Conversation

Soviet mathematicians Sobolev, Lyapunov and Kitov on "cybernetics", what today we are mostly calling "AI", "ML", or "data science":

> Foreign reactionary philosophers and writers strive to use cybernetics, like any new scientific field, in their class interests. By intensively advertising and often exaggerating the statements of individual cybernetic scientists concerning the achievements and prospects of the development of automation, reactionary journalists and writers carry out a direct order from the capitalists to inspire ordinary people to consider their own inferiority, about the possibility of replacing ordinary workers with mechanical robots and thus they seek to reduce the activity of the working masses in the fight against capitalist exploitation.

> We must resolutely expose this manifestation of a hostile ideology. Automation in a socialist society serves to facilitate and increase human productivity.

- The Main Features of Cybernetics, 1955