CONCEPT
The Tragedy of the Cybernetic Revolution
Bateson's 2018 diagnosis that the mid-century cybernetic moment produced <em>two paths</em> — computer science and systems theory — of which the culture chose marketable gadgets over deeper understanding.
In 2018, three years before her death and four years before ChatGPT reached fifty million users in two months, Mary Catherine Bateson offered what may be her most consequential observation about artificial intelligence. 'The tragedy of the cybernetic revolution,' she said, 'which had two phases, the computer science side and the systems theory side, has been the neglect of the systems theory side of it. We chose marketable gadgets in preference to a deeper understanding of the world we live in.' The observation locates the AI moment within a larger story — a civilizational choice between two ways of understanding complexity, one treating it as a problem to be solved through computation and the other treating it as a condition to be inhabited through understanding.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Mary Catherine Bateson's mother and father were both present at the birth of this choice. The Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953, brought together the people who would develop both
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