The Many Forms of the Artificial

Abstract

The public emergence of cybernetics can be dated rather sharply because of the nearly simultaneous appearance [in 1943] of three basic papers on the subject. Rosenblueth, Wiener and Bigelow showed how simple goals and purposes could be realized in feedback machines. McCulloch and Pitts pointed out how some other logical categories and mental concepts could be represented in ‘neural’ nets, and Craik suggested a variety of ways by which machines might use models and analogies. To be sure, all of these had their own intellectual ancestors, but here for the first time we see a sufficiently concrete (i.e. technical) foundation for the use of mentalistic language as a constructive and powerful tool for describing machines (M. Minsky).