[Forwarded by permission and heavily reformatted.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:39:33 -0500 From: "Philip E. Mirowski" <pmirowsat_private> Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science Philip Mirowski Cambridge University Press 0-521-77283-4 (hardcover) 0-521-77526-4 (paperback) Table of Contents 1 Cyborg Agonistes 2 Some Cyborg Genealogies; or, How the Demon Got its Bots 3 John von Neumann and the Cyborg Incursion into Economics 4 The Military, the Scientists and the Revised Rules of the Game 5 Do Cyborgs Dream of Efficient Markets? 6 The Empire Strikes Back 7 Core Wars 8 Machines Who Think vs. Machines that Sell Chapter 1: Cyborg Agonistes A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. --Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried The first thing you will notice is the light. The florescent banks in the high ceiling are dimmed, so the light at eye level is dominated by the glowing screens set at intervals throughout the cavernous room. There are no windows, so the bandwidths have that cold otherworldly truncation. Surfaces are in muted tones and matte colors, dampening unwanted reflections. Some of the screens flicker with strings of digits the color and periodicity of traffic lights, but most beam the standard dayglo palette of pastels usually associated with CRT graphics. While a few of the screens project their photons into the void, most of the displays are manned and womanned by attentive acolytes, their visages lit and their backs darkened like satellites parked in stationary orbits. Not everyone is held in the thrall of the object of their attentions in the same manner. A few jump up and down in little tethered dances, speaking into phones or mumbling at other electronic devices. Some sit stock still, mesmerized, engaging their screen with slight movements of wrist and hand. Others lean into their consoles, then away, as though their swaying might actually have some virtual influence upon the quantum electrodynamics coursing through their station and beyond, to other machines in other places in other similar rooms. No one is apparently making anything, but everyone seems nonetheless furiously occupied. I. Rooms with a View Where is this place? If it happened to be 1952, it would be Santa Monica, California, at a RAND study of the "man-machine interface" (Chapman et al, 1958). If it were 1957, then it could only be one place: the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System run by the US Air Force. By 1962, there were a few other such rooms, such as the SAGA room for war-gaming in the basement of the Pentagon (Allen, 1987). If it were 1967 instead, there were many more such rooms scattered across the globe, one of the largest being the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command center of US Air Force Operation Igloo White (Edwards, 1996, pp.3, 106). By 1977 there are many more such rooms, no longer only staffed by the military, but also by thousands of employees of large firms throughout the world: the SABRE airline reservation system of American Airlines (patterned upon SAGE); bank check and credit card processing centers (patterned upon that innovated by Bank of America); nuclear power station control rooms; the inventory control operation of the American Hospital Supply Corporation (McKenney, 1995). In 1987, a room like this could be found in any suburban shopping mall, with teenagers proleptically feeding quarters into arcade computer games. It might also be located at the University of Arizona, where "experimental markets" are being conducted with undergraduates recruited with the help of money from the National Science Foundation. Alternatively, these closed rooms also could just as surely be found in the very pinnacles of high finance, in the tonier precincts of New York and London and Tokyo, with high-stakes traders of stocks, bonds and "derivatives" glued to their screens. In those rooms, "masters of the universe" in pinstripe shirts and power suspenders make "killings" in semi-conscious parody of their khaki-clad precursors. By 1997, with the melding of home entertainment centers with home offices and personal computers via the Internet (a lineal descendant of the Defense-funded ARPANET), any residential den or rec room could be refitted as a scaled-down simulacrum of any of the previous rooms. It might be the temporary premises of one of the burgeoning 'dot-com' startups which captured the imaginations of Generation X. It could even be promoted as the prototype classroom of the future. Increasingly, work in America at the turn of the millennium means serried ranks of Dilberts arrayed in cubicles staring at these screens. I should perhaps confess I am staring at the glow now myself. Depending upon how this text eventually gets disseminated, perhaps you also, dear reader, are doing likewise. These rooms are the "closed worlds" of our brave new world (Edwards, 1996), the electronic surveillance and control centers which were the nexus of the spread of computer technologies and computer culture. They are closed in any number of senses. In the first instance, there is the obviously artificial light: chaotic 'white' sunlight is kept to a minimum to control the frequencies and the reactions of the observers. This is an ergonomically controlled environment, the result of some concerted engineering of the man-machine interface, in order to render the machines 'user-friendly' and their acolytes more predictable. The partitioning off of the noise of the outer world brings to mind another sort of closure, that of thermodynamic isolation, as when Maxwell's Demon closes the door on slower gas molecules in order to make heat flow from a cooler to a warmer room, thus violating the second law of thermodynamics. Then again, there is the type of closure that is more directly rooted in the algorithms that play across the screens, a closure that we shall encounter repeatedly in this book. The first commandment of the trillions of lines of code that appear on the screens is that they halt; algorithms are closed and bounded, and (almost never) spin on forever, out of control. And then the rooms are closed in another fashion, one resembling Bentham's Panopticon: a hierarchical and pervasive surveillance which is experienced as an automatic and anonymous expression of power (Foucault, 1977). The range of things which the occupants of the room can access, from your medical records to the purchases you made three years ago with your credit card, from your telephone calls to all the web pages you have visited, from your genealogy to your genome, consistently outstrips the paltry imagination of movies haunted by suggestions of paranoid conspiracies and fin-de-siecle science run amok (Bernstein, 1997). Just as surely as death is the culmination of life, surveillance raises the spectre of counter-surveillance, of dissimulation, of penetration; and closure comes increasingly to resemble prophylaxis. The language of viruses, worms and a myriad of other creepy-crawlies evokes the closure of a siege mentality, of quarantine, or perhaps the tomb. The closure of those rooms is also radically stark in that implacable conflicts of global proportions are frequently shrunk down to something far less than human scale, to the claustrophobic controlled play of pixilated symbols on screens. The scale of phenomena seems to have become distended and promiscuously distributed. As the computer scientist Joseph Weitzenbaum has once said, the avatars of artificial intelligence tend to describe "a very small part of what it means to be a human being and say that this is the whole". He quotes the philosopher (and cheerleader for AI) Daniel Dennett as having insisted, "If we are to make further progress in Artificial Intelligence, we are going to have to give up our awe of living things" (in Baumgartner & Payr, 1995, p.259). The quickest way to divest oneself of an awe for the living in the West is to imagine oneself surrounded instead by machines. Whatever may have once been imagined the rich ambiguity of multiform experience, it seems enigmatic encounters and inconsistent interpretations can now only be expressed in this brave new world as information. Ideas are conflated with things, and