Norbert Wiener

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 91–93. 4.Hubbard, Dianetics, 23. 5.William Schlecht to Norbert Wiener, June 29, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 121, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 6.Norbert Wiener to William Schlecht, July 8, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 121, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 7.Norbert Wiener to Frederick Schuman, August 14, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 122, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 8.Norbert Wiener to L.

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Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 91–93. 4.Hubbard, Dianetics, 23. 5.William Schlecht to Norbert Wiener, June 29, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 121, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 6.Norbert Wiener to William Schlecht, July 8, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 121, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 7.Norbert Wiener to Frederick Schuman, August 14, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 122, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 8.Norbert Wiener to L. Ron Hubbard, July 8, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 121, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 9.L. Ron Hubbard to Norbert Wiener, July 26, 1950, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 8 (“Correspondence 1950”), folder 121, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 10.L. Ron Hubbard to Claude Shannon, December 6, 1949, Claude Elwood Shannon Papers, box 1, MSS84831, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 11.Norbert Wiener to William Schlecht, July 8, 1950. 12.Norbert Wiener, “Some Maxims for Biologists and Psychologists,” Dialectica 4, no. 3 (September 15, 1950): 190. 13.Ibid., 191. 14.Ibid. 15.William Grey Walter, The Living Brain (London: Duckworth, 1953), 223. 16.Ibid. 17.Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics (New York: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster, 1969), cover. 18.The figure of thirty million is provided by the book’s publisher.

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Conway and Siegelman’s book quotes from several interviews with Bigelow, but it seems to be unreliable on some of the technical details. 44.Masani, Norbert Wiener, 188. 45.Quoted in Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, 114. 46.Wiener, cited in Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 236. 47.Masani, Norbert Wiener, 188. 48.Notebook entry from Stibitz, quoted in Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 243. 49.Ibid., 243. 50.Quoted in Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 281. 51.Quoted in Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 242. 52.Quoted in Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 281. 53.Ibid. 54.Quoted in Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 245. The full source is Norbert Wiener to Warren Weaver, January 28, 1943, Norbert Wiener Papers, collection MC-22, box 2, folder 64, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 55.Wiener, Cybernetics, 15. 56.From Sperry company history, probably 1942, quoted in Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 69. 57.Ibid. 58.Preston R.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Yet, alongside his teaching and his work on poetry, McLuhan developed a fascination with technology and its role in psychological and cultural change. Most critics trace this interest to his reading of the Canadian economic historian Harold Innis.21 But McLuhan also drew extensively on the work of Norbert Wiener. As McLuhan’s first PhD student, Donald Theall, has pointed out, McLuhan encountered Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in the summer of 1950. According to Theall, who was studying with McLuhan at the time, McLuhan rejected the mathematical theory of communication that Wiener laid out in Cybernetics but was deeply S t e w a r t B ran d M e e t s t h e C y b e r n e t i c C o u n t e r c u l t u r e [ 53 ] influenced by the vision of the social role of communication outlined in Wiener’s 1950 volume The Human Use of Human Beings.22 McLuhan began reading the work of other cyberneticians, and in 1951 he took up Jürgen Ruesch and Gregory Bateson’s Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry.

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In 1928, for instance, John Von Neumann published his “Theory of Parlor Games,” thus inventing game theory. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 84. In the 1930s in England, Robert Lilienfeld has argued, the invention of radar led to the need for the coordination of machines and thus the invention of the “total point of view” characteristic of systems thinking. Lilienfeld, Rise of Systems Theory, 103. Cybernetics emerged as a self-consciously comprehensive field of thought, however, with the work of Norbert Wiener. For a fuller account of Wiener’s career and the emergence of his cybernetics, see also Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy”; and Hayles, How We Became Posthuman. 29.

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For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Introduction [ 5 ] Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
Published 17 Jul 2017

“an idol of mine”: “Profile of Claude Shannon—Interview by Anthony Liversidge,” in Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers, xxxii. “Shannon and I”: Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician, 179. “Under these circumstances”: Norbert Wiener to Walter Pitts, April 4, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA. “total irresponsibleness”: Norbert Wiener to Arturo Rosenblueth, April 16, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA. “lost priority”: Norbert Wiener to Warren McCulloch, April 5, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA. “One of my competitors”: Norbert Wiener to Arturo Rosenblueth, April 16, 1947. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA. “The Bell people”: Norbert Wiener to Warren McCulloch, May 2, 1927, Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA. “the entire field”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed.

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He would begin the discussion”: Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 67–68. “From every angle”: Paul Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” in The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium (Cambridge, MA: American Mathematical Society, 1994). “In appearance and behaviour”: Hans Freudenthal, “Norbert Wiener,” in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/mathematics-biographies/norbert-wiener. “Can you show me where”: Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener.” Shannon had taken Wiener’s class: Price, “Oral History: Claude E.

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“splotches of silver”: Otsego County Herald and Times, April 28, 1916; September 20, 1923; September 27, 1923; Otsego County Herald Times, November 18, 1926; September 27, 1928; September 13, 1928; Otsego County Herald and Times, September 27, 1923. “the first business”: Otsego County Herald Times, October 22, 1969. “Norbert always felt”: Paul A. Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” in The Legacy of Norbert Wiener: A Centennial Symposium in Honor of the 100th Anniversary of Norbert Wiener’s Birth, October 8–14, 1994, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, ed. David Jerison, I. M. Singer, and Daniel W. Stroock (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1997), 38. “one of Gaylord’s most popular girls”: Otsego County Times, August 27, 1936.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Kay, “Cybernetics, Information, Life: The Emergence of Scriptural Representations of Heredity,” Configurations 5 (1) (1997): 23–91.Books on the cybernetic context before and during the U.S. cold war include Edwards, The Closed World; David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 2002); Jennifer Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); and Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro, eds., Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).A few biographical works include Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982); Pesi R. Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990); Flow Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).A few key theorizations and historical treatments include N.

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Pospelov and Fet, Ocherki istorii informatiki v Rossii. 123. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, 316. 124. Norbert Wiener, “Obschestvo i nauka,” Voprosi Filosofiii 7 (1961): 49–52. 125. Dirk Jan Struik, “Norbert Wiener: Colleague and Friend,” American Dialog 3 (1) (1966): 34–37. 126. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 127. On the one hundred twentieth anniversary of his birth and the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the IEEE held a medium-sized conference in Boston on June 24–26, 2014, titled Norbert Wiener in the Twenty-first Century, including a gathering of biographers, former students of his, and rising scholars interested in his life and work. 128.

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See also Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory”; Norbert Wiener, “What Is Information Theory?,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 48 (1956): 48; Ronald R. Kline, “What Is Information Theory a Theory Of? Boundary Work among Scientists in the United States and Britain during the Cold War,” in The History and Heritage of Scientific and Technical Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2002 Conference, Chemical Heritage Foundation, ed. W. Boyd Rayward and Mary Ellen Bowden, 15–28 (Medford, NJ: Information Today, 2004). 23. Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18–24. 24.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

The Old Testament prophets, who delivered the underlying logic, included Thomas Hobbes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The New Testament prophets included Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener. They delivered the machines. Alan Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent. John von Neumann wondered what it would take for machines to self-reproduce. Claude Shannon wondered what it would take for machines to communicate reliably, no matter how much noise intervened. Norbert Wiener wondered how long it would take for machines to assume control. Wiener’s warnings about control systems beyond human control appeared in 1949, just as the first generation of stored-program electronic digital computers were introduced.

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Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. . . . The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door. —NORBERT WIENER, The Human Use of Human Beings Norbert Wiener was ahead of his time in recognizing the potential danger of emergent intelligent machines. I believe he was even further ahead in recognizing that the first artificial intelligences had already begun to emerge. He was correct in identifying the corporations and bureaus that he called “machines of flesh and blood” as the first intelligent machines.

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Called the Possible Minds Project, this conversation began in earnest in September 2016, in a meeting at the Grace Mayflower Inn & Spa in Washington, Connecticut, with some of the book’s contributors. What quickly emerged from that first meeting is that the excitement and fear in the wider culture surrounding AI now has an analog in the way Norbert Wiener’s ideas regarding “cybernetics” worked their way through the culture, particularly in the 1960s, as artists began to incorporate thinking about new technologies into their work. I witnessed the impact of those ideas at close hand; indeed, it’s not too much to say they set me off on my life’s path.

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics
by David A. Mindell
Published 10 Oct 2002

Dana had been a student of Professor Tom Sheridan, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who elaborated the idea of telerobotics , according to which machines do not replace human operators but rather enhance their powers and allow them to work in remote or dangerous environments. In 1991 I came to MIT as a graduate student to work with Leo Marx and Merritt Roe Smith in the history of technology. In a first-year course taught by Sherry Turkle, I began studying Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics , where he mentions the problem that led him to think about human-machine interfaces: how to shoot down an attacking aircraft by predicting its future position and firing a shell to arrive at that point at some time in the future. Yet nowhere could I find any published discussions of the technologies designed to do this or of the people who had asked Wiener to look at the problem.

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In the era of cyberspace, global networks, and what William Gibson called “jacking in,” the line between technology and human identity continues to shift and erode. 10 How did this association between human-machine interaction, on one hand, and technologies of representation, on the other, come about ? Cybernetic Synthesis The question seems to have a simple answer. In 1948 Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . There he argued that “the problems of control engineering and of communications engineering were inseparable,” 11 that they were united by the fundamental notion of the message, and that feedback loops, both within machines and between machines and people, must be understood in such terms.

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Licklider and his disciples recognized that we live in constant interaction and exchange with machines, and that the boundaries between human and mechanical continue to blur and evolve as the online world takes on an order and a reality of its own. As Donna Haraway pointed out, we are all cyborgs, shifting combinations of organism and machine. 13 Norbert Wiener, then, seems the obvious link between Mumford’s neotechnic machine world and the cybernetic decades after World War II. Wiener himself would have us believe that he effected the genesis obviously and completely in the course of his wartime research on antiaircraft prediction. “I think that I can claim credit,” he wrote in his memoir, “for transferring the whole theory of the servomechanism bodily to communication engineering” (although he never explained what he meant by “bodily”). 14 Indeed, scientists, engineers, and the interested public associate Wiener and cybernetics with the image of a human being dynamically coupled to a machine and the notion of the message as the fundamental unit of a system, be it natural or human-made.

Turing's Cathedral
by George Dyson
Published 6 Mar 2012

Ibid. 4. Julian Bigelow, interview with Walter Hellman, June 10, 1979, in Walter Daniel Hellman, “Norbert Wiener and the Growth of Negative Feedback in Scientific Explanation,” PhD thesis, Oregon State University, December 16, 1981, p. 148. 5. Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, pp. 268–69; Julian Bigelow to John von Neumann, November 26, 1946, VNLC. 6. Norbert Wiener to Vannevar Bush, September 21, 1940, in Pesi R. Masani, ed., Norbert Wiener, Collected Works, vol. 4 (Boston: MIT Press, 1985), p. 124. 7. Norbert Wiener, “Principles Governing the Construction of Prediction and Compensating Apparatus,” submitted with S.

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Norbert Wiener, “Principles Governing the Construction of Prediction and Compensating Apparatus,” submitted with S. H. Caldwell, Proposal to Section D2, NDRC, November 22, 1940, in Pesi R. Masani, Norbert Wiener: 1894–1964 (Basel: Birkhauser, 1990), p. 182. 8. Norbert Wiener and Julian H. Bigelow, “Report on D.I.C. Project #5980: Anti-Aircraft Directors: Analysis of the Flight Path Prediction Problem, including a Fundamental Design Formulation and Theory of the Linear Instrument,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, February 24, 1941, pp. 38–39, JHB. 9. Norbert Wiener, “Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, with Engineering Applications,” classified report to the National Defense Research Committee, February 1, 1942, declassified edition (Boston: MIT Press, 1949), p. 2. 10.

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Julian Bigelow to Warren Weaver, December 2, 1941, JHB. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Julian Bigelow, interview with Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman. 18. Ibid. 19. Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician, p. 249. 20. George Stibitz, “Diary of Chairman, July 1, 1942,” in Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 243. 21. Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1 (1943): 9 and 23–24. 22. Warren S. McCulloch, “The Imitation of One Form of Life by Another—Biomimesis,” in Eugene E.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Stahlman, “Wiener’s Genius Project” (invited paper, IEEE 2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century, 2014). 17.Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 343. 18.Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 29. 19.“Machines Smarter Than Men? Interview with Dr. Norbert Wiener, Noted Scientist,” U.S. News & World Report, February 24, 1964, http://21stcenturywiener.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Machines-Smarter-Than-Man-Interview-with-Norbert-Wiener.pdf. 20.Defense Science Board, “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” U.S.

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“Transportation and Material Moving Occupations,” Occupational Outlook Handbook, Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/home.htm. 11.Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1, 1945, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881. 12.Peter Norvig, keynote address, NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Conference, Stanford, California, February 5, 2014. 3|A TOUGH YEAR FOR THE HUMAN RACE 1.John Markoff, “Skilled Work, without the Worker,” New York Times, August 18, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html. 2.Ibid. 3.Norbert Wiener, Collected Works with Commentaries, ed. Pesi Masani (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 272. 4.“Father of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener’s Letter to UAW President Walter Reuther,” August 13, 1949, https://libcom.org/history/father-cybernetics-norbert-wieners-letter-uaw-president-walter-reuther. 5.Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics, Kindle ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), Kindle location 246. 6.Anthony Carew, Walter Reuther (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993). 7.Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age, 246. 8.Stephen Meyer, “‘An Economic “Frankenstein”’: UAW Workers’ Response to Automation at the Ford Brook Park Plant in the 1950s,” Michigan Historical Review 28 (2002): 63–90. 9.

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Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, has frequently hosted me and is always a decade or two ahead in seeing where computing is heading. Mark Stahlman was generous in offering insights on Norbert Wiener and his impact. Mark Seiden, whose real-world computing experience stretches back to the first interactive computers, took time away from his work to help with editing, offering technical insight. Anders Fernstedt delved into the archives for gems from Norbert Wiener that had been lost for far too long. He painstakingly went through several of my drafts, offering context and grammar tips. Finally, to Leslie Terzian Markoff for sharing it all with me.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

Licklider, Psychologist" (unpublished address given before the Acousti- cal Society of America, 1 991). 7. Steve Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 379. 8. Jerome B. Wiesner, "The Communications Sciences-Those Early Days," in R. L. E.: 1946+20 (Cambridge, Mass.: Research Laboratory for Electronics, MIT, 1966), 13. 9. Pesi R. Masanl, Norbert Wiener (Basel: Blfkhauser, 1990), 16. 10. Wiesner, "The CommunICations Sciences-Those Early Days," 13. 11. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communicatzon in the Animal and the Machine, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961),43.

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Wiesner, "The Communications Sciences-Those Early Days," in R.L.E.: 1946+20 (Cambridge, Mass.: Research Laboratory for Electronics, MIT, 1966), 12. 4. Steve Helms, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 206. 5. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and CommunicatiOn in the Animal and the Machine, 2d ed. (Cambndge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961),23. 6. Heims, Von Neumann/Wiener, 189. 7. Norbert Wiener, "A Scientist Rebels," Atlantic Monthly, January 1947, and Bulletin of the Atomic Sci- entlSts, January 1947. 8. Helms, Von Neumann/Wiener, 334-35. 9.

