The Feedback Loop and the Filtered Signal | My Blog Drones over Ukraine have made the sky so contested that anything airborne gets jammed and shot down — friend, foe, or civilian. There is now a serious proposal for drone air traffic control, because the machines are too numerous and too fast for anyone to track who sent them. The next step writes itself: replace the operator too, let the machine make the call. When making decisions autonomous becomes more valuable than keeping humans in control, you start to wonder if they ever were.
When you watch Anthropic resist Pentagon pressure to militarise its models, it’s hard not to think of Skynet. But this fear is not new and it was never science fiction. In my previous piece I wrote about Karel Čapek, who watched Europe industrialise around him, coined the word robot in 1920, and put the machine rebellion on stage before anyone else did. This piece is about the man who built the actual machines — and saw, more clearly than anyone, where they were going.
In 1949, a mathematician named Norbert Wiener wrote a letter to Walter Reuther, who ran America’s auto workers union and had built it into a political force by surviving beatings from Ford’s security men — the same factories that now, under different branding, call unions a parasitic class. Wiener had spent the war building targeting systems that predicted where a plane would be rather than where it was, feeding trajectory into anticipation. He saw, and almost nobody else did in 1949, that this didn’t stop at air defence — that a machine capable of anticipating motion could eventually replace judgement itself. Alan Turing was arriving at the same conclusion from the computational side: Turing asked whether a machine could think, Wiener asked how an intelligent system corrects itself, and together they had sketched something that didn’t yet have a name.
Wiener told Reuther what was coming and suggested labour should own the machines before the surplus flowed upward. Reuther never wrote back. It didn’t matter. The pattern doesn’t require warnings to be ignored — it just requires that whoever owns the technology at the moment of arrival captures the first surplus. The mainframe concentrated power in institutions. The personal computer redistributed creative capability into individual hands, and within twenty years had been absorbed into a platform economy that concentrated power more efficiently than the mainframe ever had. The feedback loop always corrects eventually. It just flows upward first.
The Thermostat: Who sets the target temperature?
The Thermostat
To understand what Wiener thought he had found, start with a thermostat. It measures temperature, compares it to a target, and adjusts the system — sense, compare, correct, repeat. Wiener’s insight was that this loop is the basic unit of all intelligent behaviour: a hand reaching for a glass, a predator tracking prey, a corporation adjusting prices. He called the science of these loops cybernetics, from the Greek for helmsman, and his 1948 book on the subject was an unlikely bestseller, giving the mid-century scientific world a new vocabulary for what it was building.
He named the specific danger cybernation — not just automation of muscle, which the industrial revolution had already delivered, but automation of mind. The targeting systems he’d built for the war were primitive ancestors of something that could learn, and if machines could learn, the judgement and pattern recognition that had always been labour’s last refuge would stop being a refuge. He considered stopping his research. He decided against it, concluding that if he didn’t develop it, someone with less conscience would. That reasoning — if not me, someone worse — is now the governing psychology of an entire industry.
The Panic That Was Right
By 1964 the fear had become impossible to ignore. Automated production lines were replacing assembly workers. Institutional computers were beginning to process the work of clerks and accountants. Thirty-five intellectuals, including two Nobel laureates, sent an open letter to President Johnson called the Triple Revolution, arguing that cybernation was severing the central assumption of the economy: that income came from work. If machines could produce goods with a fraction of the human labour previously required, the gains would flow to whoever owned the machines. Workers would have nothing left to sell.
Their prescription was precise: a guaranteed income decoupled from employment, an excess profits tax on corporations capturing the cybernation surplus, government authority to regulate the speed of automation. Not a rejection of the technology — an insistence that the political question of what to do with the surplus be answered deliberately. Johnson read it, convened a commission, and the commission recommended job training programmes instead. The Triple Revolution had asked what happens if work becomes structurally scarce. Johnson’s commission...