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| A third view is in terms of means and ends. The 'sili' in siliclone was originally seen as referring, of course, to silicon. However, it is beginning to carry an additional 'meaning'. We are all familiar with people who are not so much stupid as silly. Silliness refers to ends whereas stupidity refers to means. Silly people use perfectly good means to trivial ends. The Siliclone is 'silly' in this sense. It has powerful means but no worthy ends. The capacity for meaningful ends is the domain of natural intelligence. We should subsume means to ends by sub-contracting out means to our respective siliclones. CUBERNETICS When Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine in 1948, one of his major points was that the same terms could be used to describe the person and the machine [Wiener, 1948]. Both the person and the machine can be described as an information-processing system, dealing with input, stored, and fedback information. Cybernetics is thus a useful language for describing the person-machine hybrid of the cyborg. Indeed, the term was originally coined to describe a cybernetic organism [Clynes & Kline, 1960]. A cyborg is an information-processing system, dealing with input, stored, and fedback information, where the information-processing functions are shared by a person and a machine. However, the huge Cyborg Handbook contains only two one-sentence mentions of Norbert Wiener [Gray, 1995]. In his recent book Out of Control , which he himself describes as an "update on the current state of cybernetic research" (page 453), Kevin Kelly mentions this central theory of communication and control systems only to announce its demise [Kelly, 1994]. He lists three suspects in the death of cybernetics: the artificial intelligentsia, the priesthood guarding the mainframe in the days of batch-mode computing, and advocates of Second Order Cybernetics. Let us look at each in turn. |
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