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CHAPTER 2: THE LAST TRANSITION 1. Norbert Wiener, I Am a MathematiCian: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambndge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956),112. 2. Vannevar Bush, "The Inscrutable 'Thirties" (1933), in From Memex to f(ypertext: Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine, ed. James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn (San DIego: AcademIC Press, 1991),74. 3. Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think" (1945), in Nyce and Kahn, eds., From Memex to f(ypertext, 89. 4. Qpoted in James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, "A Machine for the Mind: Vannevar Bush's Memex," In From Memex to Hypertext, 53-54. 5. Bush, "As We May Think," 101-2. 6. Norbert Wiener, "Memorandum on the MechanICal Solution of Partial Differential Equations" NOTES 477 (1940), in Norbert Wiener: Collected Works, ed.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

Grattan-Guiness, "The Russell Archives: Some New Light on Russell's Logicism," Annals of Science, vol. 31 (1974), 406. [3] M. D. Fagen, ed., A history of Engineering and science in the Bell System: National Service in War and Peace (1925-1975) (Murray Hill, N.J.: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., 1978), 135. [4] Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948), 8. [5] Adam Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and John Bigelow, "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology," Philosophy of Science, vol. 10 (1943), 18-24. [6] Warren McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965). [7] Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, vol. 5 (1943), 115-133

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John von Neumann was the center of the group who created the "stored program" concept that made truly powerful computers possible, and he specified a template that is still used to design almost all computers--the "von Neumann architecture." When he died, the Secretaries of Defense, the Army, Air Force, and Navy and the Joint Chiefs of staff were all gathered around his bed, attentive to his last gasps of technical and policy advice. Norbert Wiener, raised to be a prodigy, graduated from Tufts at fourteen, earned his Ph.D. from Harvard at eighteen, and studied with Bertrand Russell at nineteen. Wiener had a different kind of personality than his contemporary and colleague, von Neumann. Although involved in the early years of computers, he eventually refused to take part in research that could lead to the construction of weapons.

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The emergence of the digital computer, based on the principles of Turing's machine, was stimulated by World War II, which was still four years in the future. In 1936, Claude Shannon had yet to discover that the algebra invented by George Boole to formalize logical operations was identical with the mathematics used to describe switching circuits. John von Neumann and his colleagues had yet to devise the concept of stored programming. Norbert Wiener hadn't formalized the description of feedback circuits in control systems. Several crucial electronic developments were yet to come. Although only a half-dozen metamathematicians thought about such things during the 1930s, the notion of machines whose functions depend on the descriptions of how they operate happened to have one real-world application that suddenly became very important toward the end of the decade.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
by James Gleick
Published 1 Mar 2011

♦ “AN INFANT PRODIGY NAMED WIENER”: Bertrand Russell to Lucy Donnelly, 19 October 1913, quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 18. ♦ “HE IS AN ICEBERG”: Norbert Wiener to Leo Wiener, 15 October 1913, quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 30. ♦ “WE ARE SWIMMING UPSTREAM AGAINST A GREAT TORRENT”: Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964), 324. ♦ “A NEW INTERPRETATION OF MAN”: Ibid., 375

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.♦ He meant cybernetics to be a field that would synthesize the study of communication and control, also the study of human and machine. Norbert Wiener had first become known to the world as a curiosity: a sport, a prodigy, driven and promoted by his father, a professor at Harvard. “A lad who has been proudly termed by his friends the brightest boy in the world,” The New York Times reported on page 1 when he was fourteen years old, “will graduate next month from Tufts College.… Aside from the fact that Norbert Wiener’s capacity for learning is phenomenal, he is as other boys.… His intense black eyes are his most striking feature.”♦ When he wrote his memoirs, he always used the word prodigy in the titles: Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth and I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy.

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♦ “I CONSIDER HOW MUCH INFORMATION IS PRODUCED”: Claude Shannon to Norbert Wiener, 13 October 1948, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Archives. ♦ “THAT SOME OF US SHOULD VENTURE TO EMBARK”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1. ♦ “SCHRÖDINGER’S BOOK BECAME A KIND OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN”: Gunther S. Stent, “That Was the Molecular Biology That Was,” Science 160, no. 3826 (1968): 392. ♦ “WHEN IS A PIECE OF MATTER SAID TO BE ALIVE?”: Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 69. ♦ “THE STABLE STATE OF AN ENZYME”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed.

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code
by Matthew Cobb
Published 6 Jul 2015

S. 7, 17, 74, 80–1, 84, 86 Hapsburg lip 12 Hartley, Ralph 27 Harvey, William 2 Hawking, Stephen 73 Heaton, Norma 210, 310 helical structures the α-helix 95, 97, 100, 105 DNA as 58, 70–1, 94, 99–101, 104–5 triple helix models 99–100, 104, 106 X-ray signature of 102, 106 see also double helix Heppel, Leon 176, 180 herbicides and GM crops 270 heredity concept of the gene 3 genetic code and views of 312 inheritance of acquired characteristics 138, 260 patterns of, in humans 2 Schrödinger’s code-script and 13 see also genes Herriott, Roger 66–7 Hershey, Al 60, 65–70, 215 Hertwig, Oscar 3 Hinshelwood, Sir Cyril 71–2, 114, 214 hippo 239 Hiroshima 18, 28–9, 75, 86, 89, 151 histones, epigenetic marks 257 Hitler, Adolph Mrs Norbert Wiener and 21 Schrödinger and 11 Hoagland, Mahlon 134–5 Holliger, Philipp 274–5 Homo floresiensis 242n horizontal gene transfer 270–1, 284 Hotchkiss, Rollin 38, 59–60, 65, 68, 197 RNA world hypothesis 289 human beings On the human use of …, by Norbert Wiener 83, 268 information content 84 number of anticodons 211 patterns of heredity 2 human brain, computer parallels 30–1 Human Genome Project 231–2 human genomes base pair frequency 295 ENCODE project 247–8, 296 evolutionary insights 239–42 information content 85 mass sequencing 236 number of protein-encoding genes 242, 244 proportion of transposons 245 variability of 234 100,000 genomes project 236 Huntington’s disease 231, 304 Hurst, Laurence 293 Hurwitz, Jerry 183, 187–8 Hutchinson, G.

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The NRDC went on to mobilise more than 6,000 American scientists, including those working on the ultra-secret Manhattan Project, which eventually produced the atomic bomb.1 The scale of spending was immense: by 1944, the federal research budget was $700m per year – more than ten times the amount spent in 1938.* One of the scientists involved in this work was a brilliant and mercurial mathematician from MIT named Norbert Wiener (pronounced Wee-ner). In September 1940, 46-year-old Wiener – a portly, cigar-smoking vegetarian, who was short-sighted and wore a rakish van Dyke beard – wrote to Vannevar Bush offering his services: ‘I hope you may find some corner of the activity in which I may be of use during the emergency.’

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–FIVE– THE AGE OF CONTROL In his 1988 best-seller A Brief History of Time, the physicist Stephen Hawking recounts that his editor told him that every equation he used would halve the potential readership. Hawking obligingly included just one equation (e = mc2) and the book went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Things were clearly different back in the 1940s – Norbert Wiener’s 1948 popular science book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was stuffed full of hundreds of complicated equations, and yet it became a publishing sensation around the world. With its weird title and its promise of a new theory of nearly everything, Cybernetics took the bookstores by storm.

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia
by Frederik L. Schodt
Published 31 Mar 1988

Devol's idea was a form of flexible automation, a transfer apparatus or manipulator that could do many things, such as pick cartons off a series of pallets and then put them on a conveyor belt to be transferred into a truck-a simple operation usually performed by hand that was, he wrote, "a waste of manpower that is here corrected."3 The Programmed Article Transfer was made possible by advances in feedback and servomechanism technology during World War II. As MIT mathematician-genius Norbert Wiener articulated it in 1948, in his theory of cybernetics, or control and communication, feedback is used by both animals and automatic machines when "behavior is scanned for its result, and . . . the success or failure of this result modifies future behavior."4 In humans, when an arm is extended, nerve cells in the joints sense and send the brain information on its position.

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With robots, AGV, and other computer-controlled machinery, the Casio factory is a true FMS system; over sixteen different models of calculators in a variety of different sizes can be produced in virtually any quantity desired. By simply instructing the system from the plant's computer control room (manned by Casio computers), the appropriate model changes can be made in not months, but one minute. * * * * * * * * * * * * In 1950, before industrial robots existed, Norbert Wiener saw that feedback and servo technology would make possible not only programmable tools, but even an "automatic" factory. "The overall system," he predicted, "will correspond to the complete animal with sense organs, effectors, and proprioceptors, and not, as in the ultra-rapid computing machine, to an isolated brain, dependent for its experiences and for its effectiveness on our intervention."16 Today's unmanned factory increasingly resembles his vision.

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Whatever robots are, and whatever they become, they will be hard to define. And it may be best not to try too hard; like children outgrowing their clothes, robots will evolve out of any definitions we give them. PART TWO Before Industrial Robots: A State of Mind The First Japanese Robot * * * Every tool has a genealogy. NORBERT WIENER, 1950 * * * When asked about the origins of their nation's interest in robots, many Japanese refer to a seventeenth-century mechanical doll. Its image—that of a kimono-clad boy servant carrying a cup of tea—is used today in advertisements for factory automation, and a replica of the original is on display at the National Science Museum in Tokyo.

A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
Published 11 Jun 1998

Hearing before Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), House of Representatives, Eighty-third Congress, First Session, Washington, D.C., April 22 and 23, 1953. 21. Samuelson, interview. 22. Martin, interview. 23. Ibid. 24. See, for example, Wiener’s obituary, New York Times, 3.19.64; Paul Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” 1964, Xerox provided by Samuelson; and Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953) and I Am a Mathematician (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). 25. Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” op. cit. 26. Ibid. 27. Zipporah Levinson, interview, 9.11.95. 28. Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Weiner,” op. cit. 29. Z. Levinson, interview. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33.

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Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak.”5 No one was more obsessed with originality, more disdainful of authority, or more jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the high priests of twentieth-century science — Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener — but he joined no school, became no one’s disciple, got along largely without guides or followers. In almost everything he did — from game theory to geometry — he thumbed his nose at the received wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach.

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He walked into the common room one winter morning in 1959 carrying The New York Times and remarked, to no one in particular, that the story in the upper left-hand corner of the front page contained an encrypted message from inhabitants of another galaxy that only he could decipher.27 Even months later, after he had stopped teaching, had angrily resigned his professorship, and was incarcerated at a private psychiatric hospital in suburban Boston, one of the nation’s leading forensic psychiatrists, an expert who testified in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, insisted that Nash was perfectly sane. Only a few of those who witnessed the uncanny metamorphosis, Norbert Wiener among them, grasped its true significance.28 At thirty years of age, Nash suffered the first shattering episode of paranoid schizophrenia, the most catastrophic, protean, and mysterious of mental illnesses. For the next three decades, Nash suffered from severe delusions, hallucinations, disordered thought and feeling, and a broken will.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

Where do the origins of the Internet lie? Forebears They lie with those Luftwaffe bombers flying at up to 250 miles an hour and at altitudes of over 30,000 feet above London at the beginning of World War II. In 1940, an eccentric Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor of mathematics named Norbert Wiener, “the original computer geek,” according to the New York Times,8 began working on a system to track the German aircraft that controlled the skies above London. The son of a Jewish immigrant from Białystok in Poland, Wiener had become so obsessed with lending his scientific knowledge to the war against Germany that he’d been forced to seek psychoanalytical help to control his anti-Nazi fixation.9 Technology could do good, he was convinced.

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In the middle decades of this century, the Institute became a seething cauldron of ideas about information, computing, communications and control,” explains the Internet historian John Naughton. “And when we dip into it seeking the origins of the Net, three names always come up. They are Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener and J. C. R. Licklider.”10 In the 1930s, Wiener had been part of the team that worked on Vannevar Bush’s “differential analyser,” a 100-ton electromagnetic analog computer cobbled together out of pulleys, shafts, wheels, and gears and which was designed to solve differential equations. And in 1941 Wiener had even pitched a prototype of a digital computer to Bush, more than five years before the world’s first working digital device, the 1,800-square-foot, $500,000 Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), funded by the US Army and described by the press as a “giant brain,” was unveiled in 1946.

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There may not have been an electronic communications network yet, but the idea of a self-correcting information system between man and machine, “a thing of almost natural beauty that constantly righted its errors through feedback from its environment,” in the words of the technology writer James Harkin,12 was born with Wiener’s revolutionary flight path predictor machine. While Norbert Wiener’s technical challenge was making sense of scarce information, Vannevar Bush was worried about its overabundance. In September 1945, Bush published an article titled “As We May Think,” in the Atlantic Monthly magazine. The purpose of the essay was to answer the question “What are scientists to do next?”

Darwin Among the Machines
by George Dyson
Published 28 Mar 2012

Good, “Some Future Social Repercussions of Computers,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 1 (1970): 69. 24.Burks, interview. 25.Ralph Slutz, interview by Christopher Evans, June 1976, OH 86, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 26.Ware, interview. 27.Herman H. Goldstine, interview by Nancy Stern, 11 August 1980, OH 18, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 28.Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 242–243. 29.Julian Bigelow, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Norbert Wiener, “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1 (1943): 22. 30.Warren S. McCulloch, “The Imitation of One Form of Life by Another—Biomimesis,” in Eugene E. Bernard and Morley R. Kare, eds., Biological Prototypes and Synthetic Systems, Proceedings of the Second Annual Bionics Symposium sponsored by Cornell University and the General Electric Company, Advanced Electronics Center, held at Cornell University, August 30–September 1, 1961, vol. 1 (New York: Plenum Press, 1962), 393. 31.Ware, interview. 32.Ibid. 33.Julian Bigelow, “Computer Development at the Institute for Advanced Study,” in Nicholas Metropolis, J.

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In the second, posthumous volume of Ampère’s Essay, published by his son in 1843, Ampère explains how he came to recognize a field of knowledge “which I name Cybernétique, from the word κυβερνετική, which was applied first, in a restricted sense, to the steering of a vessel, and later acquired, even among the Greeks, a meaning extending to the art of steering in general.”21 Ampère, an early advocate of the electromagnetic telegraph and mathematical pioneer of both game theory and electrodynamics, thereby anticipated the Cybernetics of Norbert Wiener, who, another century later, reinvented both Ampère’s terminology and Hobbes’s philosophy in their current, electronic form. “Although the term cybernetics does not date further back than the summer of 1947,” wrote Wiener in 1948, “we shall find it convenient to use in referring to earlier epochs of the development of the field.”22 Wiener, who was involved in the development of radar-guided anti-aircraft fire control, which marked the beginning of rudimentary perception by electronic machines, was unaware until after the publication of Cybernetics of the coincidence in choosing a name coined by the same Ampère we now honor in measuring the flow of electrons through a circuit.

