Cybernetics makes a comeback at ANU, and it could save us all

Cybernetics is making a comeback at ANU and might just be the thing we’re looking for to deal with the perils of AI and automation.

John Billingsley reunited with Albert at the ANU last year, over 50 years after he build the interactive robot. Photo: Andrew Meares

At the Australian National University last November a 50 year old robot named Albert was finally reunited with its creator.

The robot – which in truth is little more than a rudimentary head – mesmerised museum goers in the 1960s because it possessed a very human quality. Approach Albert and it turned to look at you.

Albert was a vivid, for the times, example of an electro-mechanical system which could scan its environment for signals, process them and then give feedback (by moving its head). And it could do it over and over again in a control and feedback loop, something which was, in the 1960s Zeitgeist, described as cybernetics.

Created by young English electronic engineer John Billingsley, Albert became a star. It delighted audiences at a landmark 1968 exhibition at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts called Cybernetic Serendipity, and then went to the US where it was exhibited at the Smithsonian and finally at the newly opened Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1969.

And that’s where Albert remained until it was tracked down by ANU’s newly established School of Cybernetics and brought to Canberra late last year to help celebrate the school’s official launch. Even better the school discovered that Billingsley, Albert’s creator, had migrated to Australia and was a professor at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowomba. He came to ANU for the opening and reunited with Albert. “I hadn’t seen it since it got posted off (to the US) six months after Cybernetic Serendipity,” Billingsley said.

For the new School of Cybernetics Albert is a symbol which represents the origins of this field of study, which has been in decline in recent decades.

In Albert’s heyday, cybernetics as a discipline was new and cool. The 1968 London exhibition, which Albert was part of, showed people things they probably hadn’t seen before – how humans could interact creatively with machines through music, art and kinetic movement. Other exhibits included sound activated mobiles, computer art, and a device which created music from a tune whistled by a visitor. They illustrated that cybernetic control and feedback principles were not limited to rigid engineering systems but extended into any system with interaction and feedback including the environment, society and culture.

Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell, director of the Australian National University School of Cybernetics. Photo: Andrew Meares.

Fifty years later Albert is back and what was remarkable then – a machine responding to human behaviour – is both commonplace and worrying. What Albert represents, the autonomous machine, has become a deep concern for the human race, and that’s what the ANU’s new School of Cybernetics has been created to inquire into and respond to.

Vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt is right behind the effort. “It’s really important to understand the interactions of technology and society and start designing things to make sure we get the most out of technology and try to minimise what I would describe as the bad side,” Schmidt says.

Six years ago Schmidt hired Genevieve Bell to set up a research institute at ANU to study these issues. Bell is an Australian anthropologist who made her name working at one of Silicon Valley’s big companies, chip maker Intel, on human interaction with technology. Her work brought a new, broader perspective to technology and when she arrived at ANU she made an immediate impact. She delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures in 2017 and, in 2019, joined the board of the Commonwealth Bank. And, not holding back, she announced that her goal was to create “a new branch of engineering to take artificial intelligence safely, sustainably and responsibly to scale”.

At that stage Bell wasn’t calling this new activity cybernetics. But she often mentioned the word and harked back to the work of mathematician Norbert Wiener and others who founded the discipline after World War II, when information theory and computing were in their infancy. Wiener described cybernetics in the title of a book he wrote as “the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine”.

“One of the things we realised over the last five years … was that cybernetics, and the work that the 60 to 70 year body of literature that was there, helped us get there more quickly,” Bell says. Crucially, cybernetics embraces all systems, it’s not just about artificial intelligence and data flows. It also embraces complexity, understanding that the world is not simple. In this way it provides a structure for understanding the very complex interactions between technology, humans and the environment.

“It lent us a series of tools, it lent us some practitioners … it gave us some ways of thinking,” says Bell.

Schmidt says that cybernetics was expanded within the ANU because it became clear that it is “an emerging discipline”, not “just a short transitory pilot”.

“It’s actually something of substance that is has a 50 year horizon, and probably beyond, to it,” he says.

So not only is there a new ANU School of Cybernetics, but the College of Engineering and Computer Science, which it sits within, also had a name change and is now the College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics.

Schmidt believes that Bell’s decision to breathe new life into cybernetics is a significant act that it likely to have huge positive consequences in the future interactions which humans have with technology. And it could lead to world recognition.

“Genevieve is there to both change the way people think and the way people act at an international scale, in a way that may touch billions of people,” he says.

One of the things which Bell brings to cybernetics is a way of thinking which is distinctly anthropological. She sees technology in its context, finding that the story of how it develops is critical to how it should be responded to.

