| Hello all,
I have been reading this thread with much interest even if, I am afraid I may have missed many of the nuances.
I would agree with Felix when he says the airplane’s black box is a cybernetic device only to the extent that it translates all actions into information. Felix calls it a forensic device, that seems right, at least until a plane malfunctions or crashes.
I would like to suggest that the “real” cybernetic device here is the software that Boeing designed to keep the plane in the air in the face of its poor aerodynamics. That software, a black box in the sense that it both takes all sorts of inputs and controls/manipulates outputs, is also a black box in the sense that its workings (and existence) was kept hidden from the pilots.
This may have been said already but what I find fascinating about this is that it posits the triumph of bits over atoms (to use MIT’s 90’s information age lexicon). We have been walking in this direction for a long time - bodies and objects being upgraded with information processing abilities - but now software is brought along to counter the laws of physics that dictate that shifting the location of an airplanes’ engines changes its aerodynamics.
It may well be that this is old news and I have simply not been paying enough attention but to me this seems both fascinating and scary.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Ana
-----------/-/--------\-\----------- Ana Viseu Associate Professor | Universidade Europeia Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia | Univ. de Lisboa
Thanks Ted, Scott and Morlock, this history is obviously more complexand nuanced than the point I was trying to make, which was nothistorical at all, but rather logical.To my limited understanding, the black box in the airplane is not adevice to limit the complexity of the pilots' interaction with, orunderstanding of, the plane by reducing a complex process to a simplein/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 recordscertain 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'sfunction is actually exactly the opposite. It's a tool designed not tohide but to reveal complexity, to make transparent what happens insidethe cockpit.Just because there are procedural limits as to who is allowed to openthe box, and therefor it's "black" to some people (the pilots, theairline technicians like Scott) doesn't make it a black box in thecybernetic 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 talkabout the problems of complexity and if/how we run a ever larger numberof processes at or beyond the outer limits of complexity that we canmanage. That was the only point I was trying to make.But because Scott, who as detailed, first-hand knowledge of thesethings, agrees with the cybernetic reading to plane's black box, I mightbe mistaken here.FelixOn 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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