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But their preparation required enormous numbers of complex calculations, largely performed by hand. The task resembled preparing the annual nautical almanac, except that it was necessary to prepare a separate almanac for each gun. Mathematician Oswald Vehlen (1880–1960), the proving ground’s first director, assembled a notable constellation of mathematicians, including Norbert Wiener, at Aberdeen during World War I. The group dispersed its talent widely, contributing to every facet of computational mathematics and computer technology between World War I and World War II. Veblen became department head at Princeton University, soon making Princeton the rival of Göttingen in mathematics.

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence
by George Zarkadakis
Published 7 Mar 2016

I will return to the very interesting connection of cybernetics, Plato and global governance later in the book. For now, I want to focus on four individuals who took part in the Macy Conferences, and whose work laid the foundations for Artificial Intelligence: Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Warren McCulloch and John von Neumann. We have already met the first two. Norbert Wiener was the grand visionary of cybernetics. Inspired by mechanical control systems, such as artillery targeting and servomechanisms, as well as Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication and information, he articulated the theory of cybernetics in his landmark book, Cybernetics, of 1948.4 Godfather number two, Claude Shannon, was the genius who gave us information theory.

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And that’s how my journey into Artificial Intelligence began. And quite a journey it was, too, for I literarily had to pack my suitcases and fly to London to study at university. My choice of subject was Control and Systems Engineering, a discipline based on the theory of cybernetics as developed by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in the 1940s. Wiener is one of the demigods of Artificial Intelligence. Born in Missouri in 1894, he was a child prodigy who earned a degree in mathematics at the age of fourteen and a doctorate at seventeen. A polymath with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, Wiener studied philosophy as well as zoology, then travelled to Europe to learn from the most prominent mathematical celebrities of the early twentieth century: Bertrand Russell at Cambridge and David Hilbert at Göttingen.

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Born in Leipzig at the end of the Thirty Years War that devastated the German-speaking countries, Leibniz became one of the foremost intellectuals of all time, making important contributions to just about every branch of science. He was also an engineer and inventor. He is considered to be the first computer scientist and information theorist. He advanced the binary numerical system that computers use today. He built calculating machines. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, claimed to have found in Leibniz’s writings the first mention of the concept of feedback, the central idea of cybernetics. And, yes, Leibniz had a solution to the body–mind problem, too! Not satisfied with Descartes’ hypothesis concerning the pineal gland, Leibniz proposed the existence of elementary particles that could ‘perceive’ one another.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

In the eight years between 1946, the year of the first in the series of conferences supported by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, multidisciplinary meetings of the group of psycholo- gists, mathematicians, engineers, and social scientists who created cybernetics, and 1954, when the second edition of Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human BeIngs: CybernetIcs and SocIety was published, cybernetic concepts, methods, and metaphors gained a huge popularity. 10 As we will see in greater depth later, the writings of Ashby, Wiener, and others on cybernetics deeply influenced Engelbart, then in his maturing years, just as they influenced many computer scientists in the 1950'S and 1960'S.11 To understand Engelbart's con- nection with cybernetics also helps us make sense of the solution to the prob- lem of complexity and urgency that Engelbart proposed, and, more impor- tantly, helps to situate that solution in the environment of post-World War II American culture.

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(quoted in Gibson 19 80 , 57) SRI provided Engelbart with an environment that he saw was perhaps suited to the implementation of his crusade and that at the same time was connected to the industrial and business world, relatively free of academic commitments and burdens, but still in something resembling an academic setting. For an out- sider on a crusade, it was about the best he could do. Scouting the Frontier Most of the individuals who directly influenced Engelbart, as we will see, also were outsiders, other "free intellectuals" such as Norbert Wiener,12 Alfred 16 ln oduchon Korzybski, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, and all of whom directly suffered from the pervasive anti-intellectualism of American culture before and after World War II. Engelbart, however, was a radar technician turned computer engineer, and therefore certainly was well positioned to be absorbed into some large organization as a "technical expert."

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I happen to thInk that none among our "big thInkers" can stretch his mind to the dimensions needed for anticipating the extent of the com- puter's future role in our society. This covers both breadth and depth - How many kind of ways are computers going to be applied, and how sIgnificantly? Engelbart here was not just deploying the rhetoric of the American frontier, but also following Norbert Wiener, who "had redefined the function of a 18 IntroductIon scientist or engineer from mere expertise to competence and sophistication in the difficult, exacting task of anticipating the social effects of his work" (Heims 1980,337). In a paper entitled "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation" that appeared in Science a few months before Engelbart's writ- ing, Wiener had claimed that "for the individual scientist, even the partial ap- praisal of the liaison between the man and the [historical] process requires an imaginative forward glance at history which is difficult, exacting and only lim- itedlyachievable" (quoted in Heims 1980, 337).

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 247. 41.Stuart Bennett, A History of Control Engineering, 1800–1930 (London: Peter Peregrinus, 1979), 99–100. 42.Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo, 1954), 153. 43.Eric W. Leaver and J. J. Brown, “Machines without Men,” Fortune, November 1946. See also David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 67–71. 44.Noble, Forces of Production, 234. 45.Ibid., 21–40. 46.Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 148–162. 47.Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 251. 48.Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.

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Macfarlane Gray patented a steamship steering mechanism that was able to register the movement of a boat’s helm and, through a gear-operated feedback system, adjust the angle of the rudder to maintain a set course.41 But the development of fast computers, along with other sensitive electronic controls, opened a new chapter in the history of machines. It vastly expanded the possibilities of automation. As the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who helped write the prediction algorithms for the Allies’ automated antiaircraft gun, explained in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the advances of the 1940s enabled inventors and engineers to go beyond “the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms.” The new technologies, while designed with weaponry in mind, gave rise to “a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type.”

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The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when for a few euphoric years riches flooded out of computer networks and into personal brokerage accounts, seemed to herald the start of a golden age of unlimited economic opportunity—what technology boosters dubbed a “long boom.” But the good times proved fleeting. Now we’re seeing that, as Norbert Wiener predicted, automation doesn’t play favorites. Computers are as good at analyzing symbols and otherwise parsing and managing information as they are at directing the moves of industrial robots. Even the people who operate complex computer systems are losing their jobs to software, as data centers, like factories, become increasingly automated.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

Wiener’s prescient discussion of technological control over humanity and a plea to retain human autonomy: Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Riverside Press, 1950). 6. The front-cover blurb from Wiener’s 1950 book is remarkably similar to the motto of the Future of Life Institute, an organization dedicated to studying the existential risks that humanity faces: “Technology is giving life the potential to flourish like never before . . . or to self-destruct.” 7. An updating of Wiener’s views arising from his increased appreciation of the possibility of intelligent machines: Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (MIT Press, 1964). 8.

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Finally, in statistics, learning algorithms are designed to minimize an expected loss function that defines the cost of making prediction errors. Evidently, this general scheme—which I will call the standard model—is widespread and extremely powerful. Unfortunately, we don’t want machines that are intelligent in this sense. The drawback of the standard model was pointed out in 1960 by Norbert Wiener, a legendary professor at MIT and one of the leading mathematicians of the mid-twentieth century. Wiener had just seen Arthur Samuel’s checker-playing program learn to play checkers far better than its creator. That experience led him to write a prescient but little-known paper, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation.”10 Here’s how he states the main point: If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively . . . we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.

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If the gorilla problem can be solved only in this way, it isn’t going to be solved. The only approach that seems likely to work is to understand why it is that making better AI might be a bad thing. It turns out that we have known the answer for thousands of years. The King Midas Problem Norbert Wiener, whom we met in Chapter 1, had a profound impact on many fields, including artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and control theory. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was particularly concerned with the unpredictability of complex systems operating in the real world. (He wrote his first paper on this topic at the age of ten.)

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

Turing and Shannon had argued over the future musical tastes of the “electronic brain” during lunch hour at Bell Labs, while their colleague Norbert Wiener had written a best-selling paean to the self-regulatory powers of feedback in his 1949 manifesto Cybernetics. “Mostly my participation in all of this is a matter of good luck for me,” Selfridge says today, sitting in his cramped, windowless MIT office. Born in England, Selfridge enrolled at Harvard at the age of fifteen and started his doctorate three years later at MIT, where Norbert Wiener was his dissertation adviser. As a precocious twenty-one-year-old, Selfridge suggested a few corrections to a paper that his mentor had published on heart flutters, corrections that Wiener graciously acknowledged in the opening pages of Cybernetics.

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The system Selfridge described—with its bottom-up learning, and its evaluating feedback loops—belongs in the history books as the first practical description of an emergent software program. The world now swarms with millions of his demons. * * * Among the students at MIT in the late forties was a transplanted midwesterner named John Holland. Holland was also a pupil of Norbert Wiener’s, and he spent a great deal of his undergraduate years stealing time on the early computer prototypes being built in Cambridge at that time. His unusual expertise at computer programming led IBM to hire him in the fifties to help develop their first commercial calculator, the 701. As a student of Wiener’s, he was naturally inclined to experiment with ways to make the sluggish 701 machine learn in a more organic, bottom-up fashion—not unlike Selfridge’s Pandemonium—and Holland and a group of like-minded colleagues actually programmed a crude simulation of neurons interacting.

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In the contemporary rendition, it’s not that the slave technology grows stronger than us and learns to disobey our commands—it’s that we deteriorate to the level of the machines. Smart technology makes us dumber. The critique certainly has its merits, and even among the Net community—if it’s still possible to speak of a single Net community—intelligent software remains much villified in some quarters. Decades ago, in a curiously brilliant book, God and Golem, Inc., Norbert Wiener argued that “in poems, in novels, in painting, the brain seems to find itself able to work very well with material that any computer would have to reject as formless.” For many people the distinction persists to this day: we look to our computers for number crunching; when we want cultural advice, we’re already blessed with plenty of humans to consult.

The Fractalist
by Benoit Mandelbrot
Published 30 Oct 2012

These two men were the only living proof that my Keplerian dream was not an idle one—that it was possible to put together and develop a new mathematical approach to a very old, very concrete problem that overlapped several disciplines. Matching the sterling quality of their accomplishments was far beyond my ambitions, and I couldn’t think of less exalted advisers. Norbert Wiener of MIT The towering Keplerian achievements of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) were his mathematical theory of Brownian motion and cybernetics—the word and the book. Isaac Newton knew around 1700 that prisms decompose light into components of different colors. But the mathematical theory was given much later, by Wiener. A related achievement, his theory of Brownian motion, strongly affected me later in my life—as a miserable model of the variation of competitive prices, and as a wiggle with an interesting boundary that forms fractal islands.

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Two examples of sweet irony: Szolem loved and faithfully served through his life two topics of truly classical mathematics: the Taylor and the Fourier series. In the twentieth century, both developed into fields self-described as “fine” or “hard” mathematical analysis. They forgot their roots in physics, except for a massive contribution from another man who was to play an important role in my life, Norbert Wiener. After Szolem made me learn these topics, I flew away—but never jettisoned what I had learned. In Szolem’s theorems, the list of assumptions could take pages. The distinctions he enjoyed were elusive, and at his preferred level of complexity, no condition was both necessary and sufficient. The issues he tackled had a long pedigree within pure mathematics.

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The timing was ideal because several new developments that had been “bottled up” by war conditions were being revealed in a kind of fireworks I saw on no other occasion. My restless curiosity led me to read works that were widely discussed when they appeared: Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener, and Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Except for a fleeting thought that I might return to mathematics in 1949 via the University of Chicago, I was beginning to think that the examples of Wiener and von Neumann might guide me to an idea big enough to make me, in some way, the Delbrück of a new field.

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 31 Mar 2009

These meetings were organized by a small group of scientists and mathematicians who were exploring common principles of widely varying complex systems. A prime mover of this group was the mathematician Norbert Wiener, whose work on the control of anti-aircraft guns during World War II had convinced him that the science underlying complex systems in both biology and engineering should focus not on the mass, energy, and force concepts of physics, but rather on the concepts of feedback, control, information, communication, and purpose (or “teleology”). Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives) In addition to Norbert Wiener, the series of Macy Foundation conferences included several scientific luminaries of the time, such as John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Shannon, W.

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CHAPTER 14 Prospects of Computer Modeling BECAUSE COMPLEX SYSTEMS ARE TYPICALLY, as their name implies, hard to understand, the more mathematically oriented sciences such as physics, chemistry, and mathematical biology have traditionally concentrated on studying simple, idealized systems that are more tractable via mathematics. However, more recently, the existence of fast, inexpensive computers has made it possible to construct and experiment with models of systems that are too complex to be understood with mathematics alone. The pioneers of computer science—Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, and others—were all motivated by the desire to use computers to simulate systems that develop, think, learn, and evolve. In this fashion a new way of doing science was born. The traditional division of science into theory and experiment has been complemented by an additional category: computer simulation (figure 14.1).

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Ross Ashby’s “Design for a Brain,” an influential proposal for how the ideas of dynamics, information, and feedback should inform neuroscience and psychology; Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts’ model of neurons as logic devices, which was the impetus for the later field of neural networks; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s application of cybernetic ideas in psychology and anthropology; and Norbert Wiener’s books Cybernetics and The Human Use of Human Beings, which attempted to provide a unified overview of the field and its relevance in many disciplines. These are only a few examples of works that are still influential today. In its own time, the research program of cybernetics elicited both enthusiasm and disparagement.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning
by Justin E. H. Smith
Published 22 Mar 2022

To this day, no matter how careful a person is to articulate solid reasons, they still risk being called a “Luddite” in response to concerns about mechanization, recalling Ned Ludd’s (likely fictional) radical resistance against the rising robotic workforce that began to emerge already at the beginning of the industrial revolution (though of course not yet called by that name). In the early 1960s, Norbert Wiener was sharply aware that the possible apocalyptic results of modern technology might result simply from our loss of control over machines to which we have outsourced decision-making processes, and thus to teach a machine to play chess may already give it more responsibility than it can handle over war, peace, and human destiny.

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One common cosmological theory in antiquity took the universe itself to be a sort of living body, and thus imagined that physically distant parts of the physical world are in constant feedback relations with one another, where any change in one region is echoed or mirrored in any other, just as the pain of a rock landing on the extremity of my foot is felt not only in my foot, but also in my physically somewhat distant head. The universe was thus a “cybernetic” system, in the sense described by Norbert Wiener in the mid-twentieth century, whom we will discuss in some detail later. Like the animal and the machine for Wiener, the universe as a whole for many ancient theorists was characterized by a circular causality or signal-looping. The causal interconnectedness of all parts of an animal body was well captured in the Hippocratic (or more likely pseudo-Hippocratic) motto, Sympnoia pantōn, which may be translated variously as “The conspiration of all things,” or, in a somewhat more literal but also exactly equivalent rendering of the verb con-spire: “The breathing-together of all things.”

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He envisioned that they would be used not just by mathematicians, but by people in all walks of life: “[W]e may say,” he writes in the text on arithmetical machines we have already discussed above, that such a machine will be desirable to “the managers of financial affairs, the administrators of the estates of others, merchants, surveyors, geographers, navigators, astronomers, and those connected with any of the crafts that use mathematics.”37 By 1685, then, Leibniz was already envisioning a machine-aided society, and this bright vision, of a human world aided by machines rather than being dominated by them, goes together with his antimaterialist theory of what the mind is, and therefore of what artifices such as mills, or reckoning engines, are necessarily limited to being. The twentieth-century cybernetician Norbert Wiener, to whom we have already been introduced, will later acknowledge a deep debt to Leibniz in his own thinking about what machines can and cannot do. For Wiener, the occasionalist philosophy of Leibniz’s contemporaries such as Nicolas Malebranche, according to which everything that happens is the result of constant divine intervention, was the last desperate recourse of early modern philosophers incapable of “thinking dynamically.”

