Those Serendipitous Mavericks: The Ratio Club and early British Cybernetics

The second of nine monthly seminars in the Meat the Machine series, on the history of cybernetics and what it implies for how people and machines end up working together. This session is on the Ratio Club - the dining and discussion group that British life scientists, mathematicians, engineers and physicists formed after Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics in 1948. Alan Turing was a member, and his engagement with the club and its people fed into his later work. Dr Colin Williams leads it; he is a principal cyber security specialist at CDS Defence and Security with around three decades in UK government and public sector, and researches the history of cybernetics alongside that. Free, in person at the University of Manchester, 1pm to 3pm, run through Digital Futures. Why go: the current argument about machine intelligence keeps rediscovering questions this group was already arguing about in 1949, in this city. Best for people who want the long view rather than another model release.