Margaret Mead, JCR Licklider and the Conceptual Foundations for the Internet: The Early Concerns of Cybernetics of Cybernetics by Ronda Hauben rh120@columbia.edu (Overheads for talk at: http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/nov2003.ppt ) My talk is about the connection between the phenomenon that has come to be known as cybernetics and the ideas and vision that made it possible to create the Internet.(1) My efforts to understand the conceptual origins of the Internet have led me back to the cybernetic circles that formed in the early post World War II. Cybernetics describes a system that learns from previous experience (or feedback) to make changes in its behavior. It describes a system which changes its future behavior based on feedback from its past behavior. Other terms describing this form of behavior include self-correcting system, adaptive system, or goal seeking system. A simple example is a heating system that includes a thermostat. The thermostat is an instrument that has a temperature sensor. The thermostat is used to maintain the temperature in a room regardless of changes in the temperature outside the room. If the room temperature climbs above the desired temperature, the thermostat responds by shutting off the heater. When the room temperature drops below the desired temperature, the thermostat responds by turning the heater back on. The thermostat provides a regulating mechanism to monitor the current temperature comparing it with the level of the desired temperature and then making the needed adjustments in the heating system to attain the desired temperature. To illustrate the concept of cybernetics in humans, Norbert Wiener describes the effort to pick up a pencil. The person doesn't direct each muscle as to how to pick up the pencil. Instead the person makes the needed adjustments until succeeding at the task.(2) Wiener writes: "Actually what we will is not to move individual muscles but to pick up the pencil. Once we have determined this, the motion of the arm and hand proceeds in such a way that we may say that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. This part of the action is not in full consciousness." Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics", Scientific American 179, 1948, p. 14-18 In 1967, the American anthropologist, Margaret Mead was invited to present the keynote address at the First Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics. The symposium was about "Purposive Systems". (3)(G1) This is another way of referring to what are known as "goal-seeking" systems. For example a human sets goals and tries to adapt his or her behavior to reach the desired goals. The person may also adapt the goals in the process. Similarly, there are machines created to reach goals, like an anti-aircraft system designed to hit a moving plane. At this symposium some researchers discussed the human as a purposive system. Others presented talks on machines as purposive systems. The third section of the symposium was devoted to presentations about combined human-machine purposive systems. (4) Mead, speculates that one of the reasons she was invited to give the keynote, is that she was one of the participants at a small conference held in May 1942 by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation. The conference was on Cerebral Inhibition. These researchers recognized the complexity of the human brain. They hoped that by studying simpler machine structures that perform similar functions, they would be able to learn about the mechanisms of the brain. The ideas for a seminal paper on purpose in nature which would be published in 1943 by Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow were presented at this conference by Rosenblueth.(5) Among the participants in 1942 in this interdisciplinary conference were Gregory Bateson, who like Mead, was an anthropologist, L. Kubie, a psychologist, W. McCulloch, a physiologist, Rosenblueth, a medical doctor and physiologist, and John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, who were mathematicians. In her talk at the 1967 Symposium, Mead explains that the interdisciplinary nature of the 10 subsequent Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) led to a hope that a language for interdisciplinary collaboration would develop.(G2) She also remembers the enthusiastic reception Norbert Wiener's book "Cybernetics" received when it was published in 1948. (G3) Wiener had chosen the word "cybernetics" because it was discipline neutral. The word did not give priority to one discipline over the other. Mead expresses her disappointment that an interdisciplinary language did not developed as they had expected. At the 1967 Symposium, several participants in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, besides Mead, were present, including Ralph Gerard, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, and JCR Licklider. Also several of the office directors of the Information Processing Techniques Office including Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, and Saul Amarel gave papers. The symposium demonstrates an actual and theoretical link between the IPTO researchers and the researchers participating in the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. (6) As an anthropologist, Mead describes her interest in the effects that cybernetics has had on society. Mead explains how at different periods in the cybernetic movement, there were different words used to refer to the phenomenon they were studying. First it was called "feedback", then "teleological mechanisms", then "cybernetics". At the 1967 Symposium, the same phenomenon was called "Purposive Systems." Mead raises four areas of concern in her keynote speech in 1967, They are: 1. Would cybernetics, as a set of shared concepts, make it possible for members of different disciplines to communicate in a language they could share? 