The Scientist as Rebel
by Freeman Dyson
Published 1 Jan 2006

The day after his arrival, he died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism on the steps of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Dark Hero of the Information Age5 is the third biography of Norbert Wiener, unless there are others of which I am ignorant. First came a joint biography of Wiener and the mathematician John von Neumann, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, by Steve Heims in 1980.6 Then came Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964, by Pesi Masani in 1990.7 The main justification for a new biography is that the three biographies emphasize different aspects of Wiener’s life and character.

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Several chapters in this book are devoted to famous scientists who were also famous rebels. Thomas Gold (Chapter 3) was a great astronomer with heretical opinions about many subjects. Joseph Rotblat (Chapter 12) was unique as a scientist who walked out of the wartime Los Alamos bomb project when he learned that the threat of a German atomic bomb had disappeared. Norbert Wiener (Chapter 22) was a great mathematician who refused on moral grounds to have anything to do with either industry or government. Desmond Bernal (Chapter 24) was one of the founding fathers of molecular biology, and also a faithful member of the Communist Party and a passionate believer in Marxism.

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Szilard had tried unsuccessfully to persuade Rutherford that a neutron chain reaction was a practical and dangerous possibility. It is interesting to speculate how different the history of the last century might have been if Rutherford had taken Szilard’s warning seriously. 22 THE TRAGIC TALE OF A GENIUS NORBERT WIENER WAS famous at the beginning of his life and at the end. For thirty years in the middle during which he did his best work, he was comparatively unknown. He was famous at the beginning as a child prodigy. His father, Leo Wiener, the first Jew to be appointed a professor at Harvard, was a specialist in Slavic languages.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 30–32; Benj Edwards, “The Never-Before-Told Story of the World’s First Computer Art (It’s a Sexy Dame),” The Atlantic, January 24, 2013. 14. In Your Defense (motion picture) (SAGE Programming Agency, US Air Force, 1950). 15. Family interviews and other personal details about Norbert Wiener are informed by the great biography by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 16. Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, chap. 1. 17. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1950). 18. Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). 19.

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It was a small but vital component of SAGE, and the work opened his eyes to the possibilities of building tools that integrated people and computers into one continuous system: a man-machine that broke through human physical limitations and created powerful new hybrid beings. Cyborgs and Cybernetics The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was ground zero for a new science called cybernetics. Developed by MIT professor Norbert Wiener, cybernetics defined the world as a giant computational machine. It offered a conceptual and mathematical framework for thinking about and designing complex information systems. Wiener was an odd and brilliant man. He was short, pudgy, with a meaty round head and thick glasses. In his later years, he looked a bit like Hans Moleman from The Simpsons.

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Neoclassical economists integrated cybernetics into their theories and began looking at markets as distributed information machines.19 Ecologists began to look at the earth itself as a self-regulating computational “bio system,” and cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists approached the study of the human brain as if it were literally a complex digital computer.20 Political scientists and sociologists began to dream of using cybernetics to create a controlled utopian society, a perfectly well-oiled system where computers and people were integrated into a cohesive whole, managed and controlled to ensure security and prosperity.21 “Put most clearly: in the 1950s both the military and U.S. industry explicitly advocated a messianic understanding of computing, in which computation was the underlying matter of everything in the social world, and could therefore be brought under state-capitalist military control—centralized, hierarchical control,” writes historian David Golumbia in The Cultural Logic of Computation, a groundbreaking study of computational ideology.22 In a big way, this intermeshing of cybernetics and big power was what caused Norbert Wiener to turn against cybernetics almost as soon as he introduced it to the world. He saw scientists and military men taking the narrowest possible interpretation of cybernetics to create better killing machines and more efficient systems of surveillance and control and exploitation. He saw giant corporations using his ideas to automate production and cut labor in their quest for greater wealth and economic power.

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

2 Building the Star Trek Computer 3 House of Cards: The Aesthetics of Abstraction 4 Coding Cow Clicker: The Work of Algorithms 5 Counting Bitcoin Coda: The Algorithmic Imagination Works Cited Figure Credits Index List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 “This is a Turing Machine implemented in Conway’s Game of Life.” Designed by Paul Rendell. Figure 1.2 Norbert Wiener and his “moth” circa 1950. Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images. Figure 2.1 Siri playing up its human affect. Figure 2.2 Insert to the Encyclopédie, a disruptive knowledge ontology. Figure 2.3 “Search Story,” an ad for Google Search. Figure 3.1 “Do You Know When You Were Hooked?

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In its heyday cybernetics, as the field was known, was a sustained intellectual argument about the place of algorithms in material culture—a debate about the politics of implementing mathematical ideas, or claiming to find them embodied, in physical and biological systems. The polymathic mathematician Norbert Wiener published the founding text of this new discipline in 1949, calling it Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Wiener names Leibniz the patron saint of cybernetics: “The philosophy of Leibniz centers about two closely related concepts—that of a universal symbolism and that of a calculus of reasoning.”27 As the book’s title suggests, the aim of cybernetics in the 1940s and 1950s was to define and implement those two ideas: an intellectual system that could encompass all scientific fields, and a means of quantifying change within that system.

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In fact, as historian Ronald Kline describes, the entire enterprise was a public relations stunt, the construction of the robot financed by Life magazine, which planned to run an article on cybernetics.41 Wiener’s demonstration machine presaged future spectacles of human–machine interaction like early Silicon Valley icon Douglas Engelbart’s “mother of all demos,” which first showcased several aspects of a functional personal computer experience in 1968. Figure 1.2 Norbert Wiener and his “moth” circa 1950. Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images. The theoretical aspirations of cybernetics were always dependent on material implementation, a fact that has challenged generations of artificial intelligence researchers pursuing the platonic ideal of neural networks that effectively model the human mind.42 Kline reports that Life never ran photos of Wiener’s moth because an editor felt the machine “illustrated the analogy between humans and machines by modeling the nervous system, rather than showing the human characteristics of computers, which was Life’s objective.”43 In the end, Wiener had built a bug.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
Published 5 Oct 2020

Other material is drawn from oral histories of Pitts’s contemporaries, particularly Jerome (Jerry) Lettvin in Anderson and Rosenfeld, Talking Nets, as well as the essays and recollections in McCulloch, The Collected Works of Warren S. McCulloch. For other accounts of Pitts’s life, see, e.g., Smalheiser, “Walter Pitts”; Easterling, “Walter Pitts”; and Gefter, “The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic.” Further details exist in biographies of McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, and the cybernetics group—e.g., Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener and The Cybernetics Group, and Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age. 2. Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica. 3. Thanks to the staff at the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University for their help in attempting to locate a copy of this letter; unfortunately, no extant copy is known. 4.

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“There had been several thousand papers published on perceptrons up to 1969,” says Minsky. “Our book put a stop to those.”8 It is as if a dark cloud has settled over the field, and everything falls apart: the research, the money, the people. Pitts, McCulloch, and Lettvin, who have all three moved to MIT, are sharply exiled after a misunderstanding with MIT’s Norbert Wiener, who had been like a second father figure to Pitts and now won’t speak to him. Pitts, alcoholic and depressed, throws all of his notes and papers into a fire, including an unpublished dissertation about three-dimensional neural networks that MIT tries desperately to salvage. Pitts dies from cirrhosis in May 1969, at the age of 46.9 A few months later Warren McCulloch, at the age of 70, succumbs to a heart seizure after a long series of cardiopulmonary problems.

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Indeed, the seminal 1943 cybernetics paper “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology”—which, incidentally, coined the term “feedback” in its now common sense of “information used for adjustment”—set out to distinguish purposeful from purposeless (or random) behavior.18 For the cyberneticists, purpose was tantamount to a goal that could be arrived at as a place of rest. For arch-cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, one of the canonical “intrinsically purposeful” machines is a thermostat: when the temperature is too low, it turns on the heat, and when the temperature gets high enough, it shuts it off. He thought also of the “governor” of an engine—more than coincidentally, the term is an etymological kin to the word “cybernetics” itself, coming from the same Greek root kybernetes.19 (Thus “cybernetics,” for all its exotic sci-fi flavor, could well have been the much blander and more bureaucratic-sounding field of “governetics.”)

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

the general theory of feedback: See George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 109–114. in choosing the term “cybernetics”: On the ambivalence of Norbert Wiener’s work, see Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age—In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005). “their control over the rest of the human race”: Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1988), 247–250. Champagne fairs of the Middle Ages: Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—and They Shape Us (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).

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In most cases, the feedback loop of such a human-machine system works well, and even if it doesn’t, it fails gracefully. But systems based on complex feedback loops are tricky: they work so well in so many routine cases that we are tempted to disregard—even forget about—any built-in risk of extreme failure. Seven decades earlier, MIT professor Norbert Wiener, a child prodigy turned accomplished mathematician, conceived the general theory of feedback and its role in helping humans and machines control their actions. Feedback loops lie at the very core of Wiener’s concept: collecting and interpreting feedback data enables control over a system and adjustment of its goals.

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At least Cybersyn was transparent: the centralization of planning and decision-making was obvious to all Chileans. By contrast, government control of adaptive machine learning systems in data-rich markets retains the trappings of decentralized coordination and the appearance of free will, but turns Norbert Wiener’s powerful concept of cybernetics into Big Brother riding data-rich feedback loops. It’s precisely what Wiener was worried about. The system, even if perhaps appearing to promote liberal values, would make George Orwell blush and the East German Stasi salivate: seeming freedom on the outside but total state control on the inside.

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

The American logician John McCarthy coined the label “Artificial Intelligence” to describe a meeting (with all men attendees) he co-organized in 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. McCarthy never defined the term explicitly and had in fact considered several options before picking “AI.” He thought of using “cybernetics” but decided against it, because that would mean embracing MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, who coined the term, as the field’s “guru.”6 Cybernetics was already too close to the field McCarthy was trying to claim. Cybernetics was loosely structured around the notion of feedback—when systems react to their own actions—which was presented as a unifying principle for how both organisms and machines operate.

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Yerkes’s report from 1921 on psychologists’ services to the military, “Psychological Examining in the United States Army,” in Readings in the History of Psychology, ed. Wayne Dennis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948), 528–40.     6.   Nils J. Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 53.     7.   Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 228–66.     8.   See V. Rajaraman, “John McCarthy—Father of Artificial Intelligence,” Resonance 19, no. 3 (2014): 198–207. To McCarthy’s disappointment, the collection coedited with Shannon, published under the heading “Automata Studies,” ended up attracting conventional cyberneticians.

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Martin Shubik, “Bibliography on Simulation, Gaming, Artificial Intelligence and Allied Topics,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 55, no. 292 (1960): 736–51.   13.   Seymour Papert, “The Summer Vision Project,” Vision Memo No. 100, MIT Artificial Intelligence Group, July 1966.   14.   Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener—Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 321.   15.   Patrick H. Winston, oral history interview, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, 1990, 19.   16.   Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, 321.   17.   A. Müller and K. H. Müller, eds., An Unfinished Revolution?

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann
by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Published 6 Oct 2021

He mentions electronic components mostly to explain why he will not be discussing them: his aim is to describe a computer system without getting bogged down in the specifics of engineering. ‘In order to avoid this we will base our considerations on a hypothetical element, which functions essentially like a vacuum tube,’ he says.41 His ‘hypothetical element’ is an idealized neuron, shorn of its physiological complexities. This seems odd today, but von Neumann, Turing, Norbert Wiener and other thinkers who contributed to the foundations of the field that became known as ‘artificial intelligence’ did think about computers as ‘electronic brains’. Today using ‘brain’ or ‘neuron’ in the context of computers seems laughably naive. Yet we accept the similarly anthropomorphic use of ‘memory’ to mean ‘storage’ without blinking an eye.

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Beset by technical problems, the bloated EDVAC only began computing anything useful three years after its arrival at Aberdeen. By then, it had been overtaken by other computers built according to von Neumann’s radical design.53 Von Neumann was assailed by offers from prestigious universities wanting to host his new computer project. Norbert Wiener, hoping to lure his friend to MIT, asked how his plans would ‘fit in with the Princetitute? You are going to run into a situation where you will need a lab at your fingertips,’ he added, ‘and labs don’t grow in ivory towers.’54 Chicago offered him a professorship and a new institute to lead.

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The proposal was never funded but demonstrates how far von Neumann’s interests ranged across virtually every area of cutting-edge science. In the event, advances in practical techniques as well as theoretical ones – and a great deal of patience – would be required before X-ray crystallography began to reveal protein structures – as it would, starting in 1958. From 1944, meetings instigated by Norbert Wiener helped to focus von Neumann’s thinking about brains and computers. In gatherings of the short-lived ‘Teleological Society’, and later in the ‘Conferences on Cybernetics’, von Neumann was at the heart of discussions on how the brain or computing machines generate ‘purposive behaviour’. Busy with so many other things, he would whizz in, lecture for an hour or two on the links between information and entropy or circuits for logical reasoning, then whizz off again – leaving the bewildered attendees to discuss the implications of whatever he had said for the rest of the afternoon.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

Kittler’s two ages, symbolized by the two years 1800 and 1900, correspond structurally (but less so chronologically) to the social periodization supplied by Foucault and Deleuze. The passage from the modern disciplinary societies to those of the control societies, as I have already suggested, is the single most important historical transformation in this book. Norbert Wiener is also an important character. His books laid important groundwork for how control works within physical bodies. The provocative but tantalizingly thin Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World from architect Branden Hookway, looks at how cybernetic bodies permeate twentieth-century life.

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He says as much: “One retains the general form of Marxist analysis . . . , but admits that the classical definition of productive forces is too restricted, so one expands the analysis in terms of productive forces to the whole murky field of signification and communication.”13 While ostensibly non-Marxist, it is worth noting here the work of Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush, two of the most important thinkers in the history of computers and electronic media. 9. Enzensberger, “Constituents,” p. 105. 10. Enzensberger, “Constituents,” p. 105. 11. Enzensberger, “Constituents,” p. 121. 12. Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in Video Culture, ed.

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Be it the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, the commodity in Marx’s Capital, or the murdering robot in Čapek’s R.U.R., the emergence of autonomous vital forms appears as a distinct trend in the last two hundred years of contemplative thought. Much work has been done on this subject in the field of epistemology and cognitive science. During a 1959 meeting organized by the New York University Institute of Philosophy entitled “The Dimensions of Mind,” Norbert Wiener and others pondered the epistemological condition of mind in the context of the machine. Later, writers such as Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett have considered the theoretical possibilities and limits of computerized thought. Several theories of life are at play in this intellectual milieu. In what might be dubbed the “computers can never do what our brains can do” ideology, Hubert Dreyfus argues that there are theoretical limits to any type of artifi- Chapter 3 102 cial intelligence.72 In a similar vein, Leopoldseder recounts that “[i]n a personal interview, the biophysician and cybernetics researcher Heinz von Foerster—one of the fathers of constructivism—answered the question of whether there is a relation between the human brain and the computer with a ‘yes and no.’

