Cybernetics of AI
Subtopics
Research
The LLM as variety transducer: Ashby's intelligence-amplifier architecture and Beer's viable system model as a diagnostic and predictive framework
Rebuilding Ashby's Amplifier
Prompt, context, harness, and loop engineering as the components of a 1956 design
The Hollow Human: A Cybernetic Anatomy of AI and Ethics
70 years ago Ross Ashby designed an 'intelligence-amplifier'. Have we finally built it?
Intelligence as appropriate selection — and the category error at the heart of AI
Intelligence as Selection: Ashby, Beer, and the Design of Viable Autonomous Vehicles
The Machine That Outplayed Its Designer
Ashby's 1952 question, and the sixty-five-year journey to its answer
Writing
Call it entropy...no one knows what entropy really is.
A limit accepted, and the law of requisite variety
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Palimpsestic syndromes, adumbrationism, and laws of eponymy
70th anniversary of Ashby's presentation at Dartmouth's summer AI workshop
Ashby set out to amplify intelligence, not simulate it. Seventy years on, I think that's what we've built.