ANU School of Cybernetics research officer Isabel Richards plays a theremin, a electronic musical instrument which reacts to your hands waving in the air. The theremin is an artistic work titled "Wave" (1975), made by Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski. Photo: Andrew Meares

To illustrate, Bell tells the story behind the digital camera and computer vision algorithms which, she says, have a very particular history. “They come out of early digital optimisation of camera algorithms that were designed to mimic Kodachrome, which was in turn optimised around a couple of faces – more yours and mine than faces of colleagues from India or Africa,” she tells me.

“And it’s not until 2022 that the people at Google updated the camera algorithms to optimise them so that they actually worked on dark skin faces and on a different set of contrasts.”

And some technologies, such as the arrangement of the keys on typewriter keyboard, are the way they are because of a seemingly trivial decision which had lasting consequences. The keyboard was partly arranged to slow down typing speeds to avoid overstressing mechanical typewriters, Bell notes. But the letters on the top line were selected so that, in a sales demonstration, the word “typewriter” could be easily tapped out using the top row only.

“I’m always really struck as we are building all these new things that we are pulling with us all these pieces that have these demented histories,” Bell says. “And so I wonder if that means we have the opportunity to be more purposeful in what we’re doing now.”

A key feature of Bell’s work is that there is no built in pessimism about the future, no reflexive assumption that AI, or other new technologies, threaten irrevocable doom.

In Bell’s cybernetic approach, the stories which help us understand current technology also offer insights into how to make that technology safer in the future.

“We have to tell stories about the future that are more optimistic and hopeful. And then we also have to do things right now to stop those just being stories. Tell a story about the future and disrupt the present simultaneously,” she says.

Another feature of cybernetics is that it is an applied science. It’s not just a philosophy or a language, says Andrew Meares, an associate professor in the school.

“It wants to interact with the world and see what happens,” he says.

It’s not a coincidence that cybernetics also has links with the maker movement. It requires people to interact with systems, study relationships between the elements of a system, and see what happens. In the master of applied cybernetics, a degree which Bell initiated soon after she arrived at ANU, students are required to make things. If they don’t know how to write code they need to learn. And they build physical systems.

In one exercise they are given an embroidery hoop, nano fabric, conductive thread, a battery and an LED light. They are asked to get creative with this material, working alongside other students to share ideas and skills. The aim is for them to discover there is power in working together, there is choice and agency in what is created, and that the final product – because of interaction within a system – can be much more than the sum of the parts

“What we’re saying in the school, I feel, is that technology doesn’t come to us fully formed. It’s a social process and is therefore iterative,” says Meares.

He says it’s a priority to ensure a full range of voices are heard and that everyone has the opportunity to contribute. If you are pluralistic, and attentive to responsibility and accountability, that leads to optimism about what is being created, he says.

Meares played a key role in bringing together an exhibition of cybernetics at the ANU for the school’s launch last November.

ANU vice-chancellor Professor Brian Schmidt is backing the School of Cybernetics. “The worst you could do is fail,” he says. Photo: Jamie Kidston.

Not only did it feature Albert but the exhibition, titled Australian cybernetic: A point through time, showcased the creative applications of cybernetics in the 1960s and its influence in Australia in the 1970s. It finished with contemporary works curated today in the School of Cybernetics. It included a theremin, an electronic musical instrument played by moving one’s hands in the air, that was part of an exhibition in Canberra in March 1975. Titled the Australia ’75 festival of creative arts and sciences, it featured computer art and music, and prime minister Gough Whitlam used it to launch his science policy.

Meares, who worked for many years as a newspaper photographer, sees cybernetic principles at work in the evolution of digital photography. Physics and information technology interacted with traditional camera technology to produce digital cameras. And then it was changed again by social media which gave digital photography a new way to reach its audience. “I think it (technology) just doesn’t arrive to us static from Silicon Valley. We can bend and shape it here,” he says.

Schmidt says he’s aware that not everyone in the university is along for the cybernetics journey.

“A lot of people, you know, still remain uncomfortable with the whole notion of it,” he says.

He affirms that the traditional disciplines are still vital to the ANU. “But it’s not all of the university. The universe is changing. The world is changing and the university needs to do more.”

Schmidt wants Bell and the School of Cybernetics to think bold and big and have ambition. “In a university, we have exceptional people, and we try to back them in,” he says.

It reminds him of when he was 27, he says, and came up with a proposal to measure the expansion of the universe over time. “No one in Australia does this but yeah, they said, we’ll back you in. And you know the worst you could do is fail. And if you’re not prepared to fail, you’re probably not doing anything interesting.”

As it turned out Schmidt won a Nobel prize and that’s clearly had an influence on the way he looks at other ambitious projects. “I was prepared to back Genevieve in precisely because I knew she could well fail. But she hasn’t,” he says.