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies
by Cesar Hidalgo
Published 1 Jun 2015

So the knowledge amplification powers of the economy are essential to liberate the creative capacities that allow our species to create new products—which continue to augment us—and endow us with new forms of artistic expression. Our capacity to create products that augment us also helps define the overall complexity of our society. To illustrate this seemingly far-fetched connection, I will move our gaze away from humans and consider instead ant colonies, an example suggested by Norbert Wiener in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings.3 Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, understood that the ability to embody information outside our bodies is not unique to our species. In fact, our ability to print information in our environment makes us similar to other eusocial species, such as ants. Single ants are not very clever, but their ability to deposit information in the form of pheromones can make ant colonies extremely savvy.

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Mathematicians continued to formalize the idea of information, but they framed their efforts in the context of communication technologies, transcending the efforts to decipher intercepted messages. The mathematicians who triumphed became known as the world’s first information theorists or cyberneticists. These pioneers included Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener. In the 1950s and 1960s the idea of information took science by storm. Information was welcomed in all academic fields as a powerful concept that cut across scientific boundaries. Information was neither microscopic nor macroscopic.3 It could be inscribed sparsely on clay tablets or packed densely in a strand of DNA.

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v=UPNPpdBCqzU. 2. George Johnson, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (New York: Knopf, 2008), 76–86. 3. I have taken the liberty of expanding this example substantially, since in Wiener’s book it is not mentioned in a very straightforward way and furthermore is woven into a weird Cold War political argument. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). CHAPTER 6: THIS TIME, IT’S PERSONAL 1. The question of which industries locate where and why has given rise to at least four theoretical streams of literature: the literature on industrial clusters, the “new economic geography” (which is the neoclassical stream of this literature), the economic geography literature focusing on institutions and culture, and the evolutionary economic geography literature.

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan
by Robert Kanigel
Published 25 Apr 2016

• • • As a spokesman for the new rigor, Hardy exerted his impact not alone by what he had to say, but through the force, grace, and elegance with which he said it, both in print and in person. In lectures, his enthusiasm and delight in the subject fairly spilled over. “One felt,” wrote one of his later students, E. C. Titchmarsh, “that nothing else in the world but the proof of these theorems really mattered.” Norbert Wiener, the American mathematical prodigy who would later create the field known as “cybernetics,” attended Hardy’s lectures. “In all my years of listening to lectures in mathematics,” he would write, “I have never heard the equal of Hardy for clarity, for interest, or for intellectual power.” Around this time, a pupil of E.

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All through Britain, workers struck and militant suffragettes smashed windows. Ireland seethed. But in Cambridge, things were as they always were. Hardy neared his thirty-sixth birthday with his face bearing scarcely a mark of it. He’d visit Bertrand Russell in Nevile’s Court and discuss Bergson and the philosophy of religion; once, Norbert Wiener and his father met him there and took him to be an undergraduate. In 1912, Hardy published nine more papers, including his first collaborative one with Littlewood, “Some Problems of Diophantine Approximation.” His first key paper on Fourier series was coming out later in 1913, the revised edition of his popular textbook the following year.

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A plush-lined prison, perhaps, but a prison nonetheless. And while driven back into it by the English reserve, the winter chill, and the dark streets and wartime gloom, he was lured back into it by the delight he got from his work with Hardy. 3. “A SINGULARLY HAPPY COLLABORATION” Mathematician Norbert Wiener would one day note how, in one sense, number theory blurs the border between pure and applied mathematics. In search of concrete applications of pure math, one normally turns to physics, say, or thermodynamics, or chemistry. But the number theorist has a multitude of real-life problems before him always—in the number system itself, a bottomless reservoir of raw data.

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb
by William Poundstone
Published 2 Jan 1993

There were many small acts of kindness and generosity. In 1946 von Neumann sent $20 to his former teacher Feher upon learning of a financial reverse. In 1954 he asked the institute to transfer $3,500 allocated to him to the visiting Japanese mathematician Hirotada Anzai. Von Neumann nursed a minor feud with mathematician Norbert Wiener. At one lecture of Wiener’s, von Neumann sat up front and noisily read the New York Times. But Wiener was hardly an enemy. Wiener once tried to get the von Neumanns an invitation to visit China, and described them to Yuk Wing Lee of Tsing Hua University in flattering terms (letter dated May 4, 1937, M.I.T.

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Another admits: “We both have nasty tempers, but let’s quarrel less. I really love you, and, within the limitations of my horrible nature, I do want to make you happy—as nearly as possible, as much of the time as possible.” What was the horrible nature? In an interview with journalist Steve J. Heims (in John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, 1980), Eugene Wigner asserted that “Johnny believed in having sex, in pleasure, but not in emotional attachment. He was interested in immediate pleasures but had little comprehension of emotions in relationships and mostly saw women in terms of their bodies.”

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A decade after the publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, there was a correction to the early euphoria. Game theory was deprecated, distrusted, even reviled. To many, game theory, ever intertwined with the figure of John von Neumann, appeared to encapsulate a callous cynicism about the fate of the human race. A few examples will show the severity of this reappraisal. In a 1952 letter to Norbert Wiener, anthropologist Gregory Bateson wrote: What applications of the theory of games do, is to reinforce the players’ acceptance of the rules and competitive premises, and therefore make it more and more difficult for the players to conceive that there might be other ways of meeting and dealing with each other.... its use propagates changes, and I suspect that the long term changes so propagated are in a paranoidal direction and odious.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

What made the demonstration exciting was that Stibitz’s computer was sitting at Bell’s building in lower Manhattan, transmitting data over a Teletype line. It was the first computer to be used remotely. For three hours it solved problems submitted by the audience, taking about a minute for each. Among those at the demonstration was Norbert Wiener, a pioneer of information systems, who tried to stump Stibitz’s machine by asking it to divide a number by zero. The machine didn’t fall for the trap. Also present was John von Neumann, the Hungarian polymath who was soon to play a major role with Mauchly in the development of computers.46 When he decided to build a vacuum-tube computer of his own, Mauchly did what good innovators properly do: he drew upon all of the information he had picked up from his travels.

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Increasingly interested in the relationship between psychology and technology, how human brains and machines interacted, he moved to MIT to start a psychology section based in the Electrical Engineering Department. At MIT Licklider joined the eclectic circle of engineers, psychologists, and humanists gathered around Professor Norbert Wiener, a theorist who studied how humans and machines worked together and coined the term cybernetics, which described how any system, from a brain to an artillery aiming mechanism, learned through communications, control, and feedback loops. “There was tremendous intellectual ferment in Cambridge after World War II,” Licklider recalled.

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“The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly,” he wrote, “and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.” This sentence bears rereading, because it became one of the seminal concepts of the digital age.22 Licklider sided with Norbert Wiener, whose theory of cybernetics was based on humans and machines working closely together, rather than with their MIT colleagues Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy, whose quest for artificial intelligence involved creating machines that could learn on their own and replicate human cognition. As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines “cooperate in making decisions.”

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

Whereas the parts in a non-linear, open system can’t be broken up this way; ‘the whole system has to be examined all at once, as a coherent entity.’ His idea is easy to grasp if you think of chemicals interacting to form a compound: it becomes a new substance of its own.6 Such views had a solid grounding at MIT. The Media Lab was built on the intellectual foundations of the Electronic Systems Laboratory, which Norbert Wiener, arguably the greatest systems analyst of the twentieth century, founded at MIT in the 1940s. Wiener stood on the cusp of an era in which large amounts of information could be digested by machines; he explored different ways to organize the digestive process. He was particularly intrigued by electronic feedback which is complex, ambiguous or contradictory in character rather than straightforward.

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By 1934, when Mumford published arguably his best book, Technics and Civilization, he had moved beyond thinking about how to plan a socialist garden city; he pondered how the effort to wrest form out of flux, beginning in the great technological revolution of the seventeenth century, came to influence the machine culture of the twentieth. In Newton’s time, or so Mumford argued, the powers of technology expanded control over the city; now technology has become a self-contained force, displacing people. Mumford knew Norbert Wiener slightly, and admired Wiener’s late criticism of cybernetics; he once said to me in the same vein that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World should be the bible of every urbanist. In old age, Mumford sunk into bleak pessimism on this account, believing that high tech could not be coupled to socialist politics.

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Prescription tells you what is the most efficient route; people neither have to ponder what if it were different nor what is the most experience-rich route. Of course, much of the daily round has to be framed in terms of sheer efficiency. It’s a question of balance: the prescriptive city becomes unbalanced in divorcing functioning from questioning. Norbert Wiener foresaw this danger: in old age he came to fear that his brain-child would prove a monster – ‘big data’ (Wiener coined the term), controlled by ‘Big Brother’, can reduce people’s lives to digital bits of needs and desires serviced by a few monopolies. Tech as Big Brother has perhaps become a cliché, but Wiener feared something deeper: by using machines, people would stop learning.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

See Leo Findeisen, “Some Code to Die For: On the Birth of the Free Software Movement in 1887” (2003; available at http://www.monochrom.at/codetodiefor/). 5. Although the relationship between the study of machines and religious thinking is not the concern of this book, it is worth registering that Norbert Wiener identified commonalities in that machines must learn and reproduce in accordance with what he called the rules of the game, a game increasingly set by the dark forces of informational capitalism and the industrial-military complex. See Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964). 6. “Twitspeak” is the vernacular form of language used with Twitter, such as the use of hashtags (see http://twitter.com/). 7.

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Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). (The German title of his book, Aufschreibesysteme [inscription systems], was first used by Daniel Paul Schreber in his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness [1903] to designate how strange heavenly powers were tracking and recording his every move.) 27. Norbert Wiener commented that the accomplishments of artificial intelligence were as “fraudulent” as the chess-playing machine; see his Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 165. 28. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938– 1940, ed.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

Following a line of criticism that extends at least as far back as Kant (at least on one interpretation of Kant’s views), and that has recent avatars in figures as diverse as established scholars like Lewis Mumford (1934, 1964), Harold Innis (1950, 1951), Jacques Ellul (1964, 1980, 1990), Joseph Weizenbaum, Martin Heidegger, Norbert Wiener (1954, The Cultural Functions of Computation p5 1964), Terry Winograd, and Theodore Roszak (1986), and more recent writers like Langdon Winner (1977, 1988), Mark Poster (1990, 2000, 2006), Michael Adas, Philip Agre (1997), Christopher May (2002), Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1999), Alison Adam, McKenzie Wark, Scott Lash (2002), Vincent Mosco, Dan Schiller, Lisa Nakamura, and others discussed below, I argue that computationalism meshes all too easily with the project of instrumental reason.

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The book itself begins with Weaver’s famous, (until-then) privately circulated “memorandum” of 1949, here published as “Translation,” and was circulated among many computer scientists of the time who dissented from its conclusions even then.3 At the time Weaver was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and tried unsuccessfully to enlist major figures like Norbert Wiener, C. K. Ogden, Ivor Richards, Vannevar Bush, and some others in his project (see Hutchins 1986, 25–27). In contemporary histories we are supposed to see these figures as being short-sighted, but it seems equally plausible that they saw the inherent problems in Weaver’s proposal from the outset.

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Weaver’s intuition, along with those of his co-researchers at the time, therefore begins from what might be thought an entirely illegitimate analogy, between code and language, that resembles Chomsky’s creation of a language hierarchy, according to which codes are not at all dissimilar from the kind of formal logic systems Chomsky proves are not like human language. Thus it is not at all surprising that intellectuals of Weaver’s day were highly skeptical of his project along lines that Weaver dismisses with a certain amount of hubris. In the 1949 memorandum Weaver quotes correspondence he had with Norbert Wiener (whose own career reveals, in fact, a profound knowledge of and engagement with human language).4 Weaver quotes from a private letter written by Wiener to him in 1947: As to the problem of mechanical translation, I frankly am afraid the boundaries of words in different languages are too vague and the emotional and international connotations are too extensive to make any quasimechanical translation scheme very hopeful . . . .

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins
by Garry Kasparov
Published 1 May 2017

RISE OF THE CHESS MACHINES In “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess.” Claude Shannon, “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” Philosophical Magazine 41, ser. 7, no. 314, March 1950. It was first presented at the National Institute of Radio Engineers Convention, March 9, 1949, New York. This insight echoes Norbert Wiener’s note. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in Animal and Machine (New York, Technology Press, 1948), 193. made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice. Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal (London: RHM, 1976), 64. enough to beat a very weak human player. This was indeed a very optimistic number, and a chess machine wouldn’t reach the speed of analyzing a million moves per second until the 1990s.

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Since chess requires thinking, either a chess-playing machine thinks or thinking doesn’t mean what we believe it to mean. I also admire his use of the word “skillful,” since simply memorizing the rules and making random legal moves or regurgitating moves from memory (or a database) isn’t how he defines thinking. This insight echoes Norbert Wiener’s note at the end of his seminal 1948 book, Cybernetics: “Whether it is possible to construct a chess-playing machine, and whether this sort of ability represents an essential difference between the potentialities of the machine and the mind.” Shannon went on to describe the various factors a chess program would need, including the rules, piece values, an evaluation function, and, most critically, the possible search methods a future chess machine could use.

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Matthias Wüllenweber and Frans Morsch created ChessBase and Fritz, the programs that defined the computer era of professional chess. Thomas Anantharaman, Murray Campbell, Joseph Hoane, and Feng-hsiung Hsu created Deep Thought at Carnegie Mellon, which turned into Deep Blue at IBM. They deservedly seized the grail dreamt of by Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener, and it was my fortune, not misfortune, to be holding it at the time. My friend Shay Bushinsky and his colleague Amir Ban created the remarkable program Junior, my opponent in my final human-machine match in 2003. In recent years, many experts have had the patience to personally contribute to my education in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

The specter of mass joblessness as machines displaced workers had incited fear many times in the past—going all the way back to Britain’s Luddite uprising in 1812—but in the 1950s and ’60s, the concern was especially acute and was articulated by some of the United States’ most prominent and intellectually capable individuals. In 1949, at the request of the New York Times, Norbert Wiener, an internationally renowned mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote an article describing his vision for the future of computers and automation.5 Wiener had been a child prodigy who entered college at age eleven and completed his PhD when he was just seventeen; he went on to establish the field of cybernetics and made substantial contributions in applied mathematics and to the foundations of computer science, robotics, and computer-controlled automation.

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Those who did dare to entertain such thoughts risked being labeled a “neo-Luddite.” Given that the dire circumstances predicted by the Triple Revolution report did not come to pass, we can ask an obvious question: Were the authors of the report definitively wrong? Or did they—like many others before them—simply sound the alarm far too soon? Norbert Wiener, as one of the early pioneers of information technology, perceived the digital computer as being fundamentally different from the mechanical technologies that preceded it. It was a game changer: a new kind of machine with the potential to usher in a new age—and, ultimately, perhaps rend the very fabric of society.

