Information, Knowledge and Control
Alistair G. J. MacFarlane · Birkhäuser Boston eBooks · 1993
The importance of control has led to the development of one of the modern world’s key technologies, and one whose use will increase rather than diminish. As such it needs a coherent philosophy - a world view, a conceptual framework which will allow the fundamental problems which confront its developers to be posed, which will allow its nature to be explained to non- specialists in an illuminating way, which will ensure that its fundamental concerns are not overlooked in an ever-increasing welter of specialisation and diversity of application, and which will ensure that it maintains a proper balance between theory and practice.The basic concepts of: data and process, information, complexity and interaction are used to indicate the potential importance of information- theoretic concepts for such an undertaking. Much of the exposition draws on Kolmogorov’s measure of algorithmic complexity, and analogies are drawn between the properties of effective interaction and the fundamental Laws of Thermodynamics.Control is regarded as a technology which must necessarily draw on a range of cognate fields. Any resolutions of the fundamental problems which it faces in further developing as a technology will, it is claimed, share certain key features : they will use information-theoretic concepts; they will harness an emerging technology of knowledgeable machines to help manage the complexity of the data generated by theory; they will draw widely on, and interact with, a widening range of cognate fields; and they increasingly will adopt a pragmatic and empirical approach.