benefit”)
- Game Theory - how one should respond to other actors behaviors in a zero-sum game.
- “As a metaphor the zero-sum game represented yet another symbolic enclosure within which the (il)logic of nuclear politics played itself out.”
- “Nuclear war existed only as a simulation, a game, a computer model.”
-
“Systems analysis formalized this discursive connection between technology, strategy, and culture”
-
Simulation - Newell-Simon collaboration to simulate human thought became the cornerstone of AI - “Simulate human thought” —> “thinking machine”
-
McNamara - Former Harvard B-School —> Statistical Analysis during the War —> Ford Managment “whiz kids” —> President of Ford —> Secretary of Defense, appointed by Kennedy.
-
He brought managerial science and centralized command to armed forces through unification and control over their budget + being as quantative as possible. RAND into government.
-
Proliferation of complexity (via electronic communication and data processing) into their “command systems” led to managerial approach.
Larger Themes:
- Abstraction/Representation vs. Reality
- Computers and digital technology supported the possibility of the former. Which was is a necessary component for centralized command and control.
- Simiulation vs. Numerical Analysis
- Truth makers:
- Military pushed against this intially, then under Kennedy, established their own units to combat the ODS
Vietnam:
- Era where the space race became a central icon. Although it provided cover for many military mission for survielling the Soviets, it was a place to shift the frontier of competition:
-
- Technology as global prestige
-
- Spending
-
- James Webb - director of NASA - technocratic optimist of McNamara’s + “waging war” ‘on the technological frontier’
- Everything that was sent UP was sent up to look DOWN - “to pierce the Soviet Union’s veil”
- Igloo White:
- “information panoticon”
- Vientam war - no notion of success
- “Ideally panotptic power is self-enforcing: people who know their every act is ‘on the record’ tend to do and say what they think they are supposed to do and say. On the pseudo-panoptic battlefields of the Vietnam War, soilders subjected to panoptic control - managment by computers - did exactly what workers in panoptic factories often do: they faked the data and overrode the sensors.”
- “crippled by its own ‘regime of truth’” the system faltered and was dinally defeated
Dates / People
- Vietnam War - 1955 - 1975
- Secretary of Defense - Robert McNamara - (obssed with quantative analysis)
- Rand - think tank
- President Truman - “Containment”
- President Eisenhower/Dulles - “Massive Retaliation”