Abstract

This talk will open an exploration of what is coming to pass as the computing systems constructed on the deterministic assumptions of the twentieth century collide with the second epoch of computing and the indeterminacies of the Information Age.

Largely unknowingly, we owe our modern usage of the term cyber to Norbert Wiener and his 1948 work “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”. In “The Human Use of Human Beings”, Wiener’s 1954 popularisation of the first text, his preface, under the title “The Idea of a Contingent Universe”, offers the view that the fundamentally predictive philosophical basis of Newtonian physics is confounded by the essential nature of the systems he coined the term Cybernetics to describe.

For Wiener, Cybernetics was the name of the new science required to enable the study and comprehension of volition, the efficacy of intent and the agency of will in systems where cause and effect have ceased to have any direct or linear relationship. This talk is about cybernetics.

Colin Williams joined SBL (Software Box Ltd) in 1995, initially in the capacity of MoD contract manager. Colin leads the SBL team that organises the annual Information Assurance Practitioners Event in York on behalf of GCHQ .

Colin regularly speaks, consults and writes on matters to do with Information Assurance, cyber security, business development and enterprise level software procurement, to public sector audiences and clients at home and abroad. Current areas of focus include the development of an interdisciplinary approach to Information Assurance and cyber protection; the creation and development of new forms of collaboration between government, industry and academia; and, the development of new economic and business models for IT, Information Assurance and cyber protection in the context of twenty first century computing.

Colin holds a BA and MA in History from the University of York, England, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Directors. He is also a member of the Information Assurance Advisory Council Community of Interest and in November 2011 was appointed Visiting Lecturer at the Cyber Security Centre at De Montfort University.