PERSON
Heinz von Foerster
The Austrian-American cyberneticist who folded the observer back into the system—originating second-order cybernetics, the trivial/non-trivial machine distinction, and the single ethical imperative he thought followed from all of it: act always so as to increase the number of choices.
Heinz von Foerster is the thinker who put the scientist back inside the experiment. Trained as a physicist in Vienna, arriving in the United States in 1949 to become the youngest member of the Macy Conferences on cybernetics and editor of their five founding volumes, he spent fifty years insisting on a correction his colleagues preferred not to make: that any science of systems that does not include the scientist who is studying those systems is systematically incomplete. The correction, which he called second-order cybernetics, is not a methodological footnote. It is a hand grenade rolled under the table of objectivity, and it has been going off quietly ever since. His distinction between the
trivial machine—whose output is a fixed function of its input, predictable forever—and the non-trivial machine, whose internal states make behavior history-dependent and analytically indeterminable, turns out to be one of the most precise available descriptions of what a
large language model