2. Would cybernetics make it possible for scientists from the U.S. and the Soviet Union to communicate? 3. Would cybernetics make it possible to collaborate to solve the problems of large scale complex systems. 4. Would the science of cybernetics be applied to the organizational arrangement of the newly forming American Society of Cybernetics? I want to focus on her second and third concerns, as these provide an unusual window through which to view early Internet development. To illustrate her hope that cybernetics make possible the communication needed for society to solve its most complex problems, Mead refers to the urban planning work of Edmund Bacon in Philadelphia. Mead observed that there was current research and practice in the mid 1960s to support "down-to-earth political interaction among the citizenry, the elected officials and the urban planners in the city." (Time Mag vol 84, no. 19, 1964).(G4) Describing Bacon's work, Mead notes that, "he has begun to plead, persistently and stubbornly, for teaching general systems theory in every university in the world.... Planners would be furnished at the same time with a method for communication and tools for thinking about complex systems." (von Foerster, 1968, p. 4) With a common vocabulary they would be able to share problems and the search for how to solve them. Mead believed that this extension of Bacon's ideas would make possible a "cross-national language for interdisciplinary groups engaged in planning in different nations." Also Mead had hoped that cybernetics could provide an ideologically neutral language to facilitate communication between scientists from different socio-economic systems, specifically between scientists from the U.S. and Western Europe, and scientists from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She describes the need "for a more reliable form of knowledge and understanding to develop between the two systems", something espionage could not provide. (von Foerster, 1968, p. 3) Mead proposes that "we should use cybernetics as a cross-cultural vocabulary for expressing the relevant differences between the two systems." As many young people in Eastern Europe were learning about cybernetics, it seemed to Mead that, "here was a possibility that two rival nations, with very different ideological premises could develop a language in which their systems would be described in a way that was ideologically neutral." (von Foerster, 1968, p. 4) At the very time that Mead was giving her talk at the 1967 Symposium, but unknown to her, an organization like the one she hoped would be able to cross ideological boundaries, was being planned. This organization is the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, or IIASA. In an account of the origin of this institution, Howard Raiffa, one of its founders, describes its genesis. In the late 1966, the U.S. President Johnson asked his advisor McGeorge Bundy to see if the Soviet Union would be willing to participate in a collaborative research effort on joint projects. (7) According to Raiffa, Bundy contacted Jerman Gvishiani who was the son-in-law of Premier Kosygin of the Soviet Union. The response was receptive. By 1967, when Mead was presenting her talk on the "Cybernetics of Cybernetics", advisors of the heads of State of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, Bundy and Gvishiani, were discussing an agreement to make such a collaboration possible. In early 1968, Raiffa got a call from Bundy. By then Bundy was no longer Johnson's advisor, but had become President of the Ford Foundation. Bundy asked Raiffa if he would advise Bundy on how to form such a collaboration. The first meeting to plan the collaboration was to be held in June 1968. That meeting did not materialize. But by Fall 1968, actual meetings began. Raiffa explains that the Russians wanted the name of the new institute to include "cybernetics", or "operations research". The Americans disagreed. Instead, they proposed that the name of the new institute include "systems analysis". Then the word "applied," was added. Hence the name became the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, (IIASA).(G5) The IIASA supported collaboration among researchers from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries and from the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. At computer communications networking workshops held by IIASA in 1974 and 1975, researchers from different countries were introduced to computer networking technologies, including those of the US's ARPANET, Britain's NPL and France's CYCLADES packet switching networks. Also papers presented at these workshops document the earliest Internet development which had begun in 1973. (8) One of the scientists invited to participate in these early IIASA activities is Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski. Fuchs-Kittowski was at the 1975 "Workshop on Data Communications" held September 15-19, 1975 in Laxenburg, Austria. At the workshop in 1975, sponsored jointly by IIASA and also the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), (9)(G6) British researcher, Peter Kirstein presented a paper, "The Uses of the ARPA Network via the University College London Node."