Philosophies of Technologies

8Predictive Machines and Overcoming Metaphysics

8.1. Cybernetic machines and intelligent machines

Cybernetic¹ machines were inspired by the self-regulatory mechanism that enables organisms to preserve their functional balance by responding to changes in the environment that they are adapted to. As a science, cybernetics aims to capture the information-processing procedures that characterize classes of systems and represent them as a sequence of actions (outputs) correlated to variations in the values of relevant parameters (inputs). New-generation intelligent machines, on the other hand, are influenced by the learning mechanism by which humans modify operating rules in a standardized way, forcing the environment to adapt to their needs. The evolution of simpler organic systems is brought about by externalities (the influx of unexpected information) and the natural selection of random changes that are appropriate to the new situation, whereas humans intentionally advance their behavior through inductive reasoning, the basis of scientific method: the selection of hypotheses that guide behavior is made on the basis of efficiency toward freely determined purposes. Cybernetic machines are therefore the result of scientific hypotheses about the information-processing rule that makes the behavior of biological systems (capable of performing tasks) predictable and exploitable, while intelligent machines are the result of scientific hypotheses about the learning formula by which humans ...