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Chapter 3 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: AN UNPRECEDENTED FORCE FOR DISRUPTION Imagine depositing a penny in a bank account. Now, double the account balance every day. On day three you would go from 2 cents to 4 cents. The fifth day would take your balance from 8 to 16 cents. After less than a month, you would have more than a million dollars. If we had deposited that initial penny in 1949, just as Norbert Wiener was writing his essay about the future of computing, and then let Moore’s Law run its course—doubling the amount roughly every two years—by 2015, our technological account would contain nearly $86 million. And as things move forward from this point, that balance will continue to double. Future innovations will be able to leverage that enormous accumulated balance, and as a result the rate of progress in the coming years and decades is likely to far exceed what we have become accustomed to in the past.

Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future
by Luke Dormehl
Published 10 Aug 2016

Before Ktesibios’s clock, only a living thing was thought to be capable of modifying its behaviour according to changes in the environment. After Ktesibios’s clock, self-regulating feedback control systems became a part of our technology. In the twentieth century, an influential AI pioneer named Norbert Wiener worked to formulate mathematical theories around feedback systems. Wiener proposed the idea that intelligent behaviour comes about as the result of receiving and processing information: a concept which came to be known as cybernetics. During World War II, Wiener’s theories regarding feedback systems were refined when he and a colleague named Julian Bigelow worked on a project designed to improve the accuracy of anti-aircraft guns.

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It’s a theme since revisited time and again, in everything from the sci-fi stories of Isaac Asimov to the airport thrillers of Michael ‘Jurassic Park’ Crichton to recent movies like Ex Machina. Real scientists didn’t embrace the question quite as rapidly as science-fiction writers, but they weren’t far behind. In 1964, the same year as the New York World’s Fair, cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener predicted: ‘The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our own intelligence; not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.’ Wiener passed away in May 1964, aged sixty-nine. However, concerns about superintelligent machines continued.

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Billions Fewer than We Thought’, Guardian, 28 February 2012: theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/feb/28/how-many-neurons-human-brain 10 Stoller-Conrad, Jessica, ‘Controlling a Robotic Arm with a Patient’s Intentions’, Caltech, 21 May 2015: caltech.edu/news/controlling-robotic-arm-patients-intentions-46786 11 Kever, Jeannie, ‘Researchers Build Brain-Machine Interface to Control Prosthetic Hand’, University of Houston, 31 March 2015: uh.edu/news-events/stories/2015/March/0331BionicHand.php 12 Kurzweil, Ray, ‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, 7 March 2001: kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns 13 Linden, David, ‘The Singularity Is Far: A Neuroscientist’s View’, BoingBoing, 14 July 2011: http://boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html 14 http://2045.com/press/ 15 Hayworth, Ken, ‘Killed by Bad Philosophy’, Brain Preservation Foundation, January 2010: brainpreservation.org/content-2/killed-bad-philosophy/ Chapter 8: The Future (Risks) of Thinking Machines 1 Cook, James, ‘Elon Musk: Robots Could Start Killing Us All Within 5 Years’, Business Insider, 17 November 2014: uk.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-killer-robots-will-be-here-within-five-years-2014–11 2 Hern, Alex, ‘Elon Musk Says He Invested in DeepMind Over “Terminator” Fears’, Guardian, 18 June 2014: theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/18/elon-musk-deepmind-ai-tesla-motors 3 Hawking, Stephen et al., ‘Stephen Hawking: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence … ”’, Independent, 1 May 2014: independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 4 Hill, Doug, ‘The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)’, Atlantic, 11 June 2014: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/norbert-wiener-the-eccentric-genius-whose-time-may-have-finally-come-again/372607/ 5 Good, I. J., ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’, Advances in Computers, 1965. 6 Vinge, Vernor, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era’, Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, 1993. 7 Ulam, Stanislaw, ‘Tribute to John von Neumann,’ Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society: 5, May 1958. 8 Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1954). 9 Appleyard, Bryan, The Brain Is Wider than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2011). 10 www.youtube.com/watch?

The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley
Published 18 Oct 2010

By mid-1950, Atanasoff felt that his career with the military had reached a dead end, and he was disheartened, too, by the idea that all of his enterprise and inventiveness had gone into making weapons. In the summer of 1949, Turing was interviewed by a newspaper in relation to a dispute between two other men about machine intelligence and the possibility of a machine having a sensibility. The two men were Norbert Wiener, who had just published Cybernetics, and a neurosurgeon, Geoffrey Jefferson, who gave a speech that attempted to debunk any ideas that a machine could have emotions or self-consciousness and could, therefore, be said to think in a human way (Jefferson was a pioneer of the frontal lobotomy). When Turing was interviewed by the Times (London), he declared that “the university [of Manchester] was really interested in the investigation of the possibilities of machines for their own sake.”

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Back in the summer of 1946, when Atanasoff was told that the navy computer project was off, he was not told why, but part of the reason was that in late 1945, the very well connected John von Neumann had entertained letters of interest from the University of Chicago and MIT, with further feelers from Harvard and Columbia. Von Neumann was drawn to Princeton even though, as the letter from Norbert Wiener of MIT (soon to get in trouble with Dr. Jefferson) predicted, the problem that would plague the development of the IAS computer was that at “the Princestitute [the Institute for Advanced Studies] … you are going to run into a situation where you will need a lab at your fingertips, and labs don’t grow in ivory towers.”

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Unable to get Eckert, von Neumann hired an engineer named Julian Bigelow to put together the IAS computer, thinking that the project would take ten people about three years. But von Neumann could not work with Bigelow, who, he felt, tended to go down blind alleys, trying things without a good sense ahead of time of how those ideas would work. And Norbert Wiener turned out to be correct about the lack of receptivity at the IAS toward the computer project. It was housed in a boiler room and then an outbuilding, and even then there were complaints about it from the other scholars. Work that was farmed out went to corporations that didn’t know what was really wanted.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

The word “cyberspace” was coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in his 1984 novel Neuromancer and was invented to describe a new realm of communication among personal computers such as the Apple Macintosh. Gibson adapted it from the word “cybernetics,” a science of networked communications invented by the mid-twentieth-century Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematician Norbert Wiener. And Wiener named his new science of connectivity after the ancient Greek word kybernetes, meaning a steersman or a pilot. It was no coincidence that Wiener—who, along with fellow MIT alumni Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Lick-lider,1 is considered a father of the internet—chose to name his new science after kybernetes.

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He then ran technology at the multinational media conglomerate Time Warner before founding Betaworks in 2008, and there he’s made his fortune investing in multibillion-dollar hits such as Twitter and Airbnb. “I fell in love with the idea of the internet,” Borthwick says, explaining why he became an internet entrepreneur, articulating the same faith as such mid-twentieth-century pioneers as Norbert Wiener that networked technology could pilot us to a better world. It was the idea that a new networked world could be better than the old industrial one. The idea that the internet could transform society by making it more open, more innovative, and more democratic. Over the last quarter century, however, Borthwick’s youthful faith in this idea has evolved into a more ambivalent attitude toward the transformative power of digital technology.

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Private Superpowers: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse In 2015, I published my third book, The Internet Is Not the Answer,15 a work that addressed the skewed distribution of power and wealth in the network age. The tragedy of today’s digital revolution, I argued, is that the ideals of digital pioneers like Norbert Wiener, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, and Jimmy Wales—democracy, equality, enlightenment, freedom, universality, transparency, accountability, above all public space—have not, so far at least, been realized. Instead of Berners-Lee’s public World Wide Web, the online revolution has been appropriated by Garton Ash’s private Silicon Valley superpowers.

User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play
by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant
Published 7 Nov 2019

It’s feedback that allows designers to communicate to their users in a language without words. Feedback is the keystone of the user-friendly world. In fact, the importance of feedback for both mankind and machines was a founding insight of both neuroscience and artificial intelligence. It was pioneered in 1940 by Norbert Wiener, a mathematical genius teaching at MIT. At the height of World War II, the German Luftwaffe had unveiled new warplanes faster than anything that had come before; they bombed British cities with impunity, banking too fast for any gunner to react—retaliatory artillery shells exploded in empty skies.

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One of the most significant technologies of the twenty-first century, artificial intelligence, rests on feedback: Put simply, AI and machine learning are a collection of methods that allow algorithms to gauge how well they’ve performed, and then tweak their own parameters until they perform better. AI’s chief breakthrough was in allowing algorithms to process feedback. (The very first “neural networks” were proposed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts; McCulloch was inspired during one of Norbert Wiener’s first lectures on feedback.)27 While the goal of most feedback is just to reassure us that something has gone as we expected, there are higher values and needs that feedback can address, whether they be soothing us or making us anxious or spurring our competitive instincts. For example, the Facebook Like button allowed us to attach a number to the loose uncertainty of our social bonds; it created a lighter, more fleeting definition of what counted as a relationship.

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In the reactor control room, that feedback came verbally, from the second worker. It’s the same idea. It is a strange kind of world we live in, where to make sure that men make no mayhem with a machine, they’re made to behave like buttons. But then, it’s maybe not surprising on deeper reflection: As Norbert Wiener discovered in his pioneering work designing feedback algorithms for shooting down German bombers, feedback is what turns information into action. Buttons, in turn, have become the connection point between our will and the user-friendly world. Embedded in them is a fundamental truth about how our minds make sense of the world.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 22 Oct 2018

Instead of going by the book, he looked at the reddish crystals, guessed that they were ferric nitrate, and performed two tests to confirm his hunch, which only annoyed his instructor. On another occasion, he brought an entire experimental apparatus to the classroom just to prove a professor wrong. His most significant influence was Norbert Wiener, an associate professor of mathematics who later achieved worldwide fame as the founder of cybernetics. Like Campbell, Wiener had been a child prodigy with a complicated relationship to his father, whom he called his “dearest antagonist.” Campbell later described him as the worst teacher he had ever seen—he would write a complicated expression on the blackboard, state that the result was clear, and move on without elaboration.

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One told him that he was prostituting his talents, while his freshman English teacher, William Chace Greene, Jr., disliked science fiction, giving him a poor grade for a story that stated that light had mass. Campbell responded with a signed note from the physics department, but Greene flunked him anyway. The only professor who ever helped him was Norbert Wiener, who advised him on “Islands of Space.” As for his father, he had merely remarked, after hearing of his first acceptance by Amazing, “It isn’t The Saturday Evening Post.” But Campbell had bought his car. It was a Model A Ford Coupe that he rebuilt from the ground up, like one of his heroes constructing a spaceship.

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At the time of Campbell’s arrival, Rhine had allegedly obtained exceptional results from two students, but his findings were never convincingly replicated. Campbell underwent runs with the Zener cards, but failed to demonstrate any psychic abilities—although he did become convinced of the existence of “the evil eye.” He never became close to Rhine, as he had with Norbert Wiener, but both left their mark on his work. Rhine would be frequently invoked in Campbell’s stories, as well as in those that he published by others, and the entire genre was subtly shaped by his undergraduate encounters with the paranormal. Otherwise, he was rudderless, and he had mixed feelings about North Carolina, which wasn’t the sort of place where he could feel at home.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty. We must be willing to deal in facts rather than in fashionable ideologies if we wish to get through this period unharmed. —Norbert Wiener, 1949 Prologue What Is Progress? Every day, we hear from executives, journalists, politicians, and even some of our colleagues at MIT that we are heading relentlessly toward a better world, thanks to unprecedented advances in technology. Here is your new phone. There goes the latest electric car.

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Then things started getting much worse, economically, politically, and socially, as tech visionaries found a new tool to remake society: artificial intelligence. 9 Artificial Struggle Nothing has been written on this topic which can be considered as decisive—and accordingly we find everywhere men of mechanical genius, of great general acuteness and discriminative understanding, who make no scruple in pronouncing the Automaton a pure machine, unconnected with human agency in its movements, and consequently, beyond all comparison, the most astonishing of the inventions of mankind. —Edgar Allan Poe, “Maelzel’s Chess Player,” 1836 (italics in original) The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. —Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., 1964 In its special report on the future of work in April 2021, the Economist magazine took to task those worrying about inequality and dwindling job opportunities for workers: “Since the dawn of capitalism people have lamented the world of work, always believing that the past was better than the present and that the workers of the day were uniquely badly treated.”

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It is also diverting energy and research away from other, socially more beneficial directions for general-purpose digital technologies. We will next see that paradigms prioritizing machine usefulness have had some remarkable successes in the past when tried and offer many fruitful opportunities for the future. Even before the Dartmouth conference, MIT polymath Norbert Wiener had articulated a different vision, one that positioned machines as complements to humans. Although Wiener did not use the term, MU (machine usefulness) is inspired by his ideas. What we want from machines is not some amorphous notion of intelligence or “high-level capabilities” but their use for human objectives.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

Also accept that some advantages are temporary; as machines keep getting better at certain tasks, today’s safe ground might be eroding very quickly under your feet. The question of what humans are good for is one that has been taken up by various thinkers since machines first showed glimmers of “intelligence.” The legendary Norbert Wiener, who published The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950, established a starting point for the discussion. While his objective was mainly to show how advancing automation could and must enable humans to embrace their humanity more, and he wasn’t as concerned with defining those human attributes too tightly, he did point to creativity and spirituality as parts of the human condition that machines do not share.

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In 1962 he published a widely circulated paper: “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.”4 He even founded an Augmentation Research Center, which in 1969, by the way, constituted one end of the first Internet link ever made. (The University of California, Los Angeles, was the other end.) Jobs borrowed not only Engelbart’s interface ideas, but also his desire to create “wheels for the mind.” Going back further, Norbert Wiener, the MIT colleague of Vannevar Bush whom we mentioned earlier as the author of The Human Use of Human Beings, was expressing his hope already in 1950 that machines would free people from the drudgery of repetitive industrial work so that they could focus on more creative pursuits. Computers (or as he styled them, “computing machines”—the word “computer” referred then, even in an MIT professor’s writing, to the humans hired to perform calculations) had only recently proved their value by performing mathematical functions quickly and accurately, but it was easy to speculate that they would in time exceed humans’ intellect in other ways.

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Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework,” SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223, prepared for Director of Information Sciences, Air Force, Office of Scientific Research, Washington 25, DC, Contract AF 49(638)-1024, SRI Project No. 3578 (AUGMENT,3906), October 1962, http://insitu.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/FONDIHM/2012/papers/Englebart-Augmenting62.pdf. 5. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 159. 6. Maddy Myers, “Google Glass: Inspired by Terminator,” Slice of MIT, May 30, 2013, https://slice.mit.edu/2013/05/30/google-glass-inspired-by-terminator/. 7. David Scott, remarks at the opening of the Computer Museum, June 10, 1982, transcript accessed October 29, 2015, http://klabs.org/history/history_docs/ech/agc_scott.pdf. 8.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

Likewise, I will keep my earnest use of “robot”—a term many engineers hate, because it’s been tainted by sci-fi movies and can be used to describe everything from droids to dishwashers—to a minimum. Part I The Machines One Birth of a Suboptimist The machine’s danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it. —Norbert Wiener The lights dimmed, a guitar lick boomed over the speakers, and a screen behind the stage lit up with the names of robots. Infosec Auditor Bot—Accenture Turbo Extractor Bot—Kraft Heinz Web Monitor Bot—Infosys It was April 2019, and I was in a hotel ballroom in Manhattan, watching a Silicon Valley start-up called Automation Anywhere show off its latest products to a few hundred corporate executives.

