On Control and Communication: Self-regulation and Coordination of Actions

The term control is a loaded one and the term communication needs much clarification. In 1948 Wiener encapsulated the outcome of discussions about feedback loops and circular causality in self-regulating systems in his book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and this was formally the beginning of cybernetics as a discipline. The name comes from the Greek for steersman (the equivalent in Latin is gubernatur), a term that Plato used to describe the art of steering ships; much later, in the nineteenth century, the French scientist Ampère, used it in reference to the science of government. In the second edition of his book, Wiener added a few chapters showing the relevance of cybernetics to learning, artificial intelligence, adaptation and language. Today feedback mechanisms are ubiquitous; they happen whenever part of the output of a system returns as its input, which is thereby changed. This is the case of a normal heating system and any servo-mechanism ranging from missiles to robots. It is also the case of complex systems, which depend on memory to learn; feedback is happening when input information is affected by the output of the previous observation. As for communication we understand it as coordination of actions, going beyond making sure that the message has been received; only when we manage to produce coordinated actions we can claim that communication has been achieved. During the last years of the Second World War, the Office of Scientific Research and Development of the USA focused most of its efforts and resources on finding solutions to two strategic problems: the first one was the development of the atomic bomb, the second was the construction of an antiaircraft cannon to attack German bombers. While the research for the first problem was carried out at Los Alamos as the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer, the antiaircraft project was assigned to Norbert Wiener, a brilliant mathematician who was working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (Heims 1987). Wiener was a mathematician prodigy and at the age of ten wrote his first paper entitled ‘The Theory of Ignorance’, when he was sixteen he got a degree in mathematics and philosophy from Harvard University and at nineteen received a PhD in philosophy from the same university. With this impressive background, it was no surprise that he was appointed to lead the project at MIT. R. Espejo and A. Reyes, Organizational Systems, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-19109-1_2, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 21 The main problem was to predict the position of an aircraft. This was so because given the limited speed of the cannon’s projectiles, the operator of the cannon should not point it directly towards the plane. If he did so, when the projectile reached its intended target, of course, the aircraft would not be there anymore. In addition, pilots surely will move randomly to avoid being destroyed.Wiener’s approach was to develop a mathematical theory to predict future events by extrapolating incomplete information from the past which, in passim, was the basis of modern statistical communication theory (Heims 1987, p. 184). Working with a young engineer, Julian Bigelow, they built an antiaircraft machine by connecting a cannon to the recently developed radar. Figure 2.1 shows the operation of the machine. When the radar first detected the plane, it followed it for a few seconds gathering information about its course. Then, by using the mathematical theory developed by Wiener, a possible position of the planewas estimated. This informationwas fed on to the cannonmechanismwhich used it to set the target position and fire. If the planewas not destroyed, the radar gathered additional information and adjusted the prediction mechanism to calculate the new probable position of the plane. Again the information was passed on to the cannon that adjusted the firing mechanism and so on. As soon as the plane would follow a pattern, almost certainly it would be destroyed. But notice that this was an entirely automatic process, nobody was controlling the cannon! Imagine the generals’ astonishment when Wiener was showing this