ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rewiring Humans 2: Biology, Psychotherapy, and Philosophy in the Age of Digital Computers

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The gradual triumph of digital computers since the late 1940s triggered a development that Norbert Wiener described as the "Second Industrial Revolution.”
The computer in all its variations was not only understood as a tool with which existing tasks in industry and administration could be made more efficient and faster through automation. It became a new guiding metaphor and an “evocative object” (Turkle) that not only allowed mechanization to be controlled electrically, but also radically reconceptualized humans, their cognitive abilities, and their relationship to their environment.
The symposium “Rewiring Humans” focuses on various trends that emerged in North America and Western Europe in the 1950s in mostly newly emerging disciplines that thought with and through the computer.
It began with experts in the emerging field of computer science who met in Paris in 1959 to debate and steer the future direction of ideas in information theory. At the same time, psychiatrists and psychologists came together and imagined the computer as a bureaucratic aid, an analyzer of large amounts of data, and some even as an automated psychotherapist.
Cybernetics, which redefined the relationship between organisms, and machines in relation to each other and their environment, was also influenced by information theory. Austrian chemist Engelbert Broda popularized his idea of cybernetic biology. At the West German “special Research area 50”, animals and humans were re-measured neurophysiologically using digital computers. Cyberneticist Gordon Pask and his collaborators attempted to redefine the human conversation process in the new vocabulary of the time. At the MIT, AI researcher Seymour Papert, inspired both by his cybernetics colleagues and his research partner Jean Piaget, developed not only learning theories but also environments for learning. At the same time, Kenneth M. Sayre emerged as one of the first AI philosophers who took a positive view of AI research but analyzed it critically.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chairs

• Magnus Rust, University of Basel

• Rudolf Seising, Deutsches Museum

Individual Presentations

• Cybernetician Gordon Pask and His Conversation Theory & Interaction of Actor’s Theory As Critique of Artificial Intelligence - Marcus J. Carney

• Not So Automated Psychotherapy. Psycho-Scientists Test Computers in the 1960s - Magnus Rust, University of Basel

• Artificial Intelligence Philosophy: From Kenneth Sayre's Mental Simulation To Leo Breiman's Algorithmic Modeling - Rudolf Seising, Deutsches Museum