The best laid plans of the mice and the man

EPIAC XIV, though undedicated, was already at work in deciding
how many refrigerators,
how many lamps,
how many turbine generators,
how many hub caps,
how many dinner plates,
how many doorknobs,
how many rubber heels,
how many television sets,
how many pinochle decks – how many everything America and her customers could have and how much they would cost. – Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano, 1951

Kurt Vonnegut's depiction of a computer somewhat resembling Eckert's and Mauchly's ENIAC derived from his experiences working for General Electric in Schenectady and his readings of Norbert Wiener, whose "The Human Use of Human Beings" was influential for a time. The "EPIAC" state-controller described in 'Player Piano' is also a riff on statistical logistics planning that emerged out of World War II efforts.

Wiener's cybernetics work and its applicability to state planning also captured the imagination of forward looking Latin American leaders in the 1970s. e. But this is real world story, with realworld blood as told in Eden Medina's "Cybernetic Revolutionaries" [MIT Press, 2013], which concerns the ill fate of Chilean socialist leader Salvador Allende.. Her story was in turn artfully retold in part in a recent New Yorker story, "The Planning Machin," where Evgeny Morozov weaves the story of Allende and cybernetics into a discussion of such recent phenomena as big data, open data, the Internet of Things, Nest and Uber.

The piece finds similarities between the burgeoning slaught of interconnected devices and data driven business models, as others have found between long moribund AI and upstart machine learning and cognitive computing applications. History, here in the form of the Chilean cybernetic experience, provides a guide as to what can go wrong.

TBC

http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetic-revolutionaries - MIT Press
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine - New Yorker, Oct 2014