things like computers assume the status of ideas. And although there is the widespread notion that as the global reach of these rooms has been stretched beyond the wildest dreams of the medieval magus or Enlightenment philosophe, the denizens of the modern closed rooms seem to have grown more insular, less experienced, perhaps even a trifle solipsistic. Closed rooms had held out the promise of infinite horizons; but the payoff has been... more closure. Who needs to venture any more into the inner city, the outer banks, the corridors of the Louvre, the sidewalks of mean streets? Travel, real physical displacement, has become like everything else: you need special reservations and a pile of money to go experience the simulacra that the screen has already conditioned you to expect. More annual visitors to Boston seek out the mock-up of the fictional bar "Cheers" than view Bunker Hill or Harvard Yard. Restaurants and museums and universities and corporations and Walden Pond are never quite as good as their web sites. Cyberspace, once a new metaphor for spatial orientation, comes to usurp motion itself. No, don't get around much any more. II. Where the Cyborgs Are Is this beginning to sound like just another pop sociology treatise on "being digital" or the "information superhighway" or "the second self" or denunciation of some nefarious cult of information (Roszak, 1994)? Calm your fears, dear reader. What the world needs now is surely not another panegyric on the cultural evils of cyberspace. Our whirlwind tour of a few clean, well-lighted places is intended to introduce, in a subliminal way, some of the themes that will structure a work situated more or less squarely within a distinctly despised genre, that of the history of economic thought. The novelty for most readers will be to cross it with an older and rather more popular form of narrative, that of the war story. The chronological succession of closed rooms is intended to serve as a synecdoche for a succession of the ways in which many economists have come to understand markets over roughly the same period, stretching from World War II to the end of the twentieth century. For while these closed rooms begat little models of closed worlds, after the fashion of Plato's Cave, the world as we had found it has rapidly been transubstantiated into the architecture of the rooms. Modes of thought and machines that think forged in British and American military settings by their attendant mobilized army of scientists in the 1940s rapidly made their way into both the natural and social sciences in the immediate postwar period, with profound consequences for both the content and organization of science. The thesis that a whole range of sciences have been transformed in this manner in the postwar period has come to have a name in the literature of the history and sociology of science, primarily due to the pioneering efforts of Donna Haraway: that name is "cyborg science". Haraway (1991, 1997) uses the term to indicate something profound that has happened to biology and to social theory and cultural conceptions of gender. It has been applied to computer development and industrial organization by Andy Pickering (1995a; 1997, 1999). Ian Hacking (1998) has drawn attention to the connections of cyborgs to Canguilhem and Foucault. Explication of the cyborg character of thermodynamics and information theory was pioneered by Katherine Hayles (1990b), who has now devoted prodigious work to explicating their importance for the early cyberneticians (1994;1995a; 1999). Paul Edwards' (1996) was the first serious across-the-board survey of the military's conceptual influence on the development of the computer, although Kenneth Flamm (1988) had pioneered the topic in the economics literature of industrial organization. Steve Heims (1991) documented the initial attempts of the first cyberneticians to reach out to social scientists in search of a Grand Unified Teleological theory. Evelyn Fox Keller (1995) has surveyed how the gene has assumed the trappings of military command; and Lily Kay (1995, 1997a) has performed the invaluable service of showing in detail how all the above played themselves out in the development of molecular biology. Although all of these authors have at one time or another indicated an interest in economic ideas, what has been wanting in all of this work so far is a commensurate consideration of the role of economists in this burgeoning trans-disciplinary formation. Economists were present at the creation of the cyborg sciences, and as one would expect, the cyborg sciences have returned the favor by serving in turn to remake the economic orthodoxy in their own image. It is my intention in this work to provide that complementary argument, and to document just in what manner and to what extent economics at the end of the second millennium has become a cyborg science; and to speculate how this will shape the immediate future. Just how serious has the cyborg incursion been for economics? Given that in all likelihood most economists have no inkling what "cyborgs" are, or will have little familiarity with the historical narrative which follows, the question must be confronted squarely. There are two preliminary responses to this challenge: one short, yet readily accessible to anyone familiar with the modern economics literature; and the other, necessarily more involved, requiring a fair complement of historical sophistication. The short answer starts out with the litany that every tyro economist memorizes in their first introductory course. Question: What is economics about? Answer: The optimal allocation of scarce resources to given ends. This catechism was promulgated in the 1930s, about the time that neoclassicism was poised to displace rival schools of economic thought in the American context, and represented the canonical image of trade as the shifting about of given endowments so as to maximize an independently given utility function. While this phrase still may spring effortlessly to the lips-- this, after all, is the function of a catechism-- nevertheless, pause and reflect how poorly this captures the primary concerns of neoclassical economists nowadays. Nash equilibrium, strategic uncertainty, decision theory, path dependence, network externalities, evolutionary games, principal-agent dilemmas, no trade theorems, asymmetric information, paradoxes of noncomputability, ... Static allocation has taken a back seat to all manner of issues concerning agents' capacities to deal with various market situations in a cognitive sense. It has even once again become fashionable to speak with confidence of the indispensable role of "institutions", although this now means something profoundly different than it did in the earlier heyday of the American Institutionalist school of economics. This is a drastic change from the 1930s through the 50s, when it was taboo to speculate about mind, and all marched proudly under the banner of behaviorism; and society was thought to spring fully-formed from the brow of an isolated economic man. So what is economics really about these days? The New Modern Answer: The economic agent as a processor of information. This is the first, and only the most obvious, hallmark of the epoch of economics as a cyborg science. The other attributes will require more prodigious documentation and explication. III. The Natural Sciences and the History of Economics The other, more elaborate, answer to the query concerning the relevance of cyborgs for economics requires some working familiarity with the history of neoclassical economics. In a previous book entitled More Heat than Light (1989a), I argued that the genesis of the supposed "simultaneous discovery" of neoclassicism in the 1870s could be traced to the enthusiasm for "energetics" growing out of the physics of the mid-19th century. As was admitted by William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, Francis Edgeworth and Irving Fisher, "utility" was patterned upon potential energy in classical mechanics, as were their favored mathematics of extremum principles. Their shared vision of the operation of the market (and the mind of the agent, if they were willing to make this commitment) was avowedly mechanical in an eminently physical