Re-Braiding Cybernetics and AI Symposium: Unspoken Continuities
March 25, 2026 11:00AM—12:00PM
Location:
Virtual Presentation
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Remote Access
Speaker:
SYMPOSIUM #1 - THE SPLIT
The Re-Braiding Cybernetics & AI Project has the overarching goal to bring Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence back into conversation. The overall intention is to explore, from the origins to the present day, how we’ve arrived at the unpredictable and fast-moving theoretical, technical, and business advances that will inevitably impact the future of our society.
Symposium #1 titled “The Split” will focus on the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Conference and its immediate aftermath. Researchers had gathered to solidify their intention to move away from Cybernetics—away from its technology and its guru, at the least—and to embrace the ascendant digital computer and the promise of its symbolic programming as a means to what they newly coined as “artificial intelligence.”
- Why did these researchers, who became more famous as their careers matured, want to split off from their intellectual parents?
- What did they leave behind in Cybernetics that could help address the limitations of AI today? And what could advances in AI bring to modern Cybernetics?
- Is there a productive path to bringing them back into conversation?
REGISTER → Participation is free
The Re-Braiding Cybernetics and AI Symposium Series will run periodically until Spring 2027 and be captured in recordings and transcripts and published with open commentary. The Re-Braiding Project will culminate in a physical exhibit in April 2027 at CMU’s Posner Center. Books and other physical artifacts representing the core concepts of each field, through the personal collections of Heinz von Foerster and Allen Newell, will afford a compare-and-contrast, as well as paths toward, the cooperative shared futures of the two fields.
The Re-Braiding Project is supported by a generous grant from Carnegie Mellon-Architecture Computational Design Laboratory (CodeLab).
For More Information:
ppangaro@cmu.edu