Automat und Existenz

Hermann Schmidt is one of the key figures in the development of cybernetics. Concurrently with Norbert Wiener, yet independently of him, he founded what was then dubbed 'control engineering' in Berlin in the early 1940s. After the war, without knowing what Wiener was discovering at around the same time in the USA, Schmidt, who had a profound knowledge of engineering, developed a technical way of thinking that increasingly approached philosophy. At the end of the 1960s, after cybernetics had become extremely popular in education, for example, Schmidt arrived at an anthropology based on cybernetics. By this time, he had already become an international figurehead of cybernetics. His work was described as 'epoch-making', even for politics. Today, in times of the triumph of super-intelligent technology that will radically change our world and is already changing it, consideration of Schmidt's work is essential to understanding what is happening here and now. The volume 'Automat und Existenz', edited and annotated by Peter Trawny, brings together Schmidt's most important texts for the first time. A foreword places them in the context of contemporary discussions between well-known philosophers such as Arnold Gehlen and Martin Heidegger.