Cybernetics, control and big data

Teresa Numerico teresa.numerico@uniroma3.it

Hapoc 2013 – 28-31 October 2013, ENS

Outline

• The cultural biases of cybernetics

• The influence of cybernetics on Arpanet

• Big data, knowledge as control and measure, AKA the dream of reason

The epistemology of closed-box as a model

• The setting up of a simple model for a closed-box assumes that a number of variables are only loosely coupled with the rest of those belonging to the system. The success of the initial experiments depends on the validity of that assumption.

• […] Many of these small compartments may be deliberately left closed, because they are considered only functionally, but not structurally important

Rosenblueth, Wiener 1945, p. 319

The closed box in action

• […]The behavioristic method of study omits the specific structure and the intrinsic organization of the object. This omission is fundamental because on it is based the distinction between the behavioristic and the alternative functional method of study.

Rosenbluet, Wiener, Bigelow 1943, pp.1

The cybernetic perspective on machines and animals

• A further comparison of living organisms and machines leads to the following inferences

• The methods of study for the two groups are at present similar. Whether they should always be the same may depend on whether or not there are one or more qualitatively distinct, unique characteristics present in one group and absent in the other. Such qualitative differences have not appeared so far

Rosenblueth, Wiener, Bigelow, 1943, p.4

Behavior and purpose as metaphors in the closed box

• By behavior is meant any change of an entity with respect to its surroundings[…] Any modification of an object, detectable externally, may be denoted as behavior

• Purposeful behavior: […] the act or behavior may be interpreted as directed to the attainment of a goal – i.e. to a final condition in which the behaving object reaches a definite correlation in time or in space with respect to another object or event

Rosenblueth, Wiener, Bigelow, 1943, p.1

Animals and machines as information exchange agents

• The physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback

• The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world

Wiener 1950, pp.26-27

Communication and control • When I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him, and when he communicates back to me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me

• When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. […]

Wiener 1950, 16

The metaphors of cybernetics

• The association of living organisms and machine according to the concept of purposeful behavior

• The interpretation of their behavior as a correlation between an input and an output

• Input and output may be described as transmission of messages (information)

• Transmission of messages can be identified with communication interpreted as negative feedback, and servomechanisms

• The effectiveness of negative feedback is guaranteed by data that exhibit the order execution

CYBERNETICS’ INFLUENCE ON ARPANET

From human-machine interaction…

• […] the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machines and machines are destined to play an ever-increasing part

Wiener 1950:16

Libraries of the future

• It is both our hypothesis and our conviction that people can handle the major part of their interaction with the fund of knowledge better by controlling and monitoring the processing of information than by handling all the detail directly themselves

Licklider 1965, p. 28

The aim of procognitive systems

• A basic part of the over-all aim for procognitive systems is to get the user of the fund of knowledge into something more nearly like an executive’s or commander’s position. He will still read and think and, hopefully, have insights and make discoveries, but he will not have to do all the searching […] all the transforming, nor all the testing for matching or compatibility that is involved in creative use of knowledge

Licklider 1965, p. 32

Needs and desires of users • Be available when and where needed • Handle both documents and facts • Permit several different categories of input • Make available a body of knowledge organized both broadly and

deeply – and foster the improvement of such organization through use

• Provide access to the body of knowledge through convenient procedure-oriented languages

• Converse or negotiate with the user while he formulates his requests

• Facilitate joint contribution to and use of knowledge by several or many co-workers

• Present flexible wide-band interface to other systems, such as research systems, information-acquisition systems and application systems

• Handle formal procedures (computer programs, subroutines etc.)

• Handle heuristics coded in such a way as to facilitate their association with situations to which they are germane

Licklider 1965, pp. 36-39

Licklider’s dream

• The computer will not only help the scientist with repetitive tasks but also write the rules in formulating the research hypotheses:

• “one of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems”

Licklider 1960, p. 3

Command and control = human-machine interaction

• In a letter to the “members of the intergalactic computer network” (25 april 1963) Licklider acting as the head of the IPTO affirmed: – Command and control must be reviewed in terms of improved man-machine interaction, time-sharing and computer networks

– In the effort of the IPTO there must be “enough evident advantage in cooperative programming and operation to lead us to solve the problems and, thus to bring into being the technology that military needs”

Can we store information?

• It is false to think that information can be stored without an overwhelming depreciation of its value in a changing world because:

Wiener 1950: 121

Bob Taylor and Vietnam reports

• There were discrepancies in reporting that was coming back from Vietnam to the White House about enemy killed, […] logistics reports of various kinds

• […] I talked to various people who were submitting these reports back to Washington. I got a sense of how the data was collected, how it was analyzed, and what was done with it before it was sent back to the White House, and I realized that there was no uniform data collection or reporting structure

• So they built a computer center at Tonsinook and had all of this data come in through there. After that the White House got a single report rather than several. That pleased them; whether the data was any more correct or not, I don't know, but at least it was more consistent

Taylor 1989, pp. 12-13

Arpanet birth

• In 1968 Bob Taylor and Licklider wrote the seminal paper on The computer as a communication device and an year later Bob Taylor (head of the IPTO at the time) started the Arpanet project connecting the first 4 nodes

BIG DATA, THEIR METAPHORS AND THEIR RHETORIC

How big is big data

• In December 2012, IDC and EMC estimated the size of the digital universe (that is, all the digital data created, replicated and consumed in that year) to be 2,837 exabytes (EB) and forecast this to grow to 40,000EB by 2020 — a doubling time of roughly two years.

