The term servomechanisms has been coined precisely to designate machines with an intrinsic purposeful behavior.” The key was control, or self-regulation.
To analyze it properly he borrowed an obscure term from electrical engineering: “feed-back,” the return of energy from a circuit’s output back to its input. When feedback is positive, as when the sound from loudspeakers is re-amplified through a microphone, it grows wildly out of control. But when feedback is negative—as in the original mechanical governor of steam engines, first analyzed by James Clerk Maxwell—it can guide a system toward equilibrium; it serves as an agent of stability
Man, he thinks, is recreating himself, monstrously magnified, in his own image.
He was not as interested in shedding light on the rise of computing—to which, in any case, his connections were peripheral—as in how computing might shed light on humanity
He worried that it would devalue the human brain as factory machinery had devalued the human hand.
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