CONCEPT
Second-Order Cybernetics
The cybernetics of observing systems: the insistence, developed by Gordon Pask and Heinz von Foerster, that the observer is always part of the system being described—making every account of machine intelligence irreducibly relational and every benchmark a measurement of an interaction, never an object.
Classical cybernetics assumed the observer stood outside the system, measuring it from a position of neutral detachment. Second-order cybernetics—developed principally by
Gordon Pask and Heinz von Foerster at the Biological Computer Laboratory in the 1960s and 70s—is the cybernetics that turns the discipline’s tools back on itself: it asks what it means that there is always someone doing the observing, and refuses to let that someone hide behind a pretense of detachment. The observer’s act of observation, the choices about what counts and where to draw the system boundary, are constitutive of the system as described rather than incidental to it. Applied to
AI, the move is immediate and clarifying: there is no capability of the model independent of the human in the loop. The benchmark scores the industry treats as measurements of the model are, on second-order terms, measurements of a particular interaction between the model and a particular evaluation