A Neo-Cybernetics column · 4 articles
Ex Machinis
Out of the machines
A Neo-Cybernetics column on artificial intelligence: the latest AI news and ideas, read through feedback, control and the systems around them.
What Is an AI Agent?
An AI agent is an AI system that works towards a goal by taking actions, checking the results and deciding what to do next. Here is how agents work and why they go wrong.
Why We Need Cybernetics in the Age of AI
AI systems are feedback systems embedded in larger feedback systems. Five cybernetic questions that today's AI debate keeps circling without naming.
In 1936, an Anthropologist Described the AI Sycophancy Spiral
When a chatbot agrees with us a little more each time, the loop that forms was already studied in 1936. Gregory Bateson called it schismogenesis, and his work explains how AI sycophancy builds and what holds it in check.
The Recommendation Machine: A Cybernetic Reading of AI
The AI behind your feed is among the most consequential feedback machines ever built. What does cybernetics tell us about why it behaves the way it does?
Why Ex Machinis
Ex machinis is Latin for "out of the machines". It comes from deus ex machina, "the god out of the machine". In Greek theatre a crane lowered an actor playing a god onto the stage, and the audience saw the god while the crane stayed in the background.
We use the plural because the column covers many machines: the models, the products built on them, and the systems they become part of. Each piece looks at something that came out of them, such as a news story, a behaviour or an effect on the people using them, and asks what feedback, control and regulation can tell us about it.
Ex Machinis is part of Neo-Cybernetics. For the ideas the column draws on, see the articles and the wiki.