ed about the possibility of brain-washing and mind control. Under the code name MKUltra experiments with LSD and other drugs were conducted at Harvard University and elsewhere. (Marks, 1978) Some of the money for this research was channeled through the Macy Foundation. In one incident, a CIA employee was given LSD without his knowledge. Apparently he thought he was going mad and dove out a window of a hotel in New York City. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, when he was a student at Harvard, was an experimental subject of these mind control experiments. (Chase, 2003)
Early checkers-playing programs were written and raised the possibility of artificial intelligence. In 1956 at a conference at Dartmouth University people interested in studying the brain and people interested in creating computer programs parted ways. Thereafter the people interested in cybernetics and the people interested in artificial intelligence had little interaction.
Following a sabbatical year working with Arthuro Rosenblueth and Warren McCulloch, Heinz von Foerster founded the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois. br/>
EARLY 1960S
In the early 1960s several conferences on self-organizing systems were held, one of them at the University of Illinois's Allerton Park. (Von Foerster and Zopf, 1962) As a result of an invitation made at this conference, Ross Ashby moved from England to Illinois. The work on self-organizing systems was a forerunner to the field of study now called "Complexity." p> Although the Macy Foundation Conferences ended in 1953, the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) was not founded until 1964. This seems rather late. Actually the founding of the ASC was in part the result of the Cold War. During the Presidential campaign in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected, there was talk about a "missile gap" between the United States and the Soviet Union. Not long thereafter there began to be talk of a "cybernetics gap. "Some people in the Soviet Union thought cybernetics would provide the theory they needed to operate their centrally planned economy. Consequently the Soviet government generously funded cybernetics research. Some people in the US government then feared that the US might fall behind in a critical area of research, if this country did not also fund cybernetics research.
In Washington, DC, a cybernetics luncheon club was meeting. The participants included Paul Henshaw, Atomic Energy Commission; Carl Hammer, Univac; Jack Ford, CIA; Douglas Knight, IBM; Walter Munster; Bill Moore, lawyer. This group founded the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). The founding ceremony was held at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC. A grant from the National Science Foundation helped the Society to establish the Journal of Cybernetics. A conference on the social impact of cybernetics was held at Georgetown University in 1964. (Dechert, 1966) T...
