Imagining+the+future

Barbrook, Richard. 2007. //Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the global village.// London: Pluto Press.

“In the prophecies of artificial intelligence and the information society, ideology is used to warp time. The importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but in what more advanced models might b able to do one day…. the present already contains the future and this future explains the present.”(p 8) “this book insists that the imaginary futures of artificial intelligence and the information society have a long history. It’s over 40 years since the dreams of thinking machines and post-industrial cornucopia gripped the American public’s imagination at the new york world’s fair. Examining these earlier attempts to propogate these prophecies is a requisite for understanding their contemporary iterations....” (p.11 ) Paraphrased- A confounding of science fact and fiction shaped understanding of technologies p-20 The rejection of miniaturization, and the holding of a vision of the future that didn’t allow for private personal computers directed IBM’s research and this disjuncture with the way that the popular culture imagined the computer effected IBM’s image, and their technological development. P-20 The popular idea of technological development toward a utopia was simultaneously used to justify the obviousness of Capitalist American superiority in the present, by saying it was the way to that technology, and also the way that the technological utopia was imagined was framed in light of capitalism, so that the contemporary justified the future.p-103 A discursive history of the way that predictions and visions for the future surrounding the notion of cybernetics and computation have been integrated into, responded to, and mobilized by political ideology and cultural movement in the 20th Century. The book starts from the Author’s reminiscences of the 1964 worlds fair during a visit to the fair grounds recently, and looks at the similarity of the promised future of that era, and the visions of the future held in the present. He tracks cybernetics from its precursors in Charles Babbage and other pioneers of computing having been influenced by the ideology and philosophy of their time, through its official founding by Weiner, and up through its usage in the interwar and cold war periods. The work links reaction to this vision, and its associated science to the dominant ideologies it linked to, and the world events that both responded to. He looks especially at how the vision of cybernetics interacts with other predictive visions that are more closely tied to ideologies, such as Mcluhan’s theory of media, Marxism and later sects of socialism, Keynesian and Laissez Faire Capitalism. 1) Detailed history of cybernetics, drawing heavily on secondary sources, biography of key players and media representations. 2) comparisons between national sites in both the Soviet Union and US. While some connection to theory, it draws heavily on media history, and the history of computing/cybernetics. To a Lesser degree connects to a variety (?) of sources in history of technology, and the history of the cold war, and his use of a specific discussion of liberalism and left politics seem to be technical ones from the later. He does make reference to the importance of visions to the future throughout but it is unclear if he draws from any particular source, as he doesn’t cite it. He does cite Deleuze several times, but doesn’t seem particularly postmodernist, rather he is heavily a political historian more than cultural. 1) The formation and mobilization of a technology in multiple ideologies in different forms. 2) The cultural influence on when and how theory is accepted. 3) History of Cybernetics and Computation.
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