"What was the vision for science and War in the 1930's. Have things changed since then?"

Here we will be talking about the developments of science and technology during the wartimes of 1930s. It started with disorganization chaos leading to organization. It was Vannevar Bush who first proposed the idea of putting science to use in organizing the vast record of human knowledge. His idea of push-button linking between documents is commonly held to be the forefather of modern hypertext. And then came, Wiener who coined the term cybernetics in the summer of 1947 to designate what he hoped would be a new science of control mechanisms in which the exchange of information would play a central role.

Inspired by his previous work in microfilm mass storage, Bush envisioned an information workstation, “the memex”, capable of storing, navigating, and annotating an entire library’s worth of information. 

Britain was under unrelenting aerial attack, and a Nazi invasion seemed imminent. Weiner suggested procedures to improve Bush's computational device, the so-called differential analyzer, in ways that would facilitate faster design of war materiel from airplane wings to ballistic shells. Battle of Britain had begun with an assault of almost 1500 aircraft flown against British air stations and aircraft factories. Londoners had died under the rain of bombs.

Over the next few years, Wiener's attention focused increasingly on the problem of destroying enemy airplanes. The “antiaircraft (AA) predictor” was designed to characterize an enemy pilot’s zigzagging flight, anticipate his future position, and launch an antiaircraft shell to destroy his plane. In the course of characterizing the enemy pilot's actions and designing a machine to forecast his future moves, Wiener's ambitions rose beyond the pilot, even beyond the World War. Step by step, Wiener came to see the predictor as a prototype not only of the mind of an inaccessible Axis opponent but of the Allied antiaircraft gunner as well, and then even more widely to include the vast array of human proprioceptive and electrophysiological feedback systems. The model then expanded to become a new science known after the war as "cybernetics”. Here we track the ontological claims of cybernetics into a collocation of vacuum tubes, resistors and condensers designed to replicate the intentions of a hidden enemy pilot. All the enemies were not alike. To the Americans, British, and Australians, the Japanese soldiers were often thought of a lice, ants, or vermin to be eradicated. They followed the slogan “Kill him or he will kill you”

As the AA predictor came to fruition, Wiener came to see it as the articulated prototype for a new understanding of the human-machine relation, one that made soldier, calculator, and firepower into a single integrated system.

Germany looked small and individual people appeared to be invisible. The distinction between human and non-human status was blurred. Where Darwin had assiduously tracked the similarities between human and animal in order to blur the boundary between them, Wiener's efforts were devoted to effacing the distinction between human and machine.

The man-airplane-radar-predictor-artillery system is a closed one in which it appeared possible to replace men by machines and machines by men. To an antiaircraft operator, the enemy really does act like an auto-correlated servomechanism. During 1930, publishing of newspapers was banned.

The three closely related sciences which engaged in calculating the enemy were: Operational research, game theory, and cybernetics. Operational research focused on maximizing the efficiency in locating and destroying German U boats in the North Atlantic and along and along the coast of America. Game theory is the way of analyzing what two opposing forces ought to do when each expected the other to act in a maximally rational way but were ignorant both of the opponent's specific intentions and of the enemy's choice of where to bluff. Weiner divided the enemies into two categories, and regarded them as devils. One was the "Manichean devil" "who is determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory." The other, the "Augustinian devil" was characterized by the "evil" of chance and disorder but could not change the rules unlike the “Manichean devil”. 

People were regarded as fundamentally selfish. But perhaps disorganization, noise, and uncontrollability are not the greatest disasters to befall us. Perhaps our calamities are built largely from our efforts at superorganization, silence, and control.

By

Sunaina Donimath

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