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Dec. 1st, 2019 09:48 pmI will never have anything interesting to talk about on Reading Wednesday, so here's a Reading Sunday instead:
I've been watching (off and on, during thesis work and other stuff) a let's play of Death Stranding which is that wild Hideo Kojima game about a futuristic amazon worker delivering your packages and also he has a baby strapped to his chest and he's played by Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen is also there. So basically, it's Kojima's Id On Main. I really admire Kojima for being so iddy on main. Anyway, it's given me a lot of feels about interconnectedness and the nature of communication and feedback (as well as a lot of other wtf feels about time travel and causality but details of that are more spoilery for the game content). So I picked up Wiener's Cybernetics again which I tried to read in high school because well because I was a pretentious brat of a teenager. I don't remember getting much out of it at that time besides what I thought were bragging points.
I haven't made it all that far to the meat of the book yet. So thus far it's kind of ... hard to describe beyond "it's basically how information and miscommunication could have societal and AI implications in terms of control and feedback of other forms (whether they're biological or technological, control and communication principles are the same), but also it's written in the 1950s".
Is this going to be useful? I really don't know. Nothing Wiener's saying so far is stuff that isn't said elsewhere in a more modern context more succinctly and accurately given the technology that we have now, so it's difficult to see why this was revolutionary besides him being one of the first to say it, without the benefit of actual computers beyond what they had at the time and his imagination on how they might look.
One thing I thought was hilarious is my Russian mother-in-law described it as "the prostitute of capitalism" which is how it had been sold to them way back when by higher-ups toeing party line about what sciences were good and which ones weren't :'D genetics apparently was much the same, both prodazhnaya dievka kapitalisma.
Anyway, time to go watch more Norman Reedus.
I've been watching (off and on, during thesis work and other stuff) a let's play of Death Stranding which is that wild Hideo Kojima game about a futuristic amazon worker delivering your packages and also he has a baby strapped to his chest and he's played by Norman Reedus and Mads Mikkelsen is also there. So basically, it's Kojima's Id On Main. I really admire Kojima for being so iddy on main. Anyway, it's given me a lot of feels about interconnectedness and the nature of communication and feedback (as well as a lot of other wtf feels about time travel and causality but details of that are more spoilery for the game content). So I picked up Wiener's Cybernetics again which I tried to read in high school because well because I was a pretentious brat of a teenager. I don't remember getting much out of it at that time besides what I thought were bragging points.
I haven't made it all that far to the meat of the book yet. So thus far it's kind of ... hard to describe beyond "it's basically how information and miscommunication could have societal and AI implications in terms of control and feedback of other forms (whether they're biological or technological, control and communication principles are the same), but also it's written in the 1950s".
Is this going to be useful? I really don't know. Nothing Wiener's saying so far is stuff that isn't said elsewhere in a more modern context more succinctly and accurately given the technology that we have now, so it's difficult to see why this was revolutionary besides him being one of the first to say it, without the benefit of actual computers beyond what they had at the time and his imagination on how they might look.
One thing I thought was hilarious is my Russian mother-in-law described it as "the prostitute of capitalism" which is how it had been sold to them way back when by higher-ups toeing party line about what sciences were good and which ones weren't :'D genetics apparently was much the same, both prodazhnaya dievka kapitalisma.
Anyway, time to go watch more Norman Reedus.
