Cybernetics: The beginnings of transhumanism and the idea of ​​merging the human brain with machines

He probably arrived in Paris from Darmstadt, Germany, by train that January. At 53 years old, Alwin Walther, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Founding Director of the “Institut für Praktische Mathematik” of the “Technische Hochschule” in Darmstadtwas one of the most prominent figures in computing in Germany.

The computational prowess of Walther and his institute, employing all sorts of manual, mechanical, and electromechanical methods, had attracted attention and the support of the Nazi regime during World War II. But as Walther made his way to the academic heart of “liberated” Paris, in the Latin Quarter, few passersby would have guessed this background.

Walther’s institute had been one of the main sources of support for the calculus needed to Werner von Braun’s rocketry efforts, especially the V-2, for the German Army. In fact, during the war, Walther obtained funding from the German Army to create an advanced electromechanical analog computer: an advanced differential analyzer that rivaled the one previously created by Vannevar Bush at MIT. (The German system, the IPM-Ott DGMwas developed throughout the war, but was not presented to the Walther Institute until 1948)

Alwin Walther and Werner von Braun

This work by Werner von Braun and the German military was not the only effort to link Alwin Walther to slave labor, such as that in German concentration camps exploited in V-2 rocket factories. more directly, Walther was evidently involved in a plot with the Nazi SS to enslave Jewish scientists held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to perform manual calculations.

The plan was carried out and was soon under way, along with the other activities of the Walther institute. Its facilities and the vast majority of the buildings in the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and much of the rest of the city they were destroyed during the Allied aerial bombardments on September 11 and 12, 1944.

In the new facilities created after the war, Walther and his institute had their sights set on electronic digital computing. During the war, members of the institute and its machine shop had provided direct support for the famous electromechanical computer. Konrad Zuse’s Z4. (The Z4 was a pioneering digital computer, originally intended for the German aircraft industry.)

Walther himself developed wartime plans for a large electromechanical computer along the lines of the Mark 1 by Howard Aikenbut they were abandoned. When Walther packed up his belongings for his trip to Paris in January 1951, he and his institute had just embarked on a major new project to create an electronic digital computer with stored programs. This machine, the Darmstädter Elektronischer Rechenautomat, or DERAwould come into operation in 1957 (we will talk about this later).

Beginnings of a computer vision of human thought

The conference was organized by the Blaise Pascal Institutethe computer center founded in 1946 by the “National Center for Scientific Research” (CNRS). The French institute was made up of two laboratories, one dedicated to analog computing and the other, directed by louis couffignalto digital computing. Couffignal was the leading figure at the international conference in January 1951.

Couffignal had a doctorate in mathematics on the theory of computation at the University of Paris in 1938with the ambition of creating a new calculation engine based on the binary language. During the warlike occupation of the city by the Germans, Couffignal had met intensively and frequently with perhaps the France’s leading physiologist of the time, Louis Lapicque.

Lapicque, famous for his model of the integration of neurons, and Couffignal found a common vision, seeing profound analogies and connections between the physiology of human thought and the processes and components of calculating machines. Imprisoned by the German Gestapo for aiding the resistance, Lapicque managed to write his book “The Machine Nerveuse“, published in 1943.

In this book, Lapicque gave voice to this shared vision with Couffignal:

“The periodic and regular organization of the cerebellar elements makes the cerebellum resemble artificial machines. Some of its processes can be understood by comparison with calculating machines or automatic telephone relays.”

Like many of those who came before them, Couffignal and Lapicque they used man-made instruments, of great current fascination, as analogical tools to understand human bodies and minds. Whereas earlier thinkers were fascinated by clockwork mechanisms and saw themselves in gears and windings, Couffignal, Lapicque and others in the 1940s they looked at electromechanical and electronic calculating machines and saw human bodies and minds reflected in them.

Working for the CNRS during the war allowed Couffignal to take over the direction of the digital computing laboratory of the “Blaise Pascal Institute” in 1946. At that time, the institute was only equipped with electromechanical desktop calculators confiscated from the Germansbut Couffignal had the ambition to create a new French binary computer.

