by Ana Catarina Pinheiro
Paul Pangaro, a PhD in cybernetics and a computer science professor, closed Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 Symposium highlighting the importance of perceiving cybernetics in its social dimension. The professor talked about the interactivity cycles that characterize the most diverse routine situations, not only between machines and living beings, but between men.
With this, art and technology, united in the works at Emoção Art.ficial 3.0 exhibition, had their interaction and provocative dimension made explicit with meaning in the everyday reality context. The title of the lecture, mentioning the Citroën automobile brand, provided a clue to the approach, which brought the cybernetic notion to ordinary life and distanced it from the mystic of technological sophistication reigning in common sense.
Pangaro explained cybernetics as a causal circularity system, starting with the example of the automobile that was programmed to adjust its height in relation to the ground, regardless of the weight being transported. Therefore, based on a target, to maintain constant driveability, the car interacted with the environment and could self-regulate. This example explains the first order cybernetic logic: a self-contained organism that responds to external stimuli and self-modifies.
The professor continued saying that if we add to this feedback context, an observing system that interacts and self-regulates as of the first order, we will have second-order cybernetics. At this level, Pangaro included human relations, using the scheme of a simple conversation as an example. In the dialogue, the aim of the person in this situation – to satiate his hunger – is made explicit to the other who proposes possibilities that cooperatively lead to one or multiple actions, such as to prepare a dinner with several dishes on the menu.
In this sense, cybernetics appears as a mechanism in which a system modifies itself and modifies other systems, at the physical level and, especially, in the immateriality of aims and desires, adapting itself to reach shared objectives. It is a collaborative process that is applied from the learning of dance steps to the workings of participative democracy and to the production of knowledge.
Cybernetic artifactsPangaro recognizes that machines produced and programmed by man interact in second order cybernetic cycles, modifying themselves and creating new artifacts. However, the professor doubts that artifacts could coincide with the activity of the human brain, infinitely capable of operating with variables derived from interactions with machines, other living beings and with the environment.
In this case, Pangaro opposes cybernetics to the notion of artificial intelligence, suggesting the incapacity of a machine to reproduce the functioning of neural networks of the human brain. This is due to the assumption that is indispensable to artificial intelligence that reality corresponds to a truth that can be captured. According to the professor, for cybernetics, reality is built as of the negotiation of what truth is, not considered as a definitive and unbreakable scope, but as a result of interaction and cooperation. Thus, Pangaro says that “cybernetics is a way of seeing the world, a way of collaborating and negotiating.”