Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

Thanks Ted, Scott and Morlock, this history is obviously more complex
and nuanced than the point I was trying to make, which was not
historical at all, but rather logical.

To my limited understanding, the black box in the airplane is not a
device to limit the complexity of the pilots' interaction with, or
understanding of, the plane by reducing a complex process to a simple
in/out relationship.

No, it's a flight recorder. During the flight, it has no output at all,
and in no way influences the processes of flying. It simply records
certain signals, including voice signals.

The plane would fly in exactly the same way if it wasn't there.

In this sense, it's a forensic, not a cybernetic tool. And as that, it's
function is actually exactly the opposite. It's a tool designed not to
hide but to reveal complexity, to make transparent what happens inside
the cockpit.

Just because there are procedural limits as to who is allowed to open
the box, and therefor it's "black" to some people (the pilots, the
airline technicians like Scott) doesn't make it a black box in the
cybernetic sense. Otherwise, every safe would be a cybernetic black box.

And because it's not a cybernetic object, it's not a good object to talk
about the problems of complexity and if/how we run a ever larger number
of processes at or beyond the outer limits of complexity that we can
manage. That was the only point I was trying to make.

But because Scott, who as detailed, first-hand knowledge of these
things, agrees with the cybernetic reading to plane's black box, I might
be mistaken here.

Felix


On 29.03.19 02:46, tbyfield wrote:
> Not so fast, Felix, and not so clear.
> 
> The origins of the phrase black box are "obscure," but the cybernetics
> crowd started using it from the mid-'50s. Their usage almost certainly
> drew on electronics research, where it had been used on a few occasions
> by a handful of people. However, that usage paled in comparison to the
> phrase's use among military aviators from early/mid in WW2 — *but not
> for flight recorders*. Instead, it described miscellaneous
> electro-mechanical devices (navigation, radar, etc) whose inner workings
> ranged from complicated to secret. Like many military-industrial objects
> of the time, they were often painted in wrinkle-finish black paint.
> Hence the name.
> 
> Designing advanced aviation devices in ways that would require minimal
> maintenance and calibration in the field was a huge priority — because
> it often made more sense to ship entire units than exotic spare parts,
> because the devices' tolerances were too fine to repair in field
> settings, because training and fielding specialized personnel was
> difficult, because the military didn't want to circulate print
> documentation, etc, etc. So those physically black boxes became, in some
> ways, "philosophical" or even practical black boxes.
> 
> Several of the key early cyberneticians contributed to the development
> of those devices at institutions like Bell Labs and the Institute for
> Advanced Studies, and there's no doubt they would have heard the phrase.
> In that context, the emphasis would have been on *a system that behaves
> reliably even though ~users don't understand it*, more than on *an
> object that's painted black*. Wartime US–UK cooperation in aviation was
> intense (the US used something like 80 air bases in the UK under the
> Lend–Lease program), so there was no shortage of avenues for slang to
> spread back and forth across the ocean. It's on that basis, a decade
> later, that Ross Ashby called a chapter of his 1956 book _Cybernetics_
> to "The Black Box." Given who he'd been working with, it's hard to
> imagine — impossible, I think — that he was unaware of this wider usage.
> (An exaggerated analogy: try calling someone looking at shop shelves a
> "browser.")
> 
> Some early aviators had come up with ad-hoc ways to record a few flight
> variables, but the first flight recorders as we now understand them
> started to appear around the mid-'50s. There's lots of folksy
> speculation about how these things — which weren't black and weren't
> box-shaped — came to be called "black boxes." I think the simplest
> explanation is best, even if it's the messiest: a combination of
> aviation slang and the fact that they were the state of the art when it
> came to sealed units. In the same way that the word "dark" clearly
> exerts some wide appeal (dark fiber, dark pools, dark web, dark money,
> etc), I think the idea of a "black box" held mystique — of a kind that
> would tend to blur sharp distinctions like the one you drew.
> 
> Anyway. Planes are interesting, but what led me down the path of
> studying these histories is what you point out — that the fusion of the
> pilot with the plane is an ur-moment in human–machine hybridization.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ted
> 
> 
> On 28 Mar 2019, at 14:48, Felix Stalder wrote:
> 
>> Let me just pick up on one point, because it kind of annoyed me since
>> the start the thread, the significance of the the existence of a "black
>> box" in the airplane and in cybernetic diagrams. To the best of my
>> understanding, these two "black boxes" stand in no relation to each
>> other.
>>
>> In the case of the black box in cybernetics, it stands for a
>> (complicated) processes of which we only (need to) know the relationship
>> between input and output, not its inner workings. In the case of the
>> airplane, the it's just a very stable case protecting various recorders
>> of human and machine signals generated in the cockpit. There is no
>> output at all, at least not during the flight.
>>
>> There is, of course, a deep connection between aviation and cybernetics,
>> after all, the fusion of the pilot with the plane was the earliest
>> example of a system that could only be understood as consisting humans
>> and machines reacting to each other in symbiotic way. So, the main
>> thrust of the thread, and the rest of your post, are interesting, this
>> little detail irks me.
> 
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