sense of that term. Their shared prescription for rendering economics a science was to imitate the best science they knew, right down to its characteristic mathematical formalisms. It was a science of causality, rigid determinism and preordained order; in other words, it was physics prior to the second law of thermodynamics, a science most assuredly innocent of the intellectual upheavals beginning at the turn of the century and culminating in the theories of quantum mechanics and statistical thermodynamics. Some readers of that volume demurred that, although it was undeniably the case that important figures such as Jevons and Walras and Fisher cited physics as an immediate source of their inspiration, this still did not square with the neoclassical economics with which economists were familiar in the 20th century. Indeed, a book by Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel (1990) asserted that the impact of physics upon neoclassical economics was attenuated by the 1930s, precisely at the moment when it underwent substantial mathematical development and began its serious ascendancy. Others have insisted that a whole range of orthodox models, from the modern Walrasian tradition to game theory, betray no inspiration whatsoever from physics. The historiographical problem which these responses highlight is the lack of willingness to simultaneously examine the history of economics and the history of the natural sciences as jointly evolving historical entities, and not as fixed monolithic bodies of knowledge driven primarily by their internally-defined questions, whose interactions with other sciences can only be considered as irrelevant rhetoric in whatever era in which they may have occurred. If you avert your gaze from anything other than the narrowly-conceived entity called the 'economy', then you will never understand the peripatetic path of American economics in the 20th century. This book could thus be regarded as the third installment in my ongoing project to track the role and impact of the natural sciences upon the structure and content of the orthodox tradition in economics which is perhaps inaccurately but conventionally dubbed "neoclassical". The first installment of this history was published in 1989 as More Heat than Light, and was concerned with the period from classical political economy up to the 1930s, stressing the role of physics in the "marginalist revolution". The second installment would comprise a series of papers co-authored over the 1990s with Wade Hands and Roy Weintraub, which traced the story of the rise to dominance of neoclassical price theory in America from early in the century up through the 1960s. The present volume takes up the story from the rise of the cyborg sciences, primarily though not exclusively during World War II in America, and then traces their footprint upon some important postwar developments in economics, such as highbrow neoclassical price theory, game theory, rational expectations theory, theories of institutions and mechanism design, the nascent program of "bounded rationality", computational economics, "artificial economies", "autonomous agents", and experimental economics. Since many of these developments are frequently regarded as antithetical to one another, or possibly movements bent upon rejection of the prior Walrasian orthodoxy, it will be important to discern the ways in which there is a profound continuity between their sources of inspiration and those of the earlier generations of neoclassical economics. One source of continuity is that economists, especially those seeking a scientific economics, have always been inordinately fascinated by machines. Francois Quesnay's theory of circulation was first realized as a pump and some tubes of tin; only later did it reappear in abstract form as the Tableau Oeconomique. Simon Schaffer has argued that "Automata were apt images of the newly disciplined bodies of military systems in early modern Europe... Real connections were forged between these endeavors to produce a disciplined workforce, an idealized workspace, and an automatic man" (1999, pp.135, 144). It has been argued that the conception of natural order in British classical political economy was patterned upon the mechanical feedback mechanisms observed in clocks, steam engine governors, and the like (Mayr, 1976). William Stanley Jevons, as we shall discuss below in Chapter 2, proudly compared the rational agent to a machine. Irving Fisher (1965) actually built a working model of cisterns and mechanical floats to illustrate his conception of economic equilibrium. Many of those enthralled with the prospect that the laws of energy would ultimately unite the natural and social sciences looked to various engines and motors for their inspiration (Rabinbach, 1990). However, as Norbert Wiener so presciently observed at the dawn of the Cyborg Era: "If the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam engines, the present time is the age of communication and control" (1961, p.39). Natural order for economists coming of age after WWII is still exemplified by a machine; it is just that the manifestation of the machine has changed: it is now the computer. "It may be hard for younger economists to imagine, but nearly until midcentury it was not unusual for a theorist using mathematical techniques to begin with a substantial apology, explaining that this approach need not assume that humans are automatons deprived of free will" (Baumol, 2000, p.23). Cyborg love means never having to say you're sorry. Machine rationality and machine regularities are the constants in the history of neoclassical economics; it is only the innards of the machine that have changed from time to time. There is another, somewhat more contingent common denominator. The history of economics has been persistently swept by periodic waves of immigrants from the natural sciences. The first phase, that of the 1870s through the turn of the century, was the era of a few trained engineers and physicists seeking to impose some analytical structure upon the energetic metaphors which were so prevalent in their culture. The next wave of entry came in the 1930s, prompted both by the Great Depression's contraction of career possibilities for scientists, and the great forced emigration of scientists from Europe to America due to persecution and the disruptions of war. Wartime exigencies induced physicists to engage in all sorts of new activities under rubrics such as "operations research". We shall encounter some of these more illustrious souls in the chapters below. The third phase of scientific Diaspora is happening right now. The end of the Cold War and its attendant shifts in the funding of scientific research has had devastating impact upon physics, and upon the career patterns of academic science in general (Slaughter & Rhoades, 1996; National Science Board, 1995; Gruner et al, 1996; Ziman, 1994). Increasingly, physicists left to their own devices have found that economics (or perhaps more correctly, finance) has proven a relatively accommodating safe haven in their time of troubles (Pimbley, 1997; Baker, 1999; Bass, 1999; MacKenzie, 1999). The ubiquitous contraction of physics and the continuing expansion of molecular biology has not only caused sharp redirections in careers, but also redirection of cultural images of what it means to be a successful science of epochal import. In many ways, the rise of the cyborg sciences is yet another manifestation of these mundane considerations of funding and support; interdisciplinary research has become more akin to a necessary condition of survival in our brave new world than merely the province of a few dilettantes or Renaissance men; and the transformation of economic concepts described in subsequent chapters is as much an artifact of a newer generation of physicists, engineers and other natural scientists coming to terms with the traditions established by a previous generation of scientific interlopers dating from the Depression and WWII, as it is an entirely new direction in intellectual discourse. And, finally, there is one more source of the appearance of continuity. I shall argue in Chapters 4 and 5 below that the first hesitant steps toward economics becoming a cyborg science