Komm, Süsser Tod

Since the systems cybernetics produced behaved at least quasi-autonomously, they naturally gave rise to the belief in non-human (and non-subjective) agencies, as Wiener explains by reference to aircraft crews’ interaction with airplanes which used self-corrective cybernetic circuits: “The semi-humorous superstition of the gremlin among the aviators was probably due, as much as anything else, to the habit of dealing with a machine with a large number of built-in feedbacks which might be interpreted as friendly or hostile. For example the wings of an airplane are deliberately built in such a manner as to stabilize the plane, and their stabilization, which is of the nature of feedback […] may easily be felt as a personality to be antagonized when the plane is forced into unusual maneuvers.”41 Dealing with the cybernetic systems of these aircraft presented the aviators with many of the same – perceptual – clues as would interaction with another conscious being. Therefore, it was inevitable that they would posit another entity, rather than a technical system, when they were working in – or, more properly perhaps, with – the airplane. “Our consciousness of will in another person, Wiener argued, is just that sense of encountering a self-maintaining mechanism aiding or opposing our actions. By providing such a self-stabilizing resistance, the airplane acts as if it had purpose, in short, as if it were inhabited by a gremlin.”