In the first year of his new leadership, he traveled to the United States to deepen his knowledge of American developments both in electronic computing as in what we might call the “computer vision of human thought“.

• in Philadelphia, got acquainted with ENIAC. (The ENIAC was a newly completed all-electronic digital computer, and a milestone in the history of computing.)
• in PrincetonCouffignal learned about the development of the “Institute for Advanced Studies” computer by John von Neuman. (The IAS computer was a “stored program” machine, containing both software and data in its memory. The power of this approach made the computer a model for many early digital computers around the world.)
• at harvardCouffignal visited Howard Aiken and saw their electromechanical computers.

It was also in cambridge where Couffignal found the opportunity to pursue his interest in the computer view of human thought, when he met the mathematician Norbert Wiener at MIT. In the depths of the work that would lead him to publish his book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” in 1948 Wiener evidently found a kindred spirit in Couffignal. In 1947 Wiener returned the visit and met with Couffignal and Lapicque in Paris.

The French computer: Couffignal’s machine

the same The kind of analogical thinking that led Couffignal, Lapicque, and Wiener to see bodies and minds as servomechanisms (automatic control based on feedback), electromechanical relays, and electronic circuits had also led, in 1951, Couffignal to lead the major effort of France to develop a large-scale digital electronic computer in a very particular direction.

Already in his doctoral thesis of 1938Couffignal was dedicated to analogical thinking about calculating machines that connected with physiology. Wrote:

“To fully account for the development (of calculating machines) we must create for machinery the analogs of comparative anatomy and physiology”

What Couffignal ultimately concluded was that this physiology of calculating machines showed an evolution in which the increase in computing power was achieved by increasing the complexity.

In 1947, when Couffignal was in control of the France’s biggest effort to build a large-scale digital computer, his 1938 evolutionary conclusion now carried real weight. France’s computer would depart from the designs he saw in the United States, which in its “comparative anatomy” of computer design encompassed a simplicity of computational logic, thus emphasizing the need for great memories.

For Couffignal, this was a kind of involution, a reversal against complexity and therefore against progress. France’s computer, by contrast, would adopt large, parallel units of complex calculation logicand would minimize, even eliminate, the memory.

In this, Couffignal explained:

“The problem of organizing a calculation is essentially the same as that of organizing a factory assembly line”

In January 1951, a “pilot machine” embodying Couffignal’s startlingly different approach to electronic digital computing was in operation in his laboratory at the Blaise Pascal Institute. It was the result of four years of effort. by the main financier, the Logabax company, and the spending of millions of francs by the CNRS. Regardless of what can be said about him, was able to compute square roots and sinusoidal functions.

The “cyber community” meets in Paris

Under the auspices of the CNRS, and with a additional funding from the Rockefeller Foundationand with his pilot machine ready to demonstrate, Couffignal organized an ambitious international conference that combined his two greatest passions: large-scale digital electronic computers and the computer vision of human thought.

The conference brought together some of the leading figures in the development of digital computers from around the world, as well as an international group of researchers inspired by machine view of mind. After 1948, when Wiener’s book circulated the term cybernetics, this later group would be known as cyber devotees.

The conference was entitled “Les Machines a Calcular et la Pensée Humane” (Calculating machines and human thought) and was held in the meeting rooms of the National Center for Pedagogical Documentation, located just three minutes walk from Couffignal’s laboratory in the “Henri Poincare Institute”just around the corner, at 29 Rue d’Ulm.

The 6 days of the conference were divided into three parts of two days. The opening part focused on the “Progrès Récents dans la Technique des Grosses Machines a Calculer“, New advances in the approach to large-scale digital computers. The pioneer of quantum physics, Nobel Prize and Secretary of the Academy of Sciences.

