Postman Pat and the image of cybernetics

Image: Digital Spy

I went to see "Postman Pat: The Movie" today. No big deal, you might say (if you know that I'm the parent of a four year old). It must have been some production meeting when it was decided that what a 30 year old preschooler TV programme was missing was an army of killer robots - but that is indeed one of the main features of the movie. 

What amused me particularly was that the robots were created by the Cybernetics division of Special Delivery Service (Pat's employers, apparently a privatised spin-off from Royal Mail). So killer robots are the preserve of cybernetics. Which (since I edit a journal, Kybernetes, which has cybernetics as one of its main focuses and the source of its title; and since I'm off in a month to the 50th anniversary conference of the American Society for Cybernetics) got me thinking about the image of cybernetics in popular culture.

Now cybernetics has always been part of popular culture, ever since Norbert Wiener coined the term in 1948 with the publication of his book of that name (which bore the subtitle of "communication and control in the animal and the machine", always to me the single best definition of cybernetics still made, with its two pairs of linked terms). The book was published early in the cycle of ten conferences sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation (1946-53), which became known as the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. The conferences were widely reported by the press of the time, and the term 'cybernetics' became associated with a range of new ideas in the public imagination: robotics, the digital computer, and what Jean-Pierre Dupuy refers to as the 'mechanization of the mind': the idea that human beings could be replaced by machines. 

Image: BBC

So cybernetics became seen as futuristic, innovative, technological, but also very slightly sinister. And as Katherine Hayles discusses in her excellent book How We Became Posthuman, it has had that image ever since. Consider two science fiction villains: the Cybermen from the long-running TV series Doctor Who, and the Terminator from the movie of that name. Both are basically killer robots, although the Terminator looks human at the start. But both take their names from cybernetics - obviously in the case of the Cybermen, while the Terminator is referred to as a cyborg, a 1960 term that is a contraction of "cybernetic organism" and refers to an amalgam of human and machine (generalised to a transgressive boundary-crossing entity by the feminist scholar Donna Haraway). Even comedy gets in on the act: the robot Marvin in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy was designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. 

Cybernetics today continues to be a mixture of technology, artificial intelligence, robotics and psychology - though in many cases applied to human situations. Second-order cybernetics, which emphasises the importance of the observer, has brought in the importance of reflexivity to the field. Most modern academics and practitioners working under the banner of cybernetics would steer well clear of anything relating to mindless automata that seek to replace human beings. There are, of course, many contemporary technological projects to replace humans by machines (of which drones are perhaps the closest to killer robots), or to further turn 'enhance' humans with technology (witness our attachment to smartphones, rapidly diversifying into smart watches and smart glasses). Some are treated with public suspicion. But there's quite a gulf between them and the work today carried out under the name of cybernetics. 

So real cyberneticians won't be launching armies of killer robots any time soon. But it's interesting to know that even children's film producers just might expect it to happen.