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The history of cybernetics is a story of crossing cultural, political, and disciplinary boundaries. In 1948 Norbert Wiener introduced a new, “universal” language, which I call “cyberspeak,” which tied together a diverse set of human-machine metaphors. Cutting across various disciplines – computing, information theory, control theory, neurophysiology, and sociology – cybernetics described living organisms, control and communication devices, and human society in the same cybernetic terms—information, feedback, and control.

Traveling across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe and then to the Soviet Union, cybernetics changed its guise multiple times: it appeared at different times and places as an instrument for devising sophisticated weapons, a theoretical underpinning for the freedom of speech, a method for designing intelligent machines, a model for describing the functioning of the human brain, a vehicle of interdisciplinarity, and a tool for reforming the theoretical apparatus of a wide range of life and social sciences with formal models from mathematics and computing. At times filled with strong ideological messages, at other times it was presented as allegedly politically neutral. Every time cybernetics crossed a new cultural, political, or disciplinary boundary, its connotations were questioned, and new ones attached.

One particularly salient example of the localization of the universalist aspirations of the cybernetic movement is the design of computer programs capable of carrying out some human cognitive tasks, known as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Both American and Soviet scientists believed that there existed a general, universal, ahistorical mechanism of human thought. Yet as those scientists themselves belonged to different cultures, they had distinct, culturally specific intuitions of human thinking. The “humans” whom they took as universal categories were, in fact, people who belonged to specific cultures. Two metaphors capture crucial differences in the cultural stereotypes of thought and behavior reflected in AI systems implemented in the Soviet Union and the United States. Life as a maze – a labyrinth in which we must find the right path – became the central metaphor for American AI. For Soviet AI specialists, the central metaphor for decision-making was not the search in a fixed labyrinth, but the flight of a butterfly, charting its flight trajectory through random streams of air. When trying to grasp universality, AI models manifested just the opposite – the specificity of different national cultures.