Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetics Moment: or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is no question that war has led to some of the greatest technological developments and scientific advances for all of humankind.Many of the tools we use today are taken for granted, and some underestimate the contribution that military science and research have brought to enhancing the everyday lives of billions.The highly complex and ubiquitous Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, was once solely a military technology with limited availability.Today, nearly every modern smartphone bought and sold has the capability to access a shared satellite network for the benefit of businesses, governments, militaries, and consumers alike.From aiding the precision targeting of missiles to mapping the ocean floor to planning a bicycle route to and from work, GPS (first introduced in 1978) is now a staple of twenty-first-century life.According to Robert Kline-historian of technology at Cornell University and author of two other volumes concerning society and technology-the problem of developing another military technology (albeit one less ubiquitous than GPS) set the stage for the conceptualization of the so-called "information age": the automated anti-aircraft weaponry and control systems that emerged out of World War II.The pressing military need to understand control and communication systems that consist of human (organic) and machine (technology) elements led to envisioning the anti-aircraft gun, its human operator, and the highly mathematical targeting computer as a singular cohesive entity.This new way of thinking and looking at the world enabled a new conceptualization of organisms and machines (or technology) as information-feedback systems, each with varying methods of communication and control between internal components and the external environment.The study of these communication systems came to be known as cybernetics.A more holistic understanding of cybernetics is expressed via (Kline's) analogy "that the principles of information-feedback machines, which explained how a thermostat controlled a household furnace, for example, could also explain how all
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".