Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences

Do Cyborgs Dream of Electronic Rats? The Macy Conferences and the Emergence of Hybrid Multi-Agent Systems

This paper looks to the social science contributions to the Josiah Macy, Jr. conferences on cybernetics as in some ways anticipating the emergence of multi-agent systems composed of human and non-human agents, i.e., the ways in which we (as human agents) now live in tandem with increasingly intelligent and autonomous agents. By considering these systems in light of the “question of the observer...

Cybernetics: Cybernetics and the Theory of Knowledge

Leveraging Technology: The Macy Report's Recommendation #4.

N. Katherine Hayles - Boundary Disputes: Homeostasis, Reflexivity, and the Foundations of Cybernetics - Configurations 2:3

Virtual reality did not spring, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, full-blown from the mind of William Gibson. It has encoded within it a complex history of technological innovations, conceptual developments, and metaphorical linkages that are crucially important in determining how it will develop and what it is taken to signify. This essay explores that history by focusing on certain devel...

The Self-Mechanized Mind

From 1946 to 1953 ten conferences—the first nine held at the Beekman Hotel at 575 Park Avenue in New York, the last at the Nassau Inn in Princeton, New Jersey—brought together at regular intervals some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century. Sponsored by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, these meetings have since come to be known as the Macy Conferences. The mathematicians, logicians, en...