(G7) The paper describes the collaboration between researchers in the UK, Norway and the US to develop the protocol TCP/IP. The goal of their research was to make it possible to communicate across the boundaries of different packet switching networks. The paper includes a diagram showing the satellite and ground connectivity between the ARPANET in the US, the University College London computers in UK, and the NORSAR computers in Norway.(G8) Fuchs-Kittowski reports how the prospect of having access to computer networking was exciting to those present and plans for a network connecting the researchers of the IIASA were developed with the hope of including the Soviet Union, Hungary, the GDR, Austria, France, UK, and the FRG, and other countries. (10) The list of those at this workshop included researchers from Austria, Belgium, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, the UK, and the US. A functioning IIASA network was developed. Further research is needed, however, to know which countries had computers or networks attached to it. Among the participants at the 1975 IIASA Workshop were Donald Davies, and Peter Kirstein from the UK, Vint Cerf from the US, J. Le Bihan from France, L. Lazzori from Italy. H. Kopetz from Austria, and Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski from the Germany Democratic Republic. Also there was discussion at the workshop about what kind of network researchers from the IIASA would develop to support their collaboration. Fuchs-Kittowski remembers discussing a possible connection to the UCL network for Humboldt University researchers from the German Democratic Republic. The thrust of much of the remainder of Mead's talk is about whether cybernetics could provide a language to bridge the boundaries between scientific specialties. This would make possible interdisciplinary collaboration to attack the complex problems of large scale systems. Mead is concerned not only with the complexities of such systems, but also with two other aspects. The first is the need for responsible attention to these problems. Mead laments how too often, at least in American society, not enough attention is given to the human role in complex and otherwise automated systems. "(I)t seems", she notes, "that interest in the human components of complex automated and computerized systems is decreasing rather than increasing. First," She notes, "we looked at men and turned them into 'human components,' and then we stopped looking at them at all." (von Foerster, 1968, p. 6) She gives an example of a group of enthusiastic young organizers planning a large and important conference on the subject of airport lighting. When she asked the organizers some questions about their preparations to plan the conference, they responded, "We have decided we just have to risk failure." (von Foerster, 1968, p. 6) Mead believes that complex systems require "precision and accuracy and a sense of responsibility", rather than an attitude of indifference. She finds, however, that instead of education which teaches how to 'get it right' the first time, when needed, the opposite education is dominant. Such education, Mead describes as "out-educating from...minds the fundamental human quality of responsibility based on accurate reasoning." (von Foerster, 1968, p. 6) Part of the third concern that Mead presented at the 1967 Symposium was that there be an effective means for people to learn to be responsible researchers who can solve the problems of large scale complex systems. This idea was carried into the IPTO's computer science research program by Licklider as early as 1962.(G9) Licklider recognized the need for creative users of the networks to participate in contributing to the form and content of the online community. He also advocated that the networks themselves be used by those online to influence government policy regarding the development of the networks. Licklider wasn't proposing that citizens rely on voting as the way to influence government.(11) He writes (Licklider, 1979, p. 126): "That does not mean simply that everyone must vote on every question for voting in the absence of understanding defines only the public attitude, not the public interest. It means that many public spirited individuals must study, model, discuss, analyze, argue, write, criticize, and work out each issue and each problem until they reach consensus or determine that none can be reached -- at which point there may be occasion for voting." Licklider also felt that "many public-spirited individuals must serve government -- indeed must be the government." (Licklider, 1979, p. 126) This is because, whether or not all citizens would have networking access, was a problem which would require government initiatives to solve. Also Licklider saw that people in the US were frustrated with government. To change this situation, Licklider advocated making it possible for citizens to participate in government decision making via the developing computer networks. Licklider writes (Licklider, 1979, p. 124): "Computer power to the people is essential to the realization of a future in which most citizens are informed about, and interested and involved in, the process of government." Licklider saw the problem that the current "decision makers and opinion leaders see computers in terms of conventional data processing and are not able to envision or assess their many capabilities and applications." (Licklider, 1979, p. 124) He maintained that not only must the decisions about the development and exploitation of computer networks be made "in the public interest," but also in "the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making processes that will shape their future." (Licklider, 1979, p. 126) Here Licklider expresses a goal that echoes Edmund Bacon's work to encourage citizens to communicate with each other and with the officials and designers of a social policy or plan. The importance of such online developments identified in the 1960s and 1970s by Mead and Licklider, was demonstrated in the 1990s. In 1993, a student was doing online research about the effect of the Internet on the lives of users. From responses to questions he posed to users online, he recognized that not only was the Internet having an effect on the lives of those online, but also, that there were users online who were having an effect on the continued development of the Internet. He found that there were users who were committed to contributing to the socially beneficial development of the Internet. The researcher, Michael Hauben, formulated the concept of net.citizen or netizen to identify and describe these active users with a social perspective.