All Episodes - The Afterlives of Cybernetics - 17 November 2017 - Tracing the Information Revolution from the 1960s to Big Data

Public Lecture Jon Agar and Jacob Ward (University College London)'Communications, control and cybernetics in post-war British systems: rail, post and telecoms'Discussant: Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge)ConvenorsAndrew McKenzie-McHarg (University of Cambridge)Poornima Paidipaty (University of Cambridge)Egle Rindzeviciute (Kingston University) SummaryAs more and more of our collective activities (education, pension planning, health management, environmental protection) are mediated by rapidly moving markets and computerized technologies, uncertainties abound. Such visions of a technologically mediated — and seemingly limitless — future are not new. They echo the technological futurism popularized in the middle of the twentieth century by cybernetics. Beginning with the 1948 publication of Norbert Wiener’s book, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, cybernetics inaugurated path-breaking scientific explorations of feedback and

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