choosing leaders
CYBERNETICS OF CYBERNETICS
Choosing Leaders
My suggestion for ASC on how to do the “cybernetics of cybernetics” is to choose new people to invite to ASC conferences. These would be people who we believe are doing cybernetics, even though they may not think they are. Examples are:
Katherine Hayles, How we Became Post human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
Gerald Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer Programming, The Secrets of Consulting, etc.
George Soros, Alchemy of Finance, Opening the Soviet System, etc.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia
We could give these people a 1 to 5 year free membership. By honoring them we would be defining the new face of cybernetics. There is precedent for doing this. The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) operates in this way. SASE is an interdisciplinary society. How to define it? One answer is to honor people whose work is an example of what SASE is trying to promote.
Also, I think we should hold tutorials at each meeting and perhaps in special summer programs. This is necessary in the absence of academic programs at universities. Such programs would carry forward ideas from the past, so useful ideas need not be reinvented, with the consequent delay in advancing science. Tutorials could also explain how the work of contemporary authors is related to the work of the founders of cybernetics.
Author is elegible for HvF Prize (aged under 35): NO