(Hauben, 1997, p. ix-x) Describing the emergence of Netizens, Hauben writes (Hauben, 1997, ix-x): "There are people online who actively contribute towards the development of the Net. These people understand the value of collective work and the communal aspects of public communications. These are the people who discuss and debate topics in a constructive manner, who e-mail answers to people and provide help to newcomers, who maintain FAQ files and other public information repositories, who maintain mailing lists, and so on. These are people who discuss the nature and role of this new communications medium. These are the people who as citizens of the Net, I realized were Netizens." Differentiating between netizens and other users, Hauben continues (Hauben, 1997, p. x): "Netizens are not just anyone who comes online. Netizens are especially not people who come online for individual gain or profit. They are not people who come to the Net thinking it is a service. Rather, they are the people who understand it takes effort and action on each and everyone's part to make the Net a regenerative and vibrant community and resource. Netizens are people who decide to devote time and effort into making the Net, this new part of our world, a better place. Lurkers are not Netizens, and vanity home pages are not the work of Netizens. While lurking or trivial home pages do not harm the Net, they do not contribute either." This is the social responsibility that Mead identified as critical for collaborative efforts to solve the problems of large scale complex systems. Mead's fourth concern is about the need to apply the science of cybernetics to the organizational arrangements of the newly formed American Society of Cybernetics. "It seems to me," she explains, "that in a new organization centered upon our knowledge and interest in circular, self-corrective systems and our capacity to deal with the situations to which they may be productively applied," it is worth considering the application of the science to "what in thunder we are founding." (von Foerster, 1968, p. 10) Mead was committed to this concept of applying the science of cybernetics to the form as well as the content of the new organization being created. So was Licklider. He had learned the principles of cybernetics, and self correcting feedback systems through his experience as part of the cybernetics community of the early post WWII period. When the Director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. Department of Defense offered him the chance to create a computer science research office in 1962, Licklider accepted. He structured the form and activity of the office to encourage communication and collaborative interaction among those who became the IPTO community of computer science researchers. Licklider called this community the Intergalactic Network. The researchers and office directors of IPTO explored how interactive online computing and then computer networking could support their research. They were in constant communication via phone calls, rotating meetings at the different sites, and through online communication via the developing network itself. These means of communication made it possible for an international group of researchers to know each other and to collaborate to solve the problems they faced in their research work. The creation of online processes for interactive participation, the system pioneered to build the Internet, makes possible the collaboration needed to solve the problems of complex large scale systems. The system that emerged from Licklider's vision, and IPTO's operation, is the Internet. It is a cybernetic system, and as such requires automatic and human feedback processes to function and to continue to develop. The IPTO was an institutional form of organization created by Licklider utilizing the science of cybernetics to provide the needed leadership to create the Internet. The creation of the IPTO and IIASA, the presentation of the technical discussion of plans for the creation of the Internet, and the emergence of the netizen, are a tribute to Margaret Mead's 1967 insights and examples of how the seeds sown by cybernetics have indeed born fruit. Notes: 1) Talk given by Ronda Hauben in Berlin Germany on November 16, 2003 at the Kolloquium "Die Kybernetik der Kybernetik" entitled "Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead and JCR Licklider and the Conceptual Foundations of the Internet: The Early Concerns of Cybernetics of Cybernetics". http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/leibniz-sozietaet/download/kf_programm2003.doc. Overheads for the talk are online at http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/nov2003.ppt The talk was also presented to several groups of students while I was in Berlin in November 2003. One of the groups were students from the University of Goettingen, who were