07/22/96 COLD WARRIOR

COLD WARRIOR

THE CLOSED WORLD
Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America
By Paul N. Edwards
MIT Press --440pp -- $40

What says more about our life in the Information Age? That there's a computer on every desktop? Or that we increasingly understand ourselves and society in terms of the computer and ``information processing''? Are we really only ``systems'' that ``interface'' and ``exchange data'' with each other?
The computer's presence today as machine, metaphor, and myth is a product of cold war ideology, argues Paul N. Edwards in his wide-ranging and fascinating book, The Closed World. The overarching aim of the U.S. following World War II was to contain the Soviet Union at every turn--to create what Edwards calls ``a closed world, within which every event was interpreted as part of a titanic struggle between the superpowers.'' In such a world, nothing was more important than gathering, analyzing, and rapidly and unerringly acting on information, whether from ICBM-tracking satellites or sensors on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Edwards excels in showing how the digital computer, information theory, and this closed-world mindset, all born at the same moment, began to co-evolve and conjure up new myths. As a universal information processor, not just a giant calculator, the computer fueled the development of many new surveillance systems and the notion of command and control. It also nourished the Pentagon's belief that nuclear war, which strategists simulated on computers, could be survived.
With its military importance, computing drew a large share of the government's massive research funding. In return, though, military needs shaped computing research and a widening circle of related fields. For instance, much effort went into making humans and machines function together seamlessly, even under the stress of global war. That led psychologists and computer scientists to work on ``artificial intelligence'' and the ``man-machine interface.'' Psychologists came to view the human mind as a computer, resulting in the prominence today of cognitive psychology.
How might computers have evolved with no cold war? Edwards doesn't say, but ends with an intriguing analysis of Dr. Strangelove, Star Wars, and other films--reflections, he says, of how deeply the computer shapes our view of ourselves and the world.
BY JOHN W. VERITY