were in fact made from a position situated squarely within the Walrasian tradition; these initially assumed the format of augmentation of the neoclassical agent with some capacities to deal with the fundamental "uncertainty" of economic life. The primary historical site of this transitional stage was the RAND corporation and its ongoing contacts with the Cowles Commission. Part of the narrative momentum of the story recounted herein will derive from the progressive realization that cyborgs and neoclassicals could not be so readily yoked one to another, or even cajoled to work in tandem, and that this has led to numerous tensions in fin-de-siecle orthodox economics. IV. Anatomy of a Cyborg So who or what are these cyborgs, that they have managed to spawn a whole brood of feisty new sciences? A plausible reaction is to wonder whether the term more correctly belongs to science fiction, rather than to seriously practiced sciences as commonly understood. For you, dear reader, it may invoke childhood memories of Star Wars or Star Trek; if you happen to be familiar with popular culture, it may conjure William Gibson's breakthrough novel Neuromancer (1984). Yet, as usual, science fiction does not anticipate as much as reflect prior developments in scientific thinking. Upon consulting the Cyborg Handbook (Gray, 1995, p.29), one discovers that the term was invented in 1960 by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the scientific journal Astronautics (Clynes and Kline, 1995). Manfred Clynes, an Austrian emigre (and merely the first of a whole raft of illustrious Austro-Hungarian emigres we shall encounter in this book), and one of the developers of the CAT scanner technology, had been introduced to cybernetics at Princeton in the 1950s, and was concerned about the relationship of the organism to its environment as a problem of the communication of information. As he reports, "I thought it would be good to have a new concept, a concept of persons who can free themselves from the constraints of the environment to the extent that they wished. And I coined this word cyborg" (Gray, 1995, p.47), short for cybernetic organism. In a paper presented to an Air Force sponsored conference in 1960, Clynes and Kline assayed the possibilities of laboratory animals which were augmented in various ways in the interest of directly engaging in feedback stabilization and control of their metabolic environment. The inquiry attracted the attention of NASA, which was worried about the effects of long term exposure to weightlessness and artificial environments in space. NASA then commissioned a Cyborg Study, which produced a report in May 1963, surveying all manner of technologies to render astronauts more resilient to the rigors of space exploration, such as cardiovascular modules, hypothermia drugs, artificial organs, and the like. This incident establishes the precedence of use of the term in the scientific community; but it does little to define a stable referent. In the usage we will favor herein, it denotes not so much the study of a specific creature or organism as a set of regularities observed in a number of sciences which had their genesis in the immediate postwar period, sciences such as information theory, molecular biology, cognitive science, neuropsychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, operations research, systems ecology, immunology, automata theory, chaotic dynamics and fractal geometry, computational mechanics, sociobiology, artificial life, and last but not least, game theory. Most of these sciences shared an incubation period in close proximity to the transient phenomenon called "cybernetics". While none of the historians cited above manages to provide a quotable dictionary definition, Andy Pickering proffers a good point of departure in his (1995a, p.31): Cybernetics, then, took computer-controlled gun control and layered it in an ontologically indiscriminate fashion across the academic disciplinary board-- the world, understood cybernetically, was a world of goal-oriented feedback mechanisms with learning. It is interesting that cybernetics even trumped the servomechanisms line of feedback thought by turning itself into a universal metaphysics, a Theory of Everything, as today's physicists and cosmologists use the term-- a cyborg metaphysics, with no respect for traditional human and nonhuman boundaries, as an umbrella for the proliferation of individual cyborg sciences it claimed to embrace. So this definition suggests that military science and the computer became melded into a Theory of Everything based upon notions of automata and feedback. Nevertheless, there persists a nagging doubt: isn't this still more than a little elusive? The cyborg sciences do seem congenitally incapable of avoiding excessive hype. For instance, some promoters of Artificial Intelligence have engaged in wicked rhetoric about "meat machines", but indeed, where's the beef? After all, many economists were vaguely aware of cybernetics and systems theory by the 1960s, and yet even then, the prevailing attitude was that these were 'sciences' that never quite made the grade, failures in producing results precisely because of their hubris. There is a kernel of truth in this, but only insofar as it turned out that cybernetics never itself attained the status of a fully-fledged cyborg science, but instead constituted the philosophical overture toa whole phalanx of cyborg sciences. The more correct definition would acknowledge that a cyborg science is a complex set of beliefs, of philosophical predispositions, mathematical preferences, pungent metaphors, research practices, and (let us not forget) paradigmatic things, all of which are then applied promiscuously to some more or less discrete pre-existent subject matter or area. To define cyborg sciences, it may be prudent to move from the concrete to the universal. First and foremost, the cyborg sciences depend upon the existence of the computer as a paradigm object for everything from metaphors to assistance in research activities to embodiment of research products. Bluntly: if it doesn't make fundamental reference to 'the computer' (itself an historical chameleon), then it isn't a cyborg science. The reason that cybernetics was able to foresee so much so clearly while producing so little was that it hewed doggedly to this tenet. And yet, there has been no requirement that the science necessarily be about the computer per se; rather, whatever the subject matter, a cyborg science makes convenient use of the fact that the computer itself straddles the divide between the animate and the inanimate, the live and the lifelike, the biological and the inert, the Natural and the Social, and makes use of this fact in order to blur those same boundaries in its target area of expertise. One can always recognize a cyborg science by the glee with which it insinuates such world-shattering questions as: Can a machine think? How is a genome like a string of binary digits in a message? Can lifeforms be patented? How is information like entropy? Can computer programs be subject to biological evolution? How can physicists clarify the apparently political decision of the targeting of nuclear weapons? Can there be such a thing as a self-sufficient "information economy"? And most disturbingly: What is it about you that makes 'you' really you? Or is your vaunted individuality really an illusion? This breaching of the ramparts between the Natural and the Social, the Human and the Inhuman, may be the most characteristic attribute of the cyborg sciences. Prior to WWII, there were of course a surfeit of research programs which attempted to 'reduce' the Social to the Natural. Neoclassical economics was just one among many, which also included Social Darwinism, Kohler's psychological field theory, Technocracy, eugenics, and a whole host of others. However, the most important fact about all of these early profiles in scientism was that they implicitly left the barriers between Nature and Society relatively intact: the ontology of Nature was not altered by the reductionism, and controversies over each individual theory would always come back sooner or later to the question of "how much" of Society remained as the surd of Naturalism after the