The roots of machine learning

Neural networks and artificial intelligence have been on my mind over many years, while I spent most days studying middleware, something different. At the heart of neurals were backward propagations and feedback loops – all somewhat related to cybernetics, which flowered in the 1940s into the early 1970s. One of the first implements of cybernetics was the thermostat.

In early 2013 I started working at SearchDataManagement, writing about Big Data. At the end of  this year I have devoted some time to book learning about machine learning. A lot happened while Rip Van Vaughan was catching some z's.  So something told me to go back to one of my old blogs and see where I left off with feedback. If you pick through it you will find Honeywell and the thermostat and automatic pilot, etc. My research told me the first auto pilot arose from a combo of the thermostat (Honeywell) and advanced gyroscopes (Sperry).

I spent hours looking at the thermostat, its mercury, its coil. It had an alchemical effect. I remember wondering if the thermostat could be a surveillance bug. Now we have Nest, which uses the thermostat as a starting point for collecting data for machine learning process. - Jack Vaughan

[It is funny how the old arguments about the autopilot appeared as memes in this year of machine learning. This link, which includes Tom Wolfe's mirthful take on the autopilot in The Right Stuff… is here rather as a place-marker for background: The Secret Museum of Cybernetics - JackVaughan's Radio Weblog, March 2004(also reposted on Moon Traveller with a slew of feedback errata). Probably valuable to cite Nicholas Carr's The Glass Cage, published this year, which takes as its premise, society's growing inabilities, many brought on by automation. Several serious airplane crashes where pilots' skills seemed overly lulled by automation form a showcase in The Glass Cage, ]

From Wolfe’s The Right Stuff:

“Engineers were ... devising systems for guiding rockets into space, through the use of computers built into the engines and connected to accelerometers for monitoring the temperature, pressure, oxygen supply, and other vital conditions of the Mercury capsule and for triggering safety procedures automatically -- meaning they were creating  with computers, systems in which machines could communicate with one another, make decisions, take action, all with tremendous speed and accuracy .. Oh, genius engineers! “