• louis de brogliedelivered the keynote address, which was followed by a series of presentations on the latest electronic digital computers.
• Howard Aikenfrom Harvard, talked about his machines Mark II, III and IV.
• Andrew Boothof Birkbeck College, described his experimental SEC and his new APEXC computer.
• Edward Stiefelhead of applied mathematics at ETH Zurich, discussed Konrad Zuse’s Z4 computer, now under Stiefel’s supervision.
• E. W. Cannonchief of mathematics for the US National Bureau of Standards, reviewed the organizational history with computingincluding SEAC and SWAC.
• F.C. Colebrookof the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, described the recent success of the Pilot ACE computer, originally designed by Alan Turing.

At the end of the first day, Couffignal demonstrated his lab’s pilot machine, which had its world premiere.

A conference that would mark the beginnings of cybernetics

The second day continued with presentations on other new computer work, such as the review of Freddie Williams of the computing works of the University of Manchester, and discussions of various digital and analog computing approaches.

The central part of the conference was devoted to the types of math and science problems which were appropriate applications for the large-scale digital computers discussed in the first part of the conference. Linear and Differential Equations they made numerous appearances. Douglas Hartree and Maurice Wilkes talked about their experiences in programming the new EDSAC computer from the University of Cambridge.

For the final part of the conference, Couffignal turned to the colleague with whom he had perhaps discussed the mind-as-machine view the most: Louis Lapicque. The ending theme was “Les Grosses Machines, La Logique et la Physiologie du Système Nerveux“, the great digital computers and the logic and physiology of the nervous system.

The morning of Friday, January 12 was dominated by a presentation on Leonardo Torres and Quevedo and demonstrations of a set of devices made by him. Torres and Quevedo a very ingenious and famous Spanish engineerwas born in 1852 and died in 1936. He had also been something of an intellectual companion to Couffignal’s thesis advisor and mentor, Maurice d’Ocagne.

At the Couffignal conference, Torres and Quevedo’s son, Gonzalo, introduced or reintroduced his father’s work to this international computing elite. Torres y Quevedo embraced a vision of what his son called “automatism“, the possibility of creating increasingly sophisticated autonomous machinery that could encompass actions and behaviors that were previously the exclusive domain of humans.

At the congressional exhibition of 1951 there was an electromagnetic chess machine from the 1920sa system called Telekino which used radio waves and servomechanisms for remote guidance of ships, and a complex mechanical device called “endless spindle” to calculate logarithms.

After the morning presentation by Torres and Quevedo, the afternoon was devoted to names that, over time, would remain indelibly linked to the cybernetics. W. Ross AshbyBritish psychiatrist and researcher, presented his later famous Homeostatan electronic system designed to adapt to its environment and described in his 1948 paper, “Design for a Brain“.

Ashby was followed W. Gray WalterBritish neurophysiologist, who demonstrated his own and later famous “robotic turtles“sensitive to light. He was followed by none other than the Norbert Wienerwith a rather remarkable talk in which he speculated on the possibilities that computing machines provide humanity with new types of sensory perceptions in ways that are not intrinsically in our nervous system. New realms of perception could be opened to a new type of body that combined mind and machine.

Other speakers on Friday afternoon were Albert Uttleya researcher at the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory and a central figure in the Ratio Club, a British cyber club who met in the basement of a London neurological hospital. The Chicago neurophysiologist also appeared, Warren McCullochwho with the amazing talent of Walter Pitts had pioneered the concept of “nerve networks” (neural networks) in 1943, with the intention of using such networks to perform logical and other calculations.

At the Paris conference, McCulloch joked:

“Brains are calculating machines, but man-made calculating machines are not brains yet”

Computers as models of the human brain

If McCulloch and Pitts’ idea was to create machines modeled after minds (well, at least human brains), the closing remarks of the entire conference went in the opposite direction. The final speech fell, surely on purpose, to Couffignal himself.

Late in the morning of Saturday, January 13, he spoke of “Several new analogies between the structures of calculating machines and brain structures“. Taking the brain as “a machine in which thoughts and psychology are elaborated as the working method of that apparatus”, he proposed that a body of knowledge could be built on the brain’s actual “work processes” and that these realities could be compared directly with “logic performed with calculating machines.”

Couffignal’s goal was not for computers to think like humans, but for humans to think like computers.