• One exabyte equals a thousand petabytes (PB), or a million terabytes (TB), or a billion gigabytes (GB). So by 2020, according to IDC and EMC, the digital universe will amount to over 5,200GB per person on the planet

Charles McLellan Big Data an overview, 1 october 2013, ZDNET http://www.zdnet.com/big-data-an-overview-7000020785/

SO WHAT?

Why quantity means quality?

• Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

• Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselvesChris Anderson “The end of the theory” (Wired 2008)

Quantity is quality

• According to Hegel in The science of logic: – at first quantity as such thus appears in opposition to quality; but quantity is itself a quality, self-referring determinateness as such, distinct from the determinateness with is its other, from quality as such. Except that quantity is not only a quality, but the truth of quality itself is quantity, and quality had demonstrated itself as passing over into it.(p. 279)

Correlations instead of explanations

• State contenti, umana gente, al quia;ché, se potuto aveste veder tutto,mestier non era parturir Maria; 

• Seek not the wherefore, race of human kind;Could ye have seen the whole,

no need had been for Mary to bring forth.

Dante, Purgatorio canto III, 37-39

Correlation instead of causation

• Correlation analysis […] based on hard data are superior to most intuited causal connections […]. But in a growing number of contexts, such analysis is also more useful and more efficient than slow causal thinking that is epitomized by carefully controlled experiments […]

• Causality won’t be discarded, but it is being knocked off its pedestal as the primary fountain of meaning

Mayer-Schönberger, Cukier 2013, pp.67-68

Even if you don’t know why

• If big data teaches us anything, it is just acting better, making improvements – without deeper understanding – is often good enough […] even if you don’t know why your efforts work as they do, you are generating better outcomes than you would by not making such efforts

Mayer-Schönberger, Cukier 2013, pp.195-196

Machine instead of humans decisions

• The biggest impact of big data will be that data-driven decisions are poised to augment or overrule human judgment

Mayer-Schönberger, Cukier 2013, p.141

The great weakness of the machine

• The great weakness of the machine – the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it – is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that characterizes the human situation

• The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where statistical differences among individuals are nil

Wiener 1950:181

The black box philosophy

• With Big-data analysis, however, this traceability will become much harder. The basis of an algorithm’s predictions may often be far too intricate for most people to understand

• We can see the risk that big-data predictions […] will become black-boxes that offer no accountability, traceability or confidence

Mayer-Schönberger, Cukier 2013, pp. 178-179

The new science based on big data (The Human Brain Project) • The convergence between biology and ICT has reached a

point at which it can turn the goal of understanding the human brain into a reality. It is this realisation that motivates the Human Brain Project – an EU Flagship initiative in which over 80 partners will work together to realise a new "ICT-accelerated" vision for brain research and its applications.

• One of the major obstacles to understanding the human brain is the fragmentation of brain research and the data it produces. Our most urgent need is thus a concerted international effort that uses emerging ICT technologies to integrate this data in a unified picture of the brain as a single multi-level system.

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu  

• The funding started in mid October and the total funding for the 10 years project is Eur. 1.190 million, of which 643 million from EU

Big data (according to o’reilly 2012)

• Volume• Velocity • Variety• Digital nervous system:

The challenge of data flows, and the erosion of hierarchies and boundaries, will lead us to the statistical approaches, systems thinking, and machine learning we need to cope with the future we are inventing (pos. 372)

The power of the code

• The maps offered by GUI are fundamentally mediated: as our interfaces become more “transparent” and visual, our machines also become more dense and obscure. The call to map may be the most obscuring of all: by constantly drawing connections between data points, we sometimes forget that the map should be the beginning, rather than the end, of the analysis

Chun 2011, 176-177

Knowledge is action AKA Evelyn Fox Keller’s thoughts

• There is no pure science and bad applications

• Knowledge is action not only with respect to power in society but also with respect to the object of research

• After the knowledge process the object will never be the same

• Language’s role in science is never considered enough

• The evocative character of language and its vague, ambiguous status introduces uncontrolled leaps of meanings, metaphors, and the pre-scientific arguments

• Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love

Milan Kundera The unbearable lightness of being, p. 10

Big data knows all

Bibliography • Chun W. H.K. (2011): Programmed visions, MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.).• Keller Fox E. (2010) The mirage of a space between nature and nurture,

Duke University Press, Durham & London.• Licklider, J.C.R. (1960): “Man-computer symbiosis” in IEEE Transactions

on human factors in Electronics, Vol. HFE-I, March 4–11. http://memex.org/licklider.pdf.

• Licklider J.C.R. (1963) Memorandum for members of the affiliated of the Intergalactic Computer Network. http://packet.cc/files/memo.html.

• Licklider J.C.R. (1965): Libraries of the future, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

• Mayer-Schönberger V., Cukier K. (2013) Big Data. A revolution that will transform how we live, work and think, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston.

• Rosenblueth A., Wiener N., Bigelow J. (1943) "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology", in Philosophy of science, Vol. 10, pp. 18-24.

• Rosenblueth, A., Wiener, N. (1945) “The role of models in science”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 12, pp. 316-21.

• Taylor Bob oral interview 1989 http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107666/1/oh154rt.pdf

• Wiener, N. (1948/1961): Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass).

• Wiener, N. (1950): The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.