Meat the Machine or the Hidden History of Cybernetics &the Possible Futures
About this Event
Meat the Machine:
or, the Hidden History of Cybernetics and the Possible Futures of Humans
A series of nine monthly seminars at the University of Manchester exploring the rich and vibrant history of the radical science of cybernetics, and the potentially profound implications of this hitherto occluded history for our shared socio-technical futures.
All events will run from 13:00 to 15:00 and will be hosted at the University of Manchester.
1. Fire and Ice: The Conception, Birth and Infancy of Cybernetics.
24 September 2026
In 1948 Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. To the amazement of its author and publisher alike, the book became an instant bestseller and spawned a global intellectual movement that helped shape the world we inhabit today. The connection between cyber and Cybernetics is far more than merely nominative.
2. Those Serendipitous Mavericks: The Ratio Club and early British Cybernetics.
29 October 2026
Immediately after the publication of Cybernetics, a group of ambitious young British life-scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and physicists formed a dining and discussion club centred on the radical ideas in Wiener’s book. Alan Turing was a member of the Ratio Club, and his intersection with cybernetics and the Club’s members was central to his later thought.
3. Ghost in the Machine: The Battle for the Human Mind.
26 November 2026
From the outset, Wiener’s contemporaries understood that his new science of cybernetics exposed humanism, if not humanity, to mortal peril. In Britian particularly, cybernetics ignited a heated philosophical debate between mental vitalism and mechanism that was fought out across the mass media, and which drew Alan Truing onto the public stage to openly defend his scientific heresy.
4. The Spectre of Automation: Robots in the New Jerusalem.
28 January 2027
The contemporary impact of Wiener’s ideas spread far beyond the resurrection of Descartes’s ghost. In Britian and America alike Cybernetics raised the prospect of economic automation and the societal scale replacement of human labour, cognitive as well as muscular, from speculation to imminent fact. For some, this promised the final defeat of Malthus, for others it portended a decline to decadence.
5. “It’s alive!”: Prometheus, Frankenstein, and the Cyborgs.
25 February 2027
In 1960, Nathan Kline, a psychiatrist, and Manfred Clynes, an engineer, gave their paper on “Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics: Evolution to Cyborgs” to the Conference on the Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight at the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in America. Thus was the cyborg born from science not fiction, and with it Mary Shelly’s dire prophecy rose again.
6. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Intergalactic Network: The real origins of the Internet.
18 March 2027
Cybernetics spread across the entire spectrum of American intellectual life, including the deep enclaves of the military-industrial-academic complex. Here it found expression not just in the foundational technical architectures of the experimental computer network that became the Internet, but also in the ideas its makers had about what it could become.
7. A Tale of Beer, Chile, and Syn: Cybernetics in the service of socialism.
20 April 2027
In the early 1970s Stafford Beer, an early and key British cyberneticist, was invited to Chile by the young technocrat Fernando Flores. Beer’s task was to implement the ideas of cybernetics in a system that would enable the governance and regulation of Chile’s economy and society in accordance with the socialist principles of Salvador Allende’s government. The CIA had other ideas.
8. Algorithms against Neurons: The great schism between AI and cybernetics.
27 May 2027
The American mathematician John McCarthy is generally credited as the creator of AI. However, what is less well known is why he came to this creation in the first place. McCarthy’s convocation of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956 was his conscious commencement of a deliberate yet covert schism between his new discipline of AI and cybernetics, the consequences of which continue to be felt today.
9. Transcendence or Termination?: Cybernetics, transhumanism, and the future.
24 June 2027
According to the nineteenth century Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, the answer to the question of the meaning of life was the conquest of death. For Fyodorov and his followers, humanity had been granted the gift of science by God so as to attain immortality and colonise space. Fyodorov’s cosmism now sits alongside Wiener’s cybernetics in the form of transhumanism that pervades the modern culture of Silicon Valley.
Connect with the Centre for Digital Trust and Society:
The Centre for Digital Trust and Society organises the DTS Guest Seminar Series and is a focal point for research across the University of Manchester that explores aspects of trust and security in our digital world. The Centre is part of Digital Futures, a highly interdisciplinary network which operates across the whole range of the University of Manchester's digital research.
About Digital Futures:
Digital Futures is a highly interdisciplinary network that operates across the whole range of the University’s digital research. We aim to present a coherent overview of The University of Manchester's digital research activity to external stakeholders and bring together research communities to explore new research areas and address strategic opportunities.
Connect with us:
X: twitter.com/DigitalUoM
Blue Sky: bsky.app/profile/digitaluom.bsky.social
Linkedin: linkedin.com/showcase/digital-futures-at-the-university-of-manchester
Website: digitalfutures.manchester.ac.uk
Newsletter: tinyurl.com/digitalfuturesuom
Where is it happening?
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