I've been reading about cybernetics recently for the first time, for reasons to do with the research project on 'data dashboards' I'm working on with colleagues at Warwick. I can see that there are various ways in which my happiness book might have been written very differently, had I known more about cybernetics when I wrote it. In particular, Jevons was not simply a utilitarian, but an enthusiast for calculative machines (this piece by Simon Shaffer has lots of interesting details about the pre-history of cybernetics in Britain).
Along the way, I've had a few articles and a blogpost published, each of which is partly a reflection on cybernetics. I thought I'd post them here together:
- 'Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language', The Atlantic
- 'How to give a damn about data', Reading Dashboards blog
- 'Silly Robots!', The Chronicle Review
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