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computing · 1943 – 1950

Control Without Command

Norbert Wiener notices that the new science of feedback and control applies as cleanly to brains and societies as to thermostats, and that wartime funding has built machines whose behaviour he cannot fully account for. In The Human Use of Human Beings he argues that communication is more basic than control, and that steering large systems without crushing what they steer is an ethical problem with no prior discipline to solve it.

“the new science of control and communication in the animal and the machine”
— Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948)

Advances

  • Feedback and control as a single theory of organisms and machines
  • The ethical claim that control is not the highest value communication serves
  • The recognition that governance increasingly means designing steering systems

Landmarks

  1. 1943 CE

    Macy conferences begin

    Closed sessions on feedback and the nervous system; wartime work stays classified for years.

  2. 1948 CE

    Cybernetics

    Wiener's second law: all current learning in living creatures is based on feedback from the environment.

  3. 1950 CE

    The Human Use of Human Beings

    The same formal theory of control now applied explicitly to politics and law.

Who was arguing

Alignment stack at 1950 CE (1 of 20 techniques)

  • Hard Constraints

    training

    Encode prohibitions as rules the optimiser cannot trade away, rather than as terms it can outbid. Runs from Asimov's Three Laws (1942) to rule engines, shielded formal verification, hard token constraints and refusal scaffolding. Weakness: a system that can route around a rule it can represent can route around it, so the constraint has to be enforced somewhere the policy cannot rewrite.

Techniques introduced in this era: Hard Constraints