Why? He believed it would be good for people: “On an individual scale, a broadening of the social force of intelligence can be expected,” perhaps breaking the “few fixed ideas” inherited by our “civilization” that Couffignal thought humans based our current reasoning on.

And he concluded:

“And, on a human scale, a thickening of the intellectual potential”

Together, human and machine, thinking like computers, humanity would create a new and improved version of itself.

While Couffignal dreamed of reasoning more like a computer. Following their conclusion of the conference, the speakers headed across town to the 17th arrondissement and the Ecole Hotelière. This school, opened in the 1930s, trained hundreds of aspiring Parisian hotel chefs. One of his restaurants was a replica of a dining room aboard the luxury liner SS Normandie.

The French project fails, the German succeeds

After this remarkable conference, Couffignal’s career did not reach higher heights. The Logabax companywho was finishing work on Couffignal’s pilot machine and had started work on his ambitious large parallel design memory minimization computer, went bankrupt in 1952 and closed.

Couffignal’s great machine remained forever unbuilt. He and his lab worked hard and ended up buying a computer Elliott 402, a vacuum tube computer with stored program and magnetic drum memory. For Couffignal, the purchase must have felt, at least somewhere inside him, like a humiliation. The Elliott was the epitome of everything his design was not. In 1959, he was fired.

Thanks to a series of books published in the 1950s and 1960s on cybernetics, Couffignal he earned a double legacy: Today, he is widely regarded as the architect of the initial disadvantage of digital computer manufacturing in France, while at the same time he is listed as an important early figure within French cybernetics.

Alwin Walther, for his part, left Paris and returned to Darmstadt, where he continued the physical reconstruction and technological evolution of his “Institut für Praktische Mathematik”. Among other things, he started his own project to create an electronic digital computer. He would take him to the end of the decade, but he managed to create a machine based on vacuum tubes for his institute, the DERA.

The Parisian experience must have been invaluable to Walther, for in 1955 he and his institute organized their own major international conference on digital computing. Less fleetingly, he created at his institute a sizeable library of the literature available on computingmaking it a key resource for the developing German computing community.

For this library, Walther had bound the various documents he had taken from Couffignal’s conference in Paris in 1951:

• The four-page printed program.
• The announcement of the conference in three typed pages.
• The nine-page attendee list.
• More than 100 pages of summaries of the presentations, both in English and French.

This bound volume was for years on the shelves of the library of the Institute with the number B8807.

As for the other attendees at the 1951 Couffignal conference, their full comments were presented in French in a CNRS publication in 1953, under the same conference title. At over 560 pages, this record ironically remains freely accessible on the web. However, many of the attendees have become perennial topics of the history of science and technologyespecially computing.

In time, Walther’s bound volume of his 1951 lecture materials was withdrawn by the library of his institute. From there, the volume attracted the discerning gaze of Jeremy M Norman, noted collector and dealer of rare books and manuscripts in the history of science and technology. Norman, in turn, used the volume in his 2002 documentary story, “The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications“.

More recently, Norman included Walther’s bound volume in a lot of rare books that he donated to the collection of the “Computer History MuseumThe volume now resides in the Museum’s archival facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, while a new PDF scan of it resides on a computer somewhere in the infrastructure of Microsoft Azureand it could be on your computer or phone if you download here.

Another chapter in the long history of artificial intelligence

In the end, What are we to make of the Couffignal conference of 1951? What do we do with it? In a 2017 article, the computer scientist turned computer historian Herbert Bruderer consider whether the conference marked the “birth of artificial intelligenceinstead of the more famous 1956 Dartmouth Conference. Write:

“This well-documented event could also be considered the first major AI conference”

This opinion depends on how the expression “artificial intelligenceAnother perspective is that the 1951 conference was indeed part of community building: a community of people who thought and built computers and cybernetic machines. It was a community animated by the idea of ​​thinking together about minds and machines, also considering machines as minds. In this sense, the Paris conference is proof of the long history of what we might today call “artificial intelligence” and how it is woven throughout the history of computing.