cybernetics
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black box
“The conceptual metaphor ‘black box’ was originally an engineering term for any component designed to take in certain kinds of inputs (energy, signals, information, etc.) and convert them into specified outputs (e.g., a radio, a voltage transformer, a codec for converting digital into analog audio/video): the details inside the components can just stay ‘hidden’ (‘black-boxed’,…
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information processing
« The first methods for representing human activities on computers were derived from the work-rationalization methods that industrial engineers had been developing since the 1910s. Hence the phrase ‘information processing’: the idea was that computers automate a kind of factory work whose raw materials happens to be information rather than anything physical or tangible. »(Philip…