The birth of automated targeting and the modern computer

We’ve been wrestling with information as a medium for negative feedback ever since Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics in 1949, and Wiener himself had been thinking about the relationship between control and feedback since his war-related research of the early forties. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States joined the war in earnest, Wiener was asked by the army to figure out a way to train the mechanical guns to fire automatically at their targets. The question Wiener found himself answering was this: Given enough information about the target’s location and movement, could you translate that data into something a machine could use to shoot a V-2 out of the sky?

 

The problem was uniquely suited for the adaptability of negative feedback: the targets were a mixture of noise and information, somewhat predictable but also subject to sudden changes. But as it happened, to solve the problem Wiener also needed something that didn’t really exist yet: a digital computer capable of crunching the flow of data in real time. With that need in mind, Wiener helped build one of the first modern computers ever created. When the story is told of Wiener’s war years, the roots of the modern PC are usually emphasized, for legitimate reasons. But the new understanding of negative feedback that emerged from the ENIAC effort had equally far-reaching consequences, extending far beyond the vacuum tubes and punch cards of early computing.

That was from Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence. Negative feedback keeps systems in balance, like a thermostat. Positive feedback propels systems to new states.

I would put this into the “requirements pull” bucket, where there was a challenging military problem of automated targeting that pulled along new technology to solve the problem. Luckily, Weiner didn’t have to go through a prolonged requirements, budgeting, and acquisition process to start experimenting. The war would have already been over.

A lot of DoD’s problems today don’t require pulling technology along so much as incorporating existing commercial technologies. If commercial technology advances to new states faster than the DoD acquisition process can get a program started, then it isn’t commercial technology that needs to slow down. Perhaps when value-decreasing process is removed from the acquisition, the “requirements pull” approach once again becomes more viable.