Edwards, The Closed World

[Dave Monroe]

>From Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of
Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996):

    As machines, computers controlled vast systems of military
technology central to the  globalist aims and apocalyptic terms of Cold
War foreign policy.  First air defenses, then strategic early warning
and nuclear response, and later sophisticated tactical systems of the
electronic battlefield grew from the control and communications
capacities of information machines.  As metaphors, such systems
constituded a dome of global technological oversight, a closed world,
within which every event was interpreted as part of a titanic strugle
between the superpowers.  Inaugurated in the Truman Doctrine of
"containment," elaborated in Rand Corporation theories of nuclear
strategy, tested under fire in the jungles of Vietnam [...] the key
theme of closed world-world discourse was global surveillance and
control through high-technology military power.  Computers made the
closed world work simultaneously as technology, as political system, and
as ideological mirage.
    Both the engineering and the politics of closed-world discourse
centered around problems of human-machine integration: building weapons,
systems, and strategies whose human and machine components could
function as a seamless web, even on the global scales and in the vastly
comprsses time frames [that "last delta-t"] of superpower nuclear war. 
As symbol-manipulating logic machines, computers would automate or
assist tasks of perception, reasoning, and control in integrated
systems.  Such goals, first accomplished in World War II-era
anti-aircraft weapons, helped form both cybernetics, the grand theory of
information and control in biological and mechanical systems, and 
artifical intelligence (AI) [....]  At the same time, computers inspired
new psychological theories built around concepts of "information
processing."  Cybernetics, AI, and cognitive psychology relied crucially
upon computers as metaphors and models
for minds conceived as problem-solving, self-controlling,
symbol-processing systems.  The word "cyborg," or cybernetic organism,
capture the strategic blurring of boundaries inherent in these
metaphors.  Cyborg discourse, by constructing both human minds and
artificial intelligences as information machines, helped to integrate
people into technological systems.
    The cyborg figure defined not only a practical probelm and a
psychological theory but a set of subject positions. Cyborg
minds--understood as machines subject to disassembly, engineering, and
reconstruction--generated a vraiety of new perspectives,
self-interpretations, and social roles.  These indentities were most
thoroughly explored in science fiction [...].  But in a world
increasingly structured by and theorized in terms of information
processing devices, cyborg subjectivity was ot only fictional but real. 
Cyborgs were subjective devices nested inside the larger technological
systems of the closed worlds. [...] (1-2)

Robert Pirani wrote:

> And with a little further stretch you might include the software methodolgy
> of the "black-box" test a-and the paradigm case for that -- the Turing Test.
>
> Mind awandering again,
> Robert