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A great primer, written by a prominent AI researcher, and one of the only books about machine learning that has ever made me laugh. Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970). The book that kicked off the futurist craze, and still one of the best examples of writing about the psychological effects of technological change. The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener (1950). An examination of the morality of machines, written by one of my all-time favorite technological thinkers. In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff (1988). Zuboff is better known these days as the author of Surveillance Capitalism, but her earlier book was a prescient look at the future of work during the first IT boom of the 1980s.

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture
by Theodore Roszak
Published 31 Aug 1986

Similarly, if Catalog, we can we turn back to the same hybrid find the and side the rustic skills tools, we Whole Earth taste. Along- discover high and instruments: stereo systems, industrial techniques cameras, cinematography, and, of course, computers. On one page the "Manifesto of the Mad Farmer Liberation Front" (Wendell Berry's plea for family-scaled organic agriculture); on the next, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics. when tried I to first I recall noticed restrain my how it. this But then doubts. juxtaposition jarred I thought again and There was, after all, something charming about the blithe eclecticism of this worldview. Granted that a catalog is by its very nature a melange.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

While The Mindset may have brought us into the digital age, it has not yet figured out how to contend with the primary novelty that digital has wrought: cybernetics —the circular loops generated by computers, surveillance, feedback, and interaction. The term was invented by mathematician and technology philosopher Norbert Wiener when he was designing gun mounts and radar antennas during World War II. The idea was for these systems to respond to incoming sensor data in order to adjust themselves. Instead of merely following an initial command for where to point, the gun would use feedback from its environment to find and follow its target.

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Peters, “Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of ‘The Fourth Turning,’ ” New York Times , April 8, 2017, https:// www .nytimes .com /2017 /04 /08 /us /politics /bannon -fourth -turning .html. 149   1960s science fiction novel : Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (New York: Harper Voyager, 2010). 149   “In Silicon Valley” : Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In,” Guardian , May 11, 2017, https:// www .theguardian .com /world /2017 /may /11 /accelerationism -how -a -fringe -philosophy -predicted -the -future -we -live -in. 150   “It’s a fine line” : Max Chafkin, QAnon Anonymous podcast, December 10, 2021. 150   “cognitive elite” : Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian , February 15, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /news /2018 /feb /15 /why -silicon -valley -billionaires -are -prepping -for -the -apocalypse -in -new -zealand. 150   Thiel also funded : Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin, 2021). Chapter 12: Cybernetic Karma 159   cybernetics : Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: Wiley, 1948). 160   “a kind of vaccination” : Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns (Charmouth, UK: Triarchy Press, 2016), 198–99. 161   butterfly flapping : Edward Lorenz, speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC, December 29, 1972, transcribed in Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993). 162   “anyone may publish” : Ken Jordan and Randall J.

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext
by Belinda Barnet
Published 14 Jul 2013

As Bardini points out, his tool and human systems ‘communicate’ via a process of ‘feedback’ (Bardini 2000, 34), a fundamentally systemic process. Humans and technical machines are also articulated together as different kinds of systems – one of the hallmarks of cybernetics (Hayles 1999). This is not surprising; cybernetics influenced most engineers working in the 1950s (Bardini 2000). Like Norbert Wiener, Engelbart also has a systemic explanation for social structures and for life itself, a theory for the co-evolution of humans and technics. But for Engelbart, this is an unbalanced evolution; until now, it has been the tool system that has been driving human beings. The tool system moves faster than the human system, and it takes a lot of time (sometimes generations) before we can develop the appropriate human infrastructure to deal with changes.

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At the moment it is an unbalanced evolution, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Changing the relationship in favour of human beings is possible. More deeply, this implies that Doug’s revolution requires a reversal of the current relationship between humans and technology; we need to be back in the driver’s seat.3 Hayles (1999) locates a similar contradiction in Norbert Wiener’s work. AUGMENTING THE INTELLECT: NLS 41 In particular, Engelbart feels we need to create tool systems that help us deal with knowledge work in a more effective way. This objective is something he claims he inherited from Bush’s 1945 paper, ‘As We May Think’ (Engelbart 1962), and it formed the basis of the ‘Conceptual Framework for Augmenting Man’s Intellect’ he would later erect to explain and support the development of the oN-Line System (NLS), a prototype hypertext system.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

I’m not threatening, just saying,”197 another user responded with amusement: “Forking is one thing, maintaining is another ;).”198 Denis Pushkarev, the project’s maintainer, chimed in, “Feel free to fork and maintain it - I will only be glad that core-js maintenance now it’s [sic] not my problem.”199 Maintenance costs make the difference between “forking as a credible threat” and “forking as a desirable outcome.” Code, while it’s being traded, appraised, or exchanged, assumes its static form, with all the properties that we’d expect of a commodity. But once it finds users, code springs to life, switching to an active state and incurring hidden costs. To quote Norbert Wiener, the mathematician who pioneered the field of cybernetics, “Information and entropy are not conserved, and are equally unsuited to being commodities.”200 THE HIDDEN COSTS OF SOFTWARE We can think about software as having three major types of costs: creation, distribution, and maintenance.201 Creation is frequently powered by intrinsic motivation.

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v=UIDb6VBO9os. 197 Roy Revelt (revelt), “But guys, this package is not . . .,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 13, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-501661663. 198 Tristanleboss, “@revelt Forking is one thing . . .,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 13, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-501889710. 199 Denis Pushkarev (zloirock), “@revelt please, don’t say me what I should do . . .,” Core-js Issues comment, GitHub, June 14, 2019, https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/571#issuecomment-502040557. 200 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950), 129. 201 Spencer Heath MacCallum, The Art of Community (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970), 48. 202 David Heinemeier Hansson, “Open Source beyond the Market,” Signal v. Noise, May 20, 2019, https://m.signalvnoise.com/open-source-beyond-the-market. 203 David Bollier, “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm,” in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice, eds.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

Pretty much the first thing he did upon sitting me down was to open his laptop and turn it around toward me—a courtly gesture, oddly reminiscent of the serving of tea—so that I could read a few paragraphs of a paper called “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” by the cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. The paper, originally published in the journal Science in 1960, was a brief exploration of the tendency of machines to develop, as they begin to learn, “unforeseen strategies at rates that baffle their programmers.” Stuart, an Englishman who radiated an aura of genial academic irony, directed me toward the last page of the paper, and sat in contemplative silence as I read on his screen the following passage: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete, then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.”

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If we want to be more than mere animals, we need to embrace technology’s potential to make us machines. The idea of the cyborg is mostly associated with science fiction—with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, with RoboCop and The Six Million Dollar Man—but its origins are in the postwar field of cybernetics, which its founder, Norbert Wiener, defined as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” In the posthumanist vision of cybernetics, human beings were not individuals acting autonomously toward their own ends, free agents in pursuit of their destinies, but machines acting within the deterministic logic of larger machines, biological components of vast and complex systems.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

Jennings assiduously avoided the drug scene, never became a Prankster, and would become the driving force and effective general manager of the Catalog and the Truck Store. A “hidden figure” when she was a programmer working for the navy, she was long underappreciated for her role in creating the Catalog as well. John Brockman visited during the Truck Store’s first year and spent the day sitting with Brand painstakingly underlining passages in Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, an early book on cybernetics, while Jennings, seated across the room, worked at laying out an issue of the Catalog. (At the fiftieth anniversary, held in San Francisco in October of 2018, from the stage Brand would acknowledge that Jennings had been the cofounder of the Catalog.)

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And a page before the 9100A was a two-page spread on Human Biocomputer, which “offers the opportunity to learn and explore computers without requiring money or administrative approval.” The signs were there from the beginning. Fuller’s systems thinking perspective and a cybernetic approach to information spilled out of the Catalog. Fuller and Norbert Wiener were highlighted up front (the first two pages of listings—the first thing a reader would encounter after the introductory material—concerned material written by Fuller), and deeper within were discussions (with ordering instructions) of Fuller’s Education Automation and Weiner’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.

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Like Brand, Brown had been significantly influenced by an Aldous Huxley speech; when Brown heard him speak in 1961, the writer had condemned modern education and, when questioned by the future governor, pointed Brown to the study of Zen.[11] Shortly after Brown took office, Brand sent him a letter endorsing his “dialectical approach to truth,” praising the field of cybernetics for providing a similar analytical approach to problems, and offering his services. He included a copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics with several marked passages. (He underscored that the book was a loan. He had previously sent two books to Brown, and they were returned by the governor’s staff because he was unable to accept gifts.) After Brown took up residence in Sacramento, Brand became part of an informal kitchen cabinet or “brain trust” surrounding the young governor.

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling
by Adam Kucharski
Published 23 Feb 2016

So, instead we approximate the process and assume it is unpredictable. We choose to simplify an intricate physical process for the sake of convenience. In life, we must often choose (either consciously or subconsciously) what abstractions to use. The most extensive abstraction would not omit a single detail. As mathematician Norbert Wiener said, “The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.” Capturing the world in such detail is rarely practical, so instead we must strip away certain features. However, the resulting abstraction is our model of reality, influenced by our beliefs and prejudices. Sometimes abstractions have tried to deliberately influence people’s perceptions.

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“Picasso’s Lithograph(s) ‘The Bull(s)’ and the History of Art in Reverse” Art Without History, 75th Annual Meeting, College Art Association of America, February 12–14, 1987. 210Einstein once said of scientific models: Quoted by Sugihara, George. “On Early Warning Signs.” Seed Magazine, May 2013. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_early_warning_signs/. 211“The best material model of a cat”: Widely attributed to Wiener. Quote appears in: Rosenblueth, Arturo, and Norbert Wiener. “The Role of Models in Science.” Philosophy of Science 12, no. 4 (1945): 316–321. 211In 1947, Time magazine published: Chapin, R. M. “Communist Contagion.” Time, April 1946. http://claver.gprep.org/fac/sjochs/communist-contagion-map.htm. 211a piece called “Europe from Moscow”: Chapin, R. M.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
by Quinn Slobodian
Published 16 Mar 2018

(Three volumes published in one, with corrections and revised preface.) Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (New York: Verso, 2013), 54. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the ­Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 232. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948). F. A. Hayek, “Degrees of Explanation (1955),” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, ed. F. A. Hayek (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 19. 348 NOTES TO PAGES 226–230 40.

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Indeed, while Hayek disparaged the ­application of computers to economic policy, he offered, as scholars 226 GLOBALISTS have observed, a vision of the world economy itself as an enormous information pro­cessor beyond the capacity of the h ­ uman mind to e­ ither manufacture or comprehend.37 Cybernetics has its origins in the military research of self-­regulating systems during the Second World War, specifically the design of antiaircraft guns with so-­called servomechanisms that could follow a target without ­human guidance. It is most associated with Norbert Wiener, who coined the term in 1947 and helped pop­u­lar­ized it with his widely read book.38 Yet despite the association of cybernetics with what Wiener called “communication and control,” and the possibility of total oversight within a closed system, Hayek’s approach was to see cybernetics as a h ­ umble science, eschewing omniscience to identify rules of action and reaction at the micro level, which one could only extrapolate to the macro.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

“One of the war’s top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first time to mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was announced here tonight by the War Department,” reported the New York Times, in a front-page story that included a photograph of a thirty-ton machine the size of a room.5 A newsreel called it the world’s first “giant electronic brain.”6 It wasn’t only reporters who likened the new machines to the human brain. In 1948, the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener published a book called Cybernetics, in which he compared the nervous systems of living things with the automatic control systems of machines.7 At Remington Rand, Hopper devised the first “compiler,” which allowed programmers to write code in something close to English.8 In an essay called “The Education of a Computer,” Hopper reported that “it is the current aim to replace, as far as possible, the human brain by an electronic digital computer.”9 Remington Rand unveiled the UNIVAC in 1951, but the machine made its real public debut on Election Night 1952, when CBS News commissioned it to predict the outcome of the election.

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“It will be a narrative history telling of the key decisions and will describe the basic forces and background of the primary and election campaigns,” the New York Times reported about The Making of the President 1960.22 Pool planned a different sort of book. He had a few ideas for what to call it, including the tidy 1960 and the aspirational The People Decide.23 Morgan told him he ought to call it, simply, Simulmatics, an echo of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics.24 By January, between Pool’s trumpeting of Simulmatics to reporters, Morgan’s essay in Harper’s, the radio coverage, and the wire service reports, news that a top secret robot had rigged the 1960 election was eliciting editorials, too. “Mouth more or less agape and breath more or less bated, we have been reading how by ‘simulmatics’ this marvelous contrivance gave young Mr.

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Elizabeth Bernstein Rand, interview with the author, August 20, 2018. “Don’t Pity the Liberal Arts Grads—They’re Bossing the Engineers,” Hartford Courant, February 13, 1962. T. R. Kennedy Jr., “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering,” NYT, February 15, 1946. See my discussion in These Truths, 557–65. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (New York: Wiley, 1948). Clive Thompson, “The Secret History of Women in Coding,” NYT, February 13, 2019. Grace Hopper, “The Education of a Computer [1952],” Annals of the History of Computing 9 (1988): 272. Louis Hyman, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary (New York: Viking, 2018), 127.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel remarked recently that innovations seem to be drying up, not accelerating.1 Tech startups once dreamed of the next big idea to woo investors in the Valley, but now have exit strategies that almost universally aim for acquisitions by big tech companies like Google and Facebook, who have a lock on innovation anyway, since Big Data AI always works better for whoever owns the most data. The fix is in. The question is whether, as Thiel puts it, there is now a “derangement of the culture,” or whether the good ideas have already been snatched up.2 MEGABUCK SCIENCE The polymathic MIT computer scientist and founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener warned about what he called “megabuck” science in an unpublished manuscript, “Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas,” found among his papers after his death in 1964.3 In the early 1950s, Turing had completed his fundamental (and it turned out, final) turn toward the future of invention as human-level AI; Wiener during the same period had begun serious contemplation about a future bereft of ideas necessary for AI, and other fields.

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Yong, “The Human Brain Project Hasn’t Lived Up.” Chapter 18: The End of Science? 1. Peter Thiel, interviewed by Eric Weinstein on “The Portal” podcast, Episode #001: “An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure,” July 19, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s&t=1216s. 2. Ibid. 3. Norbert Wiener, Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 4. Ibid., 89. 5. Ibid., 96. 6. Ibid., 96. 7. Ibid., 87. 8. Ibid., 87. 9. John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1996).

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

In his hypothesis there is a digital basic for apparently analog phenomena (such as motion and time) and for formulas in physics, and we can model our understanding of physics as the simple transformation of a cellular automaton. Others have proposed this possibility. Richard Feynman wondered about it in considering the relationship of information to matter and energy. Norbert Wiener heralded a fundamental change in focus from energy to information in his 1948 book Cybernetic and suggested that the transformation of information, not energy, was the fundamental building block of the universe.60 Perhaps the first to postulate that the universe is being computed on a digital computer was Konrad Zuse in 1967.61 Zuse is best known as the inventor of the first working programmable computer, which he developed from 1935 to 1941.

