"Artificial Intelligence" = the (terrible!) idea that a machine can replicate human cognition. "Cyber-Social Intelligence" = the idea that humans live in generative feedback relations with machines and, as a consequence of their profound differences from us, these machines extend the capacities of our mortal selves, mental as well as material.

(What follows is an historical narrative - and we're looking for someone who may be interested to work with us on a documentary on this alternative path to intelligent computing, tragically not taken. Or as we struggle with the problems of artificial intelligence, perhaps this is a path we could still take...)

ABSTRACT

The paper traces the history of cybernetics and its relevance to notions of intelligence, decision making, and digital learning environments. At the end of this paper we propose a coda where we define a concept that we have termed “cyber-social learning.” To reach this coda, we travel an historical narrative, passing through eleven episodes in the history of cybernetics, focusing in each episode on its understandings of types of learning – including the roles of: memory, ways of knowing, intelligence, decision-making, transformation, collaboration, and feedback.

In Episode 1, Uncle Ludwig meets his nephew, and the nephew meets the Vienna Circle of logical positivists to ask the question, “how do we think about our thinking?”

In Episode 2, Heinz von Foerster pinpoints the “birth hour of artificial intelligence,” when Norbert Weiner alerts John von Neumann to Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ 1943 article, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.”

Episode 3 recalls the history of the Macy Conferences where, between 1956 and 1953, leading US intellectuals thrashed out fundamental ideas of mind, biology, and machine.

Episode 4 takes place in 1960, when von Foerster arranges his conference on self-organizing systems and processes of “homeostasis.”

Episode 5 brings us to idealized economic and business models as systems of social learning developed by two of the conference participants, Friedrich Hayek and Stafford Beer.

In Episode 6 we travel to Moscow with Norbert Weiner, where cybernetic ideas emerged to guide science and economy the 1960s post-Stalinist thaw.

In Episode 7, we encounter ideas developed from the 1970s in a late, “second order cybernetics,” including "eigen-states" or self-states that are the frame of reference for inevitably constructivist encounters with new environments and meanings, and "autopoiesis," or the process in which an entity contemplates its own organization, so overcoming illusions of one-sided “objectivity.”

In years of great turbulence in universities—Episode 8 now—von Foerster played through these ideas to unsettled students in a series of ‘Heuristics” courses at the University of Illinois.

Then, in Episode 9, cybernetics connects with the work of educators Jean Piaget, Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire.

Episode 10 describes attempts to create cybernetic teaching-learning machines.

Finally, Episode 11, and the end comes to the cybernetics movement when it is finally supplanted by another, apparently more bankable idea, artificial intelligence.

Drawing the threads together in a coda, we suggest ways in which the cyber idea might be productively recalibrated for an era that we might rename “cyber-social learning.”

• Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, "The Cybernetics of Learning,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2033213.
• Full text here:
  

  Cybernetics of Learning