Making Effective Decisions: Machine Learning and the Ecogame in 1970

Abstract: This paper considers Ecogame, an innovative art project of 1970, whose creators believed in a positive vision of a technological future; an understanding, posited on cybernetics, of a future that could be participatory via digital means, and therefore more democratised. Using simulation and early machine learning techniques over a live network, Ecogame combined the power of visual art with cybernetic concepts of adaptation, feedback, and control to propose that behaviour had implications for the total system. It provides an historical precedent for contemporary AI-driven art about using AI in a more human-centred way.