The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence

by Matteo Pasquinelli

This book tries to clarify that, rather than designing machines like organisms (biomorphism) as they professed, cyberneticians ultimately envisioned organisms like machines (technomorphism), which were mirroring their own surrounding social order (sociomorphism). Like the philosophies of nature from earlier centuries (the canonical example being La Mettrie’s L’homme Machine of 1747), cyberneticians projected on the ontology of nature and the brain the technical composition of their time, made up of telegraph networks, electromechanical relays, feedback systems, and television scanners. Cyberneticians did not pursue a scientific and experimental but rather a speculative (and often naive) method of analogy, mapping preconstituted rules onto nature rather than making hypotheses about new ones.