Address presented by Professor B.H. Rudall, Vice-President WOSC/Director of the Norbert Wiener Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes

Citation

(2006), "Address presented by Professor B.H. Rudall, Vice-President WOSC/Director of the Norbert Wiener Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes", Kybernetes, Vol. 35 No. 1/2. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2006.06735aab.005

Address presented by Professor B.H. Rudall, Vice-President WOSC/Director of the Norbert Wiener Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes

Address presented by Professor B.H. Rudall, Vice-President WOSC/Director of the Norbert Wiener Institute and Editor-in-Chief of Kybernetes

May I welcome all participants to the 13th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems of WOSC and the 6th International Conference of Sociocybernetics. It is a pleasure to see so many familiar faces and, of course, so many new ones.

May I also express our thanks to our hosts for their kind invitation to hold these events at Maribor. WOSC has a great congress tradition that has lasted more than 40 years. Maribor will be remembered as an important event rather than just a place on a map of Europe. In the same way as we refer in our literature and citations to the London/Oxford/Paris/Amsterdam/New York/Bucharest/New Delhi Congresses and we will allude to Slovenia, not only as the latest member of the EEC, but a country where cybernetics and systems are thriving!

I would like to echo what Professor Essor Vallée has said about Drs Rose and Andrew – I spoke to both before I left the UK and they regret their absence and wish me to express their personal greetings to you all-they tell me with confidence they will be at our next meetings.

Since our last Congress we will all have a personal list of those who will no longer be with us-my list includes Gordon Pask/Petsi Masani/Charles Muses/Heinz von Foerster/Stafford Beer … all made lasting contributions to our field of endeavour. Stafford Beer in one of his last papers published in Kybernetes asked “What is cybernetics?” his theme was to link Cybernetics and Systems to current events and to the future. He ended his paper with: “We should continue to seek answers … orthodox solutions are unlikely to be successful”.

We do well to ask what is Cybernetics and where we are heading? Are we archieving our goals? Are we relevant to the modern world? Heisenberg, the architect of the uncertainty principle who coined the words “Cosmic Snag” said that we cannot know an electron’s speed and its position, the act of measurement alters the system (a 2nd order Cybernetics situation) he, you may recall, was caught speeding near his university campus and asked by the speed cop. “Do you know how fast you were going?” No he said, but I know exactly where I am.

I would suggest that in Cybernetics and Systems we believe we know where we are but have no real idea of where we are going or whether we can reach our goals.

AI is a prime example of this. At the 7th Congress in London in 1987 there was much concern about progress in AI the best we could do was to give a computer an IQ of 5 (-Turing would not have been excited) the answer it was decided was to aim at the moon but first get down from the top of the tree and start again at ground level. This may well be the strategy we should take in many of our studies and perhaps use the unorthodox methods that Beer envisaged.

We rely on all contributors to the programme to help us realise our goals. Maybe at Maribor this week we have the Wieners/Ashbys/McCollochs/Pasks/Beers and von Foersters of the future. To that end the Kybernetes Research Awards donated by the WOSC Norbert Wiener Institute and the Journal publishers – Emerald, will help us to recognise and encourage excellence in our work. Have a very successful and enjoyable stay at Maribor.