supposed unification. With the advent of the cyborg sciences after WWII, something distinctly different begins to happen. Here and there, a cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans and machines, the living and the dead, the active and the inert, meaning and symbol, intention and teleology, and before we know it, Nature has taken on board many of the attributes conventionally attributed to Society, just as Humanity has simultaneously been rendered more machinelike. Whereas before WWII, the drive for unification always assumed the format of a take-no-prisoners reductionism, usually with physicists unceremoniously inserting their traditions and formalisms wholesale onto some particular sphere of social or biological theory, now it was the ontology of Nature itself that had grown ambiguous. It was not just the bogeyman of postmodernism which has challenged the previous belief in an independent Nature: the question of what counts as Natural is now regularly disputed in such areas as artificial life (Levy, 1992; Helmreich, 1995), cognitive science (Dennett, 1995) and conservation ecology (Cronon, 1995; Soule & Lease, 1995; Takacs, 1996). Interdisciplinarity, while hardly yet enjoying the realm of Pareto improving exchange, now apparently takes place on a more multilateral basis. For instance, 'genes' now unabashedly engage in strategies of investment, divestment and evasion within their lumbering somatic shells (Dawkins, 1976); information and thermodynamic entropy are added together in one grand law of physical regularity (Zurek, 1990); or inert particles in dynamical systems 'at the edge of chaos' are deemed to be in fact performing a species of computation. This leads directly to another signal characteristic of cyborg sciences, namely, that as the distinction between the Natural and the Social grows more vague, the sharp distinction between 'reality' and simulacra also becomes less taken for granted and even harder to discern (Baudrillard, 1994). One could observe this at the very inception of the cyborg sciences in the work of John von Neumann. At Los Alamos, simulations of hydrodynamics, turbulence and chain reactions were one of the very first uses of the computer, because of the difficulties of observing most of the complex physical processes that went into the making of the atomic bomb. This experience led directly to the idea of Monte Carlo simulations, which came to be discussed as having a status on a par with more conventional "experiments" (Galison, 1996). Extending well beyond an older conception of mathematical model building, von Neumann believed that he was extracting out the logic of systems, be they dynamical systems, automata, or "games"; thus manipulation of the simulation eventually came to be regarded as essentially equivalent to manipulation of the phenomenon (von Neumann, 1966, p.21). But you didn't have to possess von Neumann's genius to know that the computer was changing the very essence of science along with its ambitions. The computer scientist R.W. Hamming once admitted: The Los Alamos experience had a great effect on me. First, I saw clearly that I was at best second rate... Second, I saw that the computing approach to the bomb design was essential... But thinking long and hard on this matter over the years showed me that the very nature of science would change as we look more at computer simulations and less at the real world experiments that, traditionally, are regarded as essential... Fourth, there was a computation of whether or not the test bomb would ignite the atmosphere. Thus the test risked, on the basis of a computation, all of life in the known universe. (in Duren, 1988, pp.430-1) In the era after the fall of the Wall, when the Los Alamos atomic weapons test section is comprised primarily of computer simulations (Gusterson,1996), his intuition has become the basis of routinized scientific inquiry. As Paul Edwards (1996) has observed, the entire Cold War military technological trajectory was based upon simulations, from the psychology of the enlisted men turning the keys to the patterns of targeting of weapons to their physical explosion profile to the radiation cross-sections to anticipated technological improvements in weapons to the behavior of the opponents in the Kremlin to econometric models of a post-nuclear world. Once the cyborg sciences emerged sleek and wide-eyed from their military incubator, they became, in Herbert Simon's telling phrase, "the sciences of the artificial" (1981). It is difficult to overstate the ontological import of this watershed. "At first no more than a faster version of an electro-mechanical calculator, the computer became much more: a piece of the instrument, an instrument in its own right, and finally (through simulations) a stand-in for nature itself... In a nontrivial sense, the computer began to blur the boundaries between the 'self-evident' categories of experiment, instrument and theory" (Galison, 1997, pp.44-5). While the mere fact that it can be done at all is fascinating, it is the rare researcher who can specify in much detail just "how faithful" is that particular fractal simulation of a cloud, or that global climate model, or that particular Rogetian simulation of a psychiatrist (Weizenbaum, 1976), or that particular simulation of an idealized Chinese speaker in John Searle's (1980) 'Chinese Room'. It seems almost inevitable that as a pristine Nature is mediated by multiple superimposed layers of human intervention for any number of reasons -- from the increasingly multiply processed character of scientific observations to the urban culture of academic life-- and as such seemingly grows less immediate, the focus of research will eventually turn to simulations of phenomena. The advent of the computer has only hastened and facilitated this development. Indeed, the famous "Turing Test" (discussed below in Chapter 2) can be understood as asserting that when it comes to questions of mind, a simulation that gains general assent is good enough. In an era of the revival of pragmatism, this is the pragmatic maxim with a vengeance. The fourth hallmark of the cyborg sciences is their heritage of distinctive notions of order and disorder rooted in the tradition of physical thermodynamics. While this will be a topic of extended consideration in the next chapter, it will suffice for the present to observe that questions of the nature of disorder, the meaning of randomness, and the directionality of the arrow of time are veritable obsessions in the cyborg sciences. Whether it be the description of information using the template of entropy, or the description of life as the countermanding of the tendency to entropic degradation, or the understanding of the imposition of order as either threatened or promoted by noise, or the depiction of chaotic dynamics due to the 'butterfly effect', or the path dependence of technological development, the cyborg sciences make ample use of the formalisms of phenomenological thermodynamics as a reservoir of inspiration. The computer again hastened this development, partly because the question of the 'reliability' of calculation in a digital system focused practical attention on the dissipation of both heat and signals; and partly because the computer made it possible to look in a new way for macro level patterns in ensembles of individual realizations of dynamic phenomena (usually through simulations). The fifth hallmark of a cyborg science is that terms such as "information", "memory" and "computation" become for the first time physical concepts, to be used in explanation in the natural sciences. One can regard this as an artifact of the computer metaphor, but in historical fact their modern referents are very recent and bound up with other developments as well (Aspray, 1985; Hacking 1995). As Hayles (1990a, p.51) explains, in order to forge an alliance between entropy and information, Claude Shannon had to divorce information from any connotations of meaning or semantics and instead associate it with "choice" from a pre-existent menu of symbols. "Memory" then became a holding-pen for accumulated message symbols awaiting utilization by the computational processor, which every so often had to be flushed clean due to space constraints. The