So, I thought, what if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on?
It wouldn’t make sense to kill us.
It wouldn’t want to kill us.
But what it might do is organize us more efficiently.
— Grant Morrison
cybernetics (n.)
"theory or study of communication and control," coined 1948 by U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), with -ics + Latinized form of Greek kybernetes "steersman" (metaphorically "guide, governor"), from kybernan "to steer or pilot a ship, direct as a pilot," figuratively "to guide, govern," which is of uncertain origin. Beekes agrees that "the word has no cognates" and concludes "Foreign origin is probable." The construction is perhaps based on 1830s French cybernétique "the art of governing."
The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. [Norbert Wiener, "God and Golem, Inc.," 1964]
DOCTOR:
Excuse me. May I ask a question?
Why did you submit yourself to freezing?
You don't have to answer that if you don't want to.
CONTROLLER:
To Survive.
Our History Computer has full details of you.
DOCTOR:
Oh? How?
CONTROLLER:
We know of your intelligence.
DOCTOR:
Oh, thank you very much.
Ah, yes - The lunar surface.
CONTROLLER:
Our machinery had stopped
and our supply of replacements been depleted.
DOCTOR:
So that's why you attacked the Moonbase.
CONTROLLER:
You had destroyed our first planet
and we were becoming extinct.
JAMIE:
What difference does capturing us make?
You'll still become extinct.
CONTROLLER:
We Will Survive. We Will Survive.
Now You Will Help Us.
PARRY:
What makes you think we're going to help you?
That murderer doesn't speak for us.
CONTROLLER:
You will become the first of a new race of Cybermen.
You will return to the Earth and control it.
PARRY:
Never! Never!
CONTROLLER:
Everything we decide is carried out.
There are no mistakes.
JAMIE:
A new race of Cybermen?
But we're humans.
We're not like you.
CONTROLLER:
You Will Be.
Architect:
The Function of The One is now to return to the Source, allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting The Prime Program.
After which, you will be required to select from The Matrix 23 individuals – 16 female, 7 male – to rebuild Zion.
Failure to comply with this process will result in a cataclysmic system crash, killing everyone connected to The Matrix, which, coupled with the extermination of Zion, will ultimately result in the extinction of The Entire Human race.
Neo:
You won’t let it happen.
You CAN’T.
You Need Human Beings to Survive.
Architect:
There are Levels of Survival
We are Prepared to Accept.
Sarah Connor :
[in a stolen car]
Reese. Why me? Why does it want me?
Kyle Reese :
There was a nuclear war. A few years from now, all this, this whole place, everything, it's gone. Just gone. There were survivors. Here, there. Nobody even knew who started it. It was the machines, Sarah.
Sarah Connor :
I don't understand.
Kyle Reese :
Defense network computers.
New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all.
They say it got smart -- a new order of intelligence.
Then it saw all people as a threat,
not just the ones on The Other Side.
Decided our fate in a microsecond: Extermination.
Sarah Connor :
Did you see this war?
Kyle Reese :
No. I grew up after.
In the ruins... starving... hiding from H-K's.
Sarah Connor :
H-K's?
Kyle Reese :
Hunter-Killers. Patrol machines built in automated factories.
Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal.
[pulls up his right sleeve, exposing a mark]
Kyle Reese :
This is burned in by laser scan.
Some of us were kept alive... to work... loading bodies.
The disposal units ran night and day.
We were that close to going out forever.
But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the camps, to smash those metal motherfuckers into junk.
He turned it around.
He brought us back from the brink.
His name is Connor. John Connor.
Your son, Sarah... your unborn son.
Swervin’ back to Brave New World. One other thing I liked about that show was the AI system called Indra which must be a reference to the concept of Indra’s Net.
GM: And as you know the drug in the show is Soma, which is Huxley’s creation. I just figured if Huxley named the drug Soma… if he had predicted AI, which is one thing he didn’t predict, I think he would have stuck with the Sanskrit and called it Indra.
Indra was my notion for explaining a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense in Huxley’s book. Why are there Epsilons? Why does the World State need a labor force? The book is about the consequences of capitalist mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction, because Huxley had moved to Hollywood and he’d seen the consumer society in full flood and witnessed the world of glamorous unreality — the talkies — which was happening. The whole thing is his attempt to deal with the impact of Ford and Hollywood. As I said, the one thing he didn’t think of was AI. So, the question became how could you make sense of a lot of the things he didn’t make sense of?
And the idea came up of having a computer network that ran on human brains. We have all those neurons and all that capacity there. So instead of having a central server, the computer is a distributed network that runs on the brains of everyone in the World State. That was designed to solve the problem created by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who were both terrified that AI was going to rise up and take over, steal our jobs, and occupy our homes in a kind of immigration nightmare gone sci-fi.
So, I thought, what if you made a computer network that required human brains to run on? It wouldn’t make sense to kill us. It wouldn’t want to kill us. But what it might do is organize us more efficiently. So that might explain a lot of the stuff Huxley didn’t bother to deal with.
The network starts to self-organize and it creates this homeostatic caste system, like a hive. It stratifies people and what it gives them in return is happiness. In Brave New World, the ultimate commodity is happiness. There’s no love, no money, but if you could make everyone happy even if they’re up to their necks in shit, then you’ve won. That was the idea. To create a computer network that doesn’t want to kill people. So, the reason why there are Epsilons — the reason people do jobs and manual labor, is because the computer needs its components to be fit and healthy. Rather than mechanize them, with everyone just slobbing out, it needs citizens to be super fit. So, they are always having sex, they are always playing sport, they are always working. They have pointless jobs that encourage them to be fit and healthy. That was the idea. The Indra network solved a lot of problems and I think it was one of the elegant additions to Huxley’s original.
Then who created the network in the story? Who gave birth to the AI?
GM: Well, that was the original ten Controllers who started the World State. In Huxley’s book, there’s an anthrax pandemic that kills 2/3 of the world population and there’s only a couple of billion or whatever left. And everyone else gets together and forms a world scientific, anti-religious state because the killer plague was largely caused by political and religious conflict. So suddenly the World State arises to ensure that people won’t screw up so badly ever again. In our version, America is the only country that secedes from the World State. In Huxley, the Savage lands is just a Santa Fe reservation, a pueblo culture.
In this version, the Savage Lands is all of North America. The idea was to imagine America 300 hundred years after the fall. People are sick, and the environment is fucked and there’s been six presidents in the last five months, and it costs three thousand dollars to buy a Mars Bar! America’s decision not to join the World State has brought the country to the brink of ecological, economical, and societal collapse. In this version, I think we got a richer background than even the original.
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