This book, written between 1954 and 1956, published in 1957, and conceived under the spell of cybernetics, may be occasionally dated on the level of facts; on the level of making predictions, the passage of time has either corrected it or shown it to be false.
These words hardly look like a recommendation for a text that was designed to popularize the fundamental concepts of and foresee the future development of cybernetics. Bringing the book up to date has proved impossible—adhering to its original purpose, I would need to write it anew. Yet I have not changed a word of it, adding a supplement instead, because when I reread the book, I realized that it preserved a quality different from the one I originally intended. Time has made Dialogues a testimony to the almost limitless cognitive optimism that the emergence of cybernetics created in me. The book describes not so much cybernetics or its foundations as the visions it offered at the end of the 1950s—visions that were not only my own. The supplement begins with two critical sketches: the first briefly summarizes the historical journey of cybernetics; the second is a contribution to the cybernetic theory of the sociopathology of governing. In the first, the views expressed in Dialogues are confronted with the actual state of things after the sixteen years that passed since the book was written. The naivete revealed by that confrontation was not only mine; it was widespread among the proponents of cybernetics in the 1950s. The comparison of past opinions with present realities makes an interesting contribution to the history of science. It nicely illustrates the extrapolative linearity that marks almost all scientific revolutions. To those at the moment of a revolution, the prospects in the development of knowledge appear straight, as if the complex, winding path, full of obstacles and blind alleys, that led to the revolution was suddenly replaced by a smooth exponential trajectory without obstacles or reversals. The invariable result of this divergence between overoptimistic hopes and reality is a subsequent cognitive pessimism, but such pessimism is usually based on a misunderstanding. Cybernetics may not have accomplished what was most eagerly hoped from it—in particular, it did not cure the plague of specialization (this was expected because cybernetics is an inter- or maybe even superdisciplinary science, unifying natural sciences with the humanities)—but it accomplished what no one thought of. Although admittedly computers have not become equal companions to people, they have proved irreplaceable tools in regulating the world economy. Although information theory has not become the new philosopher’s stone, it has spread into fields where it was totally unexpected—for example, theoretical physics. We could list many other instances of such divergence between expectations and actual accomplishments.
So I felt that my supplement would have some cognitive value, particularly today, when we so often see fashionable futurological concepts blossom, concepts that tend to reduce themselves to a dense proliferation of prognostications, which are disproved or ridiculed in just a few years after their birth, and yet this phenomenon is conveniently ignored by the adepts of futurology—to their field’s detriment. (A quick look, for example, at what Hermann Kahn had to say about the world’s global political matters in his book, The Year 2000, written with A. J. Wiener in 1967, is enough to prove that everything that has happened since is totally different from all those “canonical,” “noncanonical,” or “alternative” predictions of his lengthy volume.) Knowledge is unquestionably a more important matter than the reputation of a futurologist. Therefore, comparing the prognostications and opinions of the relatively recent past with those of today may be instructive for us.
The second part of my supplement contains a sketch that amends the last paragraphs of Dialogues—about the pathology of social regulation. My comments here are those of a nonexpert; what motivated me to include them in the book was that the second part of Dialogues had not dated as much as the first.
Finally, I added two short discourses that were published in Studia filozoficzne (Philosophical Studies)1 and are thematically linked to the book’s overall thesis. The first talks about the ethics of technology and the technology of ethics; the second deals with the problem of value in biology. The first considers the questions of order in society, civilization, and ethics; the second, the relation between axiology2 and theoretical biology. I include these essays in this edition because Dialogues was conceived not as a tractate, separated into two voices, on the new scientific discipline and its possible future development, but rather as a search for the investigative methods and tools that might increase our understanding of both the human and nonhuman worlds. Cybernetics was viewed from the perspective of its possible applications, not as a “pure” science like mathematics (as some scientists wished to see it). That Dialogues eventually turned out to be an expression of the cognitive curiosity and anxiety of modern thought is my justification for putting both these studies in the Annex.
Kraków, December 1971