association of this loss of memory with the destruction of 'information' and the increase of entropy then became salient, as we shall discover in Chapter 2 below. Once this set of metaphors caught on, the older energetics tradition could rapidly be displaced by the newer cybernetic vocabulary. As the Artificial Life researcher Tom Ray put it: "Organic life is viewed as utilizing energy...to organize matter. By analogy, digital life can be viewed as using CPU to organize memory" (in Boden, 1996, p.113). Lest this be prematurely dismissed as nothing more than an insubstantial tissue of analogies and just-so stories, stop and pause and reflect on perhaps the most pervasive influence of the cyborg sciences in modern culture, which is to treat "information" as an entity which has ontologically stable properties, preserving its integrity under various transformations. The sixth defining characteristic of the cyborg sciences is that they were not invented in a manner conforming to the usual haphazard image of the lone scientist being struck with a brilliantly novel idea in a serendipitous academic context. It is an historical fact that each of the cyborg sciences trace their inception to the conscious intervention of a new breed of science manager, empowered by the crisis of WWII and fortified by lavish foundation and military sponsorship. The new cyborg sciences did not simply spontaneously arise; they were consciously made. The usual pattern (described in Chapter 4) was that the science manager recruited some scientists (frequently physicists or mathematicians) and paired them off with collaborators from the life sciences and/or social sciences, supplied them with lavish funding along a hierarchical model, and told them to provide the outlines of a solution to a problem which was bothering their patron. Cyborg science is Big Science par excellence, the product of planned coordination of teams with structured objectives, expensive discipline-flouting instrumentation and explicitly retailed rationales for the clientele. This military inspiration extended far beyond mere quotidian logistics of research, into the very conceptual structures of these sciences. The military rationale often imposed an imperative of "command, control, communications and information"-- shorthand, C3 I-- upon the questions asked and the solutions proposed. Ultimately, the blurred ontology of the cyborg sciences derives from the need to subject heterogeneous agglomerations of actors, machines, messages and (let it not be forgotten) opponents to a hierarchical real-time regime of surveillance and control (Galison, 1994; Pickering, 1995a; Edwards, 1996). The culmination of all these cyborg themes in the military framework can easily be observed in the life and work of Norbert Wiener. Although he generally regarded himself as an anti-militarist, he was drawn into war work in 1941 on the problem of anti-aircraft gunnery control. As he explained it in 1948, "problems of control engineering and of communication engineering were inseparable, and...they centered not around the techniques of electrical engineering but around the more fundamental notion of the message...The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time-- precisely what is called a time series by statisticians" (1961 [1948], p.8). Under the direction of Warren Weaver, Wiener convened a small research group to build an antiaircraft motion predictor, treating the plane and the pilot as a single entity. Since the idiosyncrasies of each pilot could never be anticipated, prediction was based on the ensemble of all possible pilots, in clear analogy with thermodynamics. In doing so, one had to take into account possible evasive measures, leading to the sorts of considerations which would now be associated with strategic predictions, but which Wiener saw as essentially similar to servomechanisms, or feedback devices used to control engines. Although his gunnery predictor never proved superior to simpler methods already in use, and therefore was never actually implemented in combat, Wiener was convinced that the principles he had developed had much wider significance and application. His report on the resulting statistical work, The Interpolation and Control of Stationary Time Series (1949), is considered the seminal theoretical work in communications theory and time series analysis (Shannon & Weaver, 1949, p.85fn). Yet his manifesto for the new science of Cybernetics (1961[1948]) had even more far reaching consequences. Wiener believed his melange of statistical, biological and computational theories could be consolidated under the rubric of 'cybernetics', which he coined from the Greek word meaning "steersman". As he later wrote in his biography, "life is a perpetual wrestling match with death. In view of this, I was compelled to regard the nervous system in much the same light as a computing machine" (1956, p.269). Hence military conflict and the imperative for control were understood as a license to conflate mind and machine, Nature and Society. While many of the historians (Haraway, Pickering, Edwards, et al.) I have cited at the beginning of this chapter have made most of these same points about the cyborg sciences at one time or another in various places in their writings, the one special aspect they have missed is that the early cyberneticians did not restrict their attentions simply to bombs and brains and computers; from the very start, they had their sights trained upon economics as well, and frequently said so. Just as they sought to reorient the physical sciences towards a more organicist modality encompassing mind, information and organization, they also were generally dissatisfied with the state of the neoclassical economic theory which they had observed in action, especially in wartime. Although the disdain was rife amongst the cyborg scientists, with John von Neumann serving as our star witness in Chapter 3 below, we can presently select one more quote from Wiener to suggest the depths of the dissatisfaction: From the very beginning of my interest in cybernetics, I have been well aware that the considerations of control and communications which I have found applicable in engineering and in physiology were also applicable in sociology and in economics... [However,] The mathematics that the social scientists employ and the mathematical physics they use as their model are the mathematics and mathematical physics of 1850. (1964, pp.87, 90) V. Attack of the Cyborgs It is always a dicey proposition to assert that one is living in an historical epoch when one conceptual system is drawing to a close and another rising to take its place; after all, even dish soaps are frequently retailed as new and revolutionary. It may seem even less prudent to attempt the sketch of such a scenario when one is located in a discipline such as economics, where ignorance of history prompts the median denizen to maintain that the wisdom du jour is the distilled quintessence of everything that has ever gone before, even as they conveniently repress some of their own intellectual gaffes committed in their salad days. Although the purpose of this volume is to provide detailed evidence for this scenario of rupture and transformation between early neoclassicism and the orthodoxy after the incursion of the cyborgs, it would probably be wise to provide a brief outline up front of the ways in which the cyborg sciences marked an epochal departure from rather more standard neoclassical interpretations of the economy. The bald generalizations proffered in this section will be documented throughout the rest of this volume. As we have noted, economists did not exactly lock up their doors and set the guard dogs loose when the cyborgs first came to town. That would have gone against the grain of nearly 70 years of qualified adherence to a model of man based upon the motion of mass points in space; and anyway it would have been rude and ungracious to those physical scientists who had done so much to help them out in the past. Economists in America by and large welcomed the physicists exiled by war and persecution and unemployment with open arms into the discipline in the 1930s and 1940s; these seemed the sorts of folks that neoclassicals had wanted to welcome to their neighborhood. The first signs of trouble were that, when the cyborgs came to town, the ideas they brought with them did not seem to conform to those which had represented "science" to previous generations of economists, as we shall recount in Chapters 5 and 6. Sure, they plainly understood mechanics and differential equations and formal logic and the hypothetico-deductive imperative; but there were some worrisome danger signs, like a nagging difference of opinion about the meaning of 'dynamics' and 'equilibrium' (Weintraub, 1991), or suspicions concerning the vaunting ambitions of 'operations research' and 'systems analysis' (Fortun & Schweber, 1993), or wariness about von Neumann's own ambitions for game theory (Chapter 6 below). For reasons the economists found difficult to divine, some of the scientists resisted viewing the pinnacle of social order as the repetitive silent orbits of celestial mechanics or the balanced kinetics of the lever or the hydraulics of laminar fluid flow. If there was one tenet of that era's particular faith in science, it was that logical rigor and the mathematical idiom of expression would produce transparent agreement over the meaning and significance of various models and their implications. However, this faith was sorely tested when it came to that central concept of 19th century physics and of early neoclassical economics, energy. When the neoclassicals thought about energy, it was in the context of a perfectly reversible and deterministic world exhibiting a stable and well-defined 'equilibrium' where there was no free lunch. The cyborg scientists, whilst also having recourse to the terminology of 'equilibria', seemed much more interested in worlds where there was real irreversibility and dissipation of effort. They seemed less worried whether lunch was paid for, since their thermodynamics informed them that lunch was always a loss leader; hence they were more concerned over why lunch existed at all, or perhaps more to the point, what functions did lunch underwrite which could not have been performed in some other manner? For the cyborgs, energy came with a special proviso called 'entropy' which could render it effectively inaccessible, even when nominally present; many arguments raged in this period how such a macroscopic phenomenon could be derived from underlying laws of mechanics which were apparently deterministic and reversible. The premier language which had been appropriated and developed to analyze macroscopic phenomena in thermodynamics was the theory of probability. The cyborg scientists were convinced that probability theory would come to absorb most of physics in the near future; quantum mechanics only served to harden these convictions even further. By contrast, neoclassicals in the 1920s and 1930s had been fairly skeptical about any substantive role for probability within economic theory. Since they had grown agnostic about what, if anything, went on in the mind when economic choices were made, initially the imposition of some sort of probabilistic overlay upon utility was avoided as a violation of the unspoken rules of behaviorism. Probability was more frequently linked to statistics, and therefore questions of empiricism and measurement; an orthodox consensus on the appropriate status and deployal of those tools had to await the stabilization of the category "econometrics", something which did not happen until after roughly 1950. Thus once the cyborg sciences wanted to recast the question of the very nature of order as a state of being which was inherently stochastic, neoclassical economists were initially revulsed at the idea of the market as an arena of chance, a play of sound and fury which threatened to signify nothing (Samuelson, 1986). These two predispositions set the cyborg sciences on a collision course with that pursued by neoclassical economics in the period of its American ascendancy, roughly the 1940s through the 1960s. Insofar as neoclassicals believed in Walrasian general equilibrium (and many did not), they thought its most admirable aspect was its stories of Panglossian optimality and Pareto improvements wrought by market equilibria. Cyborg scientists were not averse to making use of the mathematical formalisms of functional extrema, but they were much less enamored of endowing these extrema with any overarching significance. For instance, cyborg science tended to parse its dynamics in terms of basins of attraction; due to its ontological commitment to dissipation, it imagined situations where there were a plurality of attractors, with the codicil that stochastic considerations could tip a system from one to another instantaneously. In such a world, the benefits of dogged optimization were less insistent and of lower import, and thus the cyborg sciences were much more interested in coming up with portrayals of agents that just 'made do' with heuristics and simple feedback rules. As we have seen, this prompted the cyborg sciences to trumpet that the next frontier was the mind itself, which was conceived as working on the same principles of feedback, heuristics, and provisional learning mechanisms that had been pioneered in gun-aiming algorithms and operations research. This could not coexist comfortably with the prior neoclassical framework, which had become committed in the interim to a portrayal of activity where the market worked 'as if' knowledge were perfect, and took as gospel that agents consciously attained pre-existent optima. The cyborg scientists wanted to ask what could in principle be subject to computation; the neoclassicals responded that market computation was a fait accompli. To those who complained that this portrait of mind was utterly implausible (and they were legion), the neoclassicals tended to respond that they needed no commitment to mind whatsoever. To those seeking a new theory of social organization, the neoclassicals retorted that all effective organizations were merely disguised versions of their notion of an ur-market. This set them unwittingly on a collision course with the cyborg sciences, all busily conflating mind and society with the new machine, the computer. Whereas the neoclassicals desultorily dealt in the rather intangible ever-present condition called "knowledge", the cyborg scientists were busy defining something else called information. This new entity was grounded in the practical questions of the transmission of signals over wires and the decryption of ciphers in wartime; but the temptation to extend its purview beyond such technical contexts proved irresistible. Transmission required some redundancy, which was given a precise measure with the information concept; it was needed because sometimes noise could be confused with signal, and perhaps stranger, sometimes noise could boost signal. For the neoclassicals, on the other hand, noise was just waste; and the existence of redundancy was simply a symptom of inefficiency, a sign that someone somewhere was not optimizing. The contrast could be summed up in the observation that neoclassical economists wanted their order austere and simple and their a priori laws temporally invariant; whereas the cyborg scientists tended to revel in diversity and complexity and change, believing that order could only be defined relative to a background of noise and chaos, out of which the order should temporally emerge as a process. In a phrase, the neoclassicals rested smugly satisfied with classical mechanics, while the cyborgs were venturing forth to recast biology as a template for the machines of tomorrow. These sharply divergent understandings of what constituted "good science" resulted in practice in widely divergent predispositions as to where one should seek interdisciplinary collaboration. What is noteworthy is that while both groups essentially agreed that a prior training in physics was an indispensable prerequisite for productive research, the directions in which they tended to search for their inspiration were very nearly orthogonal. The most significant litmus test would come with revealed attitudes towards biology. Contrary to the impression given by Alfred Marshall in his Principles, the neoclassical economists were innocent of any familiarity with biology, and revealed miniscule inclination to learn any more. This did not prevent them from indulging in a little evolutionary rhetoric from time to time, but this never adequately took into account any contemporary understandings of evolutionary theory (Hodgson, 1993), nor was it ever intended to. In contrast, from their very inception, the cyborg scientists just knew in their prosthetic bones that the major action in the 20th century would happen in biology. Partly this prophecy was self-fulfilling, since the science managers both conceived and created 'molecular biology', the arena of its major triumph. Nevertheless, they saw that their concerns about thermodynamics, probability, feedback and mind all dictated that biology would be the field where their novel definitions of order would find some purchase. Another agonistic field of interdisciplinary intervention from the 1930s onwards was that of logic and metamathematics. Neoclassical economists were initially attracted to formal logic, at least in part because they believed that it could explain how to render their discipline more rigorous and scientific, but also because it would provide convincing justification for their program to ratchet up the levels of mathematical discourse in the field. For instance, this was a major consideration in the adaptation of the Bourbakist approach to axiomatization at the Cowles Commission after 1950 (Weintraub & Mirowski, 1994). What is noteworthy about this choice was the concerted effort to circumvent and avoid the most disturbing aspects of metamathematics of the 1930s, many of which revolved around Godel's incompleteness results. In this regard, it was the cyborg scientists, and not the neoclassicals, who sought to confront the disturbing implications of these mathematical paradoxes, and turn them into something positive and useful. Starting with Alan Turing, the theory of computation transformed the relatively isolated and sterile tradition of mathematical logic into a general theory of what a machine could and could not do in principle. As described in the next chapter, cyborgs reveled in turning logical paradoxes into effective algorithms and computational architectures; and subsequently, computation itself became a metaphor to be extended to fields outside of mathematics proper. While the neoclassical economists seemed to enjoy a warm glow from their existence proofs, cyborg scientists needed to get out and calculate. Subsequent generations of economists seemed unable to appreciate the theory of computation as a liberating doctrine, as we shall discover in Chapter 7. Hence the Bourbakist strain of neoclassicism ended up in the dead end of the Sonnenschein/ Mantel/Debreu and no-trade theorems, whereas computational theory gave rise to a whole new vibrant field of computer science. These are just a few of the ways in which cyborg science came into conflict with neoclassical economics over the second half of the 20th century. We will encounter many others in the chapters which follow. VI. The New Automaton Theatre Steven Millhauser has written a lovely story contained in his collection The Knife Thrower called "The New Automaton Theatre", a story which in many ways illustrates the story related in this volume. He imagines a town where the artful creation of lifelike miniature automata has been carried far beyond the original ambitions of Vaucanson's Duck or even Deep Blue -- the machine that defeated Gary Kasparov. These automata are not 'just' toys, but have become the repositories of meaning for the inhabitants of the town: So pronounced is our devotion, which some call an obsession, that common wisdom distinguishes four separate phases. In childhood we are said to be attracted by the color and movement of these little creatures, in adolescence by the intricate clockwork mechanisms that give them the illusion of life, in adulthood by the truth and beauty of the dramas they enact, and in old age by the timeless perfection of an art that lifts us above the cares of mortality and gives meaning to our lives... No one ever outgrows the automaton theatre. Every so often in the history of the town there would appear a genius who excels at the art, capturing shades of human emotion never before inscribed in mechanism. Millhauser relates the story of one Heinrich Graum, who rapidly surpasses all others in the construction and staging of automata. Graum erects a Zaubertheatre where works of the most exquisite intricacies and uncanny intensity are displayed, which rival the masterpieces of the ages. In his early career Graum glided from one triumph to the next; but it was "as if his creatures strained at the very limits of the human, without leaving the human altogether; and the intensity of his figures seemed to promise some final vision, which we awaited with longing, and a little dread". And then, at age thirty-six and without warning, Graum disbanded his Zaubertheatre and closed his workshop, embarking on a decade of total silence. Disappointment over this abrupt mute reproach eventually gave way to fascinations with other distractions and other artists in the town, although the memory of the old Zaubertheatre sometimes haunted apprentices and aesthetes alike. Life went on, and other stars of the Automata Theatre garnished attention and praise. Then after a long hiatus, and again without warning, Graum announced he would open a Neues Zaubertheatre in the town. The townsfolk had no clue what to expect from such an equally abrupt reappearance of a genius who had for all intents and purposes been relegated to history. The first performance of the Neues Zaubertheatre was a scandal, or as Millhauser puts it, "a knife flashed in the face of our art". Passionate disputes broke out over the seemliness or the legitimacy of such a new automaton theatre. Those who do not share our love of the automaton theatre may find our passions difficult to understand; but for us it was as if everything had suddenly been thrown into question. Even we who have been won over are disturbed by these performances, which trouble us like forbidden pleasures, secret crimes... In one stroke his Neues Zaubertheatre stood history on its head. The new automatons can only be described as clumsy. By this I mean that the smoothness of motion so characteristic of our classic figures has been replaced by the jerky abrupt motions of amateur automatons.... They do not strike us as human. Indeed it must be said that the new automatons strike us first of all as automatons... In the classic automaton theatre we are asked to share the emotions of human beings, whom in reality we know to be miniature automatons. In the new automaton theatre we are asked to share the emotions of the automatons themselves... They live lives that are parallel to ours, but are not to be confused with ours. Their struggles are clockwork struggles, their suffering is the suffering of automatons. Although the townsfolk publicly rushed to denounce the new theatre, over time they found themselves growing impatient and distracted with the older mimetic art. Many experience tortured ambivalence as they sneak off to view the latest production of the Neues Zaubertheatre. What was once an affront imperceptibly became a point of universal reference. The new theatre slowly and inexorably insinuates itself into the very consciousness of the town. It has become a standard practice in modern academic books to provide the impatient modern reader with a quick outline of the argument of the entire book in the first chapter, providing the analogue of fast food for the marketplace of ideas. Here, Millhauser's story can be dragooned for that purpose. In sum, the story of this book is the story of the New Automaton Theatre: the town is the American profession of academic economics, the classic automaton theatre is neoclassical economic theory, and the Neues Zaubertheatre is the introduction of the cyborg sciences into economics. And Hienrich Graum -- well, Graum is John von Neumann. The only thing missing from Millhauser's parable would a proviso where the military would have acted to fund and manage the apprenticeships and workshops of the masters of automata, and Graum's revival stage-managed at their behest. end
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