visiting Berlin at Technical University. http://www.holz.uni-goettingen.de/phd/uni/internet.301206.html I am currently working on a paper documenting how the IPTO was formed as a collaborative institutional form and how this helped to nourish the development of the Internet. http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/misc/lick101.doc. And for background about the early development of the Internet see my paper, "Birth of the Internet: An Architectural Conception for Solving the Multiple Network Problem" http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/birth_internet.txt See also Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet," Los Alamitos, IEEE Computer Society, 1997. http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/ (G10) 2) Also, Wiener, describing cybernetics writes: "Cybernetics is a word invented to define a new field of science. It combines under one heading the study of what in a human context is sometimes loosely described as thinking and in engineering is known as control and communication. In other words, cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the functioning of automatic machines and of the human nervous system, and to develop a theory which will cover the entire field of control and communication in machines and in living organisms. (....) The construction of more and more complex mechanisms actually is bringing us closer to an understanding of how the brain itself operates...." Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics", Scientific American 179, 1948, p. 14-18 3) The Symposium was held at the National Bureau of Standards, in Gaithersburg, MD A partial Proceedings were edited by Heinz von Foerster and others and published in 1968: Heinz von Foerster et al, editor, "Purposive Systems: Proceedings of the First Annual Symposium of the American Society for Cybernetics," New York, Spartan Books, 1968, Ralph Gerard, one of the participants at the 1967 Symposium, explains that "I suppose most of us would agree that a behavior that appears goal-directed or problem solving or error-corrected or adaptive or can take unreliable pathways from where it starts to where it ends has the earmarks of purposive behavior." (von Foerster, 1968. p. 26) There are forms of self-regulating systems. Some systems of living organisms work in a similar way, as do certain machine systems. For example, in the human body, the pancreas regulates the amount of insulin available. aN Anti-aircraft system is an example of a machine system which uses radar to help it determine where it will aim to shoot down a moving plane. 4) The Symposium Proceedings indicate these parts: Purposive Systems I - Man as a purposive system II - Machines as purposive systems III - Man and Machine together as purposive systems 5) Rosenblueth, A., WIENER N. and BIGELOW, J. (1943). Behaviour, purpose and teleology. Phil. Sci. 10, 1, 18-24. 6) Other examples of this link include when Licklider was invited to attend one of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics in 1950. In 1954, Licklider was one of the researchers sponsoring a similar conference at MIT on Communication, Control, and Information theory. In 1962, Licklider was invited to create a computer science and behavioral science research office by the Director of the Advanced Research Project Agency. at the U.S. Department of Defense. 7) See the description of the beginnings of IIASA at http://www.pon.harvard.edu/organization/scommittee/hraiffa.php3?page=pp and http://www.iiasa.ac.at/docs/history.html Also Raiffa has written an unpublished memoire he was kind enough to make available. 8) Workshop on Data Communication, September 15-19, 1975, Laxenberg, IIASA. See especially p. 53-62. 9) There was also international collaboration as part of the IFIP 6.1 working group. Further research is needed to determine whether the eventual Further research is needed to determine whether the eventual IIASA network connectivity ever connected to the UCL system or if it was a separate IIASA network. 10) There is at least one discussion in IIASA in 1976 about whether or not to have an IIASA connection to the ARPANET or to the European Informatics Network (EIN).) Also Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski remembers talking with Peter Kirstein in 1975 about what kind of connection would be possible between UCL and Humboldt University in East Berlin. 11) JCR Licklider, "Computers in Government", in Michael Dertouzos and Joel Moses, "The Computer Age: A Twenty-Year View", Cambridge, MIT Press, 1979, p. 87 - 126. Graphics for talk: Some urls for graphics: G1) Margaret Mead http:// www.margaretmead.com/mead.jpg G2) Macy Group on Cybernetics http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/images/INTERVW3.GIF G3) The publication of Wiener's book Cybernetics http://www.angelfire.com/co/1x137/images/cybernetics.gif G4) Edmund Bacon, Urban Planner on Time Magazine Cover, 84(19), 1964 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/archive/covers/0,16641,1101641106,00.html G5) Signing of the IIASA Charter, October 4, 1972 http://www.iiasa.ac.at/docs/HOTP/Oct02/charter-1.html G6) Proceedings of a IIASA Conference on Computer Communications Networks. December 1975 http://www.iiasa.ac.at/cgi-bin/pubsrch?CP75007 G7) Peter Kirstein from the University College London (UCL) http://www.nubic.adm.nihon-u.ac.jp/jpn/katsudo/kat-1999/0127/kat0127-kirst.jpg G8)Diagram from Kirstein's talk http://umcc.ais.org/~ronda/new.papers/2.pdf G9) Licklider images.forbes.com/images/asap/ 2000/1127/105_200_275.jpg G10) Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_7/0818677066_m.gif Version: talknov2003.txt December 20, 2003