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The system is almost as accurate as I would be and much faster. Markov Models. Another method that is good at applying probabilistic networks to complex sequences of information involves Markov models.170 Andrei Andreyevich Markov (1856–1922), a renowned mathematician, established a theory of "Markov chains," which was refined by Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) in 1923. The theory provided a method to evaluate the likelihood that a certain sequence of events would occur. It has been popular, for example, in speech recognition, in which the sequential events are phonemes (parts of speech). The Markov models used in speech recognition code the likelihood that specific patterns of sound are found in each phoneme, how the phonemes influence each other, and likely orders of phonemes.

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See the classic article Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, "Conservative Logic," International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21.3–4 (l982): 219–53, http://www.digitalphilosophy.org/download_documents/ConservativeLogic.pdf. Also, a set of concerns about the physics of computation analytically similar to those of Fredkin's may be found in Norman Margolus, "Physics and Computation," Ph.D. thesis, MIT/LCS/TR-415, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 1988. 65. I discussed Norbert Wiener and Ed Fredkin's view of information as the fundamental building block for physics and other levels of reality in my 1990 book, The Age of Intelligent Machines. The complexity of casting all of physics in terms of computational transformations proved to be an immensely challenging project, but Fredkin has continued his efforts.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

The metaphorical leaps that we consider of significance tend to take place in the interstices of different disciplines. Working against this essential force of creativity, however, is the pervasive trend toward ever greater specialization in the sciences (and just about every other field as well). As American mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) wrote in his seminal book Cybernetics, published the year I was born (1948): There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field.

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He went on to hypothesize a situation in which a system has such a hierarchy of linear sequences of states, but those are unable to be directly examined—hence the name hidden Markov models. The lowest level of the hierarchy emits signals, which are all we are allowed to see. Markov provides a mathematical technique to compute what the probabilities of each transition must be based on the observed output. The method was subsequently refined by Norbert Wiener in 1923. Wiener’s refinement also provided a way to determine the connections in the Markov model; essentially any connection with too low a probability was considered not to exist. This is essentially how the human neocortex trims connections—if they are rarely or never used, they are considered unlikely and are pruned away.

The Soul of a New Machine
by Tracy Kidder
Published 1 Jan 1981

There were Datum, Data Pro and Data I/O, Tri Data, Epic Data, Facit Data, Control Data, Decision Data, Data General and Data Specialties. And we didn't have time even to glance at the wares of Itek, Pertec, Mostek, Wavetek, Intertek, Ramtek ... Ah, Ramtek. "In 'seventy-three," said Wallach, "there were two floors, and now there are four floors and it's just as crowded." Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics in order to describe the study of "control and communication in the animal and the machine." In 1947 he wrote that because of the development of the "ultra-rapid computing machine,... the average human being of mediocre attainments or less" might end up having "nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy."

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Which is it, though: the technology or the way people use it? Who controls this technology? Can it be controlled? Jacques Ellul, throwing up his hands, wrote that technology operates by its own terrible laws, alterable by no human action except complete abandonment of technique. More sensible, I think, Norbert Wiener, prophesied that the computer would offer "unbounded possibilities for good and for evil," and he advanced, faintly, the hope that the contributors to this new science would nudge it in a humane direction. But he also invoked the fear that its development would fall "into the hands of the most irresponsible and venal of our engineers."

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks
by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Published 16 May 2016

But at the center it is dense, still, and even quiet, with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated power. Yin. In fact, this debate hovers at the dawn of the network revolution. The computer-science pioneer Claude Shannon saw information in 1949 as pulsing with the instability of an entropic system. Yang. The machine architect Norbert Wiener, writing at nearly the same moment in 1948, saw the digital age differently, as an expression of stability and structure. Yin. His vision for a digital order, what he called cybernetics, emerged from the Greek concept of kibernetes—the orderly steering of a ship through sometimes chaotic waters.

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Balasubramaniam, and Yevgeni Koucheryavy, “The Internet of Bio-Nano Things,” IEEE Communications Magazine 53, no. 3 (March 2015): 32–40. The computer-science pioneer: See David Bawden and Lyn Robinson, “Waiting for Carnot: Information and Complexity,” Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66, no. 11 (November 2015): 2177–86; Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1948); Warren Weaver, “Science and Complexity,” American Scientist 36, no. 4 (October 1948): 536–44. They are ordered: Carlos Gershenson, Péter Csermely, Péter Érdi, “The Past, Present and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research,” arXiv:1308.6317v3, September 23, 2013.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
by Anil Seth
Published 29 Aug 2021

— In the 1950s, at the dawn of the computer age, the emerging disciplines of cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI) were equally promising and in many ways inseparable. Cybernetics – from the Greek kybernetes, meaning ‘steersman’ or ‘governor’ – was described by one of its founders, the mathematician Norbert Wiener, as ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’. The emphasis of cybernetics was squarely on control, and its primary applications were in systems – such as guided missiles – that involved closed-loop feedback from output to input. One conspicuous feature of this approach was that such systems could appear to have ‘purposes’ or ‘goals’, like hitting a target.

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This view of consciousness and human nature does not exclude the possibility of conscious machines, but it does undercut the amped-up techno-rapture narrative of soon-to-be-sentient computers that propels our fears and permeates our dreams. From the beast machine perspective, the quest to understand consciousness places us increasingly within nature, not further apart from it. Just as it should. Notes a golem: In his 1964 book God and Golem, Inc., the polymathic pioneer Norbert Wiener treated golems as central to his speculations about risks of future AI. vast mound of paperclips: In the parable of the paperclip maximiser, an AI is designed to make as many paperclips as possible. Because this AI lacks human values but is otherwise very smart, it destroys the world in its successful attempt to do so.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

Other examples of self-regulating feedback control systems include the steam engine governor, created by James Watt (1736–1819), and the thermostat, invented by Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633), who also invented the submarine. James Clerk Maxwell (1868) initiated the mathematical theory of control systems. A central figure in the post-war development of control theory was Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). Wiener was a brilliant mathematician who worked with Bertrand Russell, among others, before developing an interest in biological and mechanical control systems and their connection to cognition. Like Craik (who also used control systems as psychological models), Wiener and his colleagues Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow challenged the behaviorist orthodoxy (Rosenblueth et al., 1943).

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If superhuman AI were a black box that arrived from outer space, then indeed it would be wise to exercise caution in opening the box. But it is not: we design the AI systems, so if they do end up “taking control,” as Turing suggests, it would be the result of a design failure. To avoid such an outcome, we need to understand the source of potential failure. Norbert Wiener (1960), who was motivated to consider the long-term future of AI after seeing Arthur Samuel’s checker-playing program learn to beat its creator, had this to say: If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively ... we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.

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The two shared the Nobel Prize in 1906 but gave mutually antagonistic acceptance speeches. 9A complex machine named after a British cartoonist who depicted whimsical and absurdly complicated contraptions for everyday tasks such as buttering toast. 10In the postwar period, Turing wanted to use these computers for AI research—for example, he created an outline of the first chess program (Turing et al., 1953)—but the British government blocked this research. 11Now Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). 12This was the first official usage of McCarthy’s term artificial intelligence. Perhaps “computational rationality” would have been more precise and less threatening, but “AI” has stuck. At the 50th anniversary of the Dartmouth conference, McCarthy stated that he resisted the terms “computer” or “computational” in deference to Norbert Wiener, who was promoting analog cybernetic devices rather than digital computers. 13Newell and Simon also invented a list-processing language, IPL, to write LT. They had no compiler and translated it into machine code by hand. To avoid errors, they worked in parallel, calling out binary numbers to each other as they wrote each instruction to make sure they agreed. 14Some have characterized this change as a victory of the neats—those who think that AI theories should be grounded in mathematical rigor—over the scruffies—those who would rather try out lots of ideas, write some programs, and then assess what seems to be working.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street
by William Poundstone
Published 18 Sep 2006

It has been claimed that this was the most important master’s thesis of all time. Vannevar Bush was so impressed that he insisted that the mathematics department accept Shannon for his doctoral work. The result was too momentous to be “mere” electrical engineering. Bush’s mercurial colleague Norbert Wiener was equally impressed. (When Wiener got upset with someone, which was often, he sometimes wrote an unflattering caricature of the person into a private, forever-unpublished novel. Bush was the villain of one of these novels.) Wiener realized the superiority of Shannon’s digital computation to that in Bush’s analog computer.

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Shannon came to feel that information theory had been over-sold. In a 1956 editorial he gently derided the information theory “bandwagon.” People who did not understand the theory deeply were seizing on it as a trendy metaphor and overstating its relevance to fields remote from its origin. Other theorists such as Norbert Wiener and Peter Elias took up this theme. It was time, Elias acidly wrote, to stop publishing papers with titles like “Information Theory, Photosynthesis, and Religion.” To Shannon, Wiener, and Elias, the question of information theory’s relevance was more narrowly defined than it was for Marshall McLuhan.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

In the early sixties, he was running a research program on computing at NASA headquarters. Although he was not a computer scientist, Taylor had read widely in the literature about the interaction of humans and computers. He had also been intrigued by Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic article when he was in college and had read the work of cyberneticist Norbert Wiener. Most important, however, was that he knew J. C. R. Licklider, who was a leading researcher in the area of psychoacoustics and a close friend of Taylor’s thesis adviser at Texas. Beginning in 1960, Licklider had sketched out a vision that closely paralleled Engelbart’s in a paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis.”

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It was the second half of the short introduction that neatly captured the various threads that would soon come together to liberate the computer from large, impersonal institutions: “a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.” In the first catalog, there wasn’t much computing power to tap into. The HP 9100A calculator, referred to as a computer on the title page, was given a glowing review; Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and the September 1966 Scientific American issue on information were also reviewed. The scarcity of material in this particular area didn’t matter; the principle of valued tools controlled by the individual was established firmly. On the verge of publishing the first Catalog the following month, Brand saw himself not so much as an entrepreneur but as an artist who was exploring new media, and he was immediately struck by the possibilities of computers that were moving beyond being calculators.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
by Terrence J. Sejnowski
Published 27 Sep 2018

Yes, it is true that a Turing machine can compute any computable function given enough memory and enough time, but nature had to solve problems in real The Dawn of Neural Networks 39 time. To do this, it made use of the brain’s neural networks that, like the most powerful computers on the planet, have massively parallel processors. Algorithms that run efficiently on them will eventually win out. Early Pioneers In the 1950s and 1960s, shortly after Norbert Wiener introduced cybernetics, based on communications and control systems in both machines and living creatures,3 there was an explosion of interest in self-organizing systems. As a small sample of the ingenious creations that explosion gave rise to, Oliver Selfridge created Pandemonium,4 a pattern recognition device in which feature-detecting “demons” vied with one another for the right to represent objects in images (a metaphor for deep learning; figure 3.3); and Bernard Widrow and his student Ted Hoff at Stanford invented the LMS (least mean squares) learning algorithm,5 which, along with its successors, is used extensively for adaptive signal processing in numerous applications from noise cancellation to financial forecasting.

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At a local level, differences in cellular properties and connectivity are found between different parts of the cortex, which presumably reflect specialization for different sensory systems and different levels in the hierarchies. 2. P. C. Wason, “Self-Contradictions,” in P. N. Johnson-Laird and P. C. Wason, eds., Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 3. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948). 4. O. G. Selfridge, “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” in D. V. Blake and A. M. Uttley, eds., Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanisation of Thought Processes (1959): 511–529. Notes 291 5.

Information: A Very Short Introduction
by Luciano Floridi
Published 25 Feb 2010

Indeed, the classic debate on the ultimate nature of reality could be reconstructed in terms of the possible interpretations of that principle. All this explains why the physics of information is consistent with two slogans, this time popular among scientists, both favourable to the proto-physical nature of information. The first is by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the father of cybernetics: `information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.' The other is by John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008), a very eminent physicist, who coined the expression `it from bit' to indicate that the ultimate nature of physical reality, the `it', is informational, comes from the `bit'.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise
by Nathan L. Ensmenger
Published 31 Jul 2010

In reality, many of the predictions made by contemporaries about the revolutionary potential of the electronic computer were, if anything, wildly optimistic. Almost before there were any computers—functional, modern, electronic digital stored-program computers—enthusiasts for the new technology were confidently anticipating its influence on contemporary society. As early as 1948 the cybernetician Norbert Wiener was predicting a “second industrial revolution” enabled by the electronic computer.2 A year later, the computer consultant Edmund Berkeley, in his popular book Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think, described a near future in which computers radically transformed a broad range of human cognitive and occupational activities, including business, law, education, and medicine.3 Despite the fact that electronic computers were in this period little more than glorified calculating machines, the provocative image of the computer as a “giant” or “mechanical brain” quickly became established in the popular imagination.

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David Morrison, “Software Crisis,” Defense 21, no. 2 (1989): 72. 67. John Shore, “Why I Never Met a Programmer I Could Trust,” Communications of the ACM 31, no. 4 (1988): 372. Chapter 2 1. I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 2. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1948). 3. Edmund Callis Berkeley, Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think (New York: Wiley, 1949). 4. Steven P. Schnaars and Sergio Carvalho, “Predicting the Market Evolution of Computers: Was the Revolution Really Unforeseen,” Technology in Society 26, no. 1 (2004): 1–16. 5.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 1 Feb 2003

Synchrony The best way to learn about the subject of coupled oscillators is from Steve Strogatz himself in his recent book: Strogatz, S. H. Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (Hyperion, Los Angeles, 2003). Strogatz has also written two shorter accounts of his (and related) work on the Kuramoto model: Strogatz, S. H. Norbert Wiener’s brain waves. In Levin, S. A. (ed.), Frontiers in Mathematical Biology, Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, 100 (Springer, New York, 1994), pp. 122–138. Strogatz, S. H., and Stewart, I. Coupled oscillators and biological synchronization. Scientific American, 269(6), 102–109 (1993). The Road Less Traveled Winfree’s original paper on the entrainment of coupled oscillators that kicked off much of the recent literature, and that was my initial reference point, is Winfree, A.

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(ed.), Lectures in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. I, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989), pp. 301–354. Strogatz, S. H. Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos with Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry, and Engineering (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1994). ———. Norbert Wiener’s brain waves. In Levin, S. A. (ed.), Frontiers in Mathematical Biology, Lecture Notes in Biomathematics, 100 (Springer, New York, 1994), pp. 122–138. ———. Exploring complex networks. Nature, 410, 268–275 (2001). ———. Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (Hyperion, Los Angeles, 2003).

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012

.* The Technological Society (9 Pure science seems to be yielding its place to an applied science which now and again reaches a brilliant peak from which new technical research becomes possible. Conversely, certain technical modifications— in airplanes, for instance— which may seem simple and mechanical, presuppose complex scientific work. The problem of reaching supersonic velocities is one. The considered opinion of Norbert Wiener is that the younger generation of research workers in the United States consists primarily of technicians who are un­ able to do research at all without the help of machines, large teams of men, and enormous amounts of money. The relation between science and technique becomes even less clear when we consider the newer fields, which have no boundaries.

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Indeed, the period which followed the Renaissance and the Reformation was much less fertile in invention than the period whichhad preceded them. Printing, the nautical compass, gunpowder (also copied from the East), all date from the fifteenth century. It would not do to minimize the importance of these inventions. For Norbert Wiener, they “constitute the locus of an industrial revolution which pre­ ceded the principal industrial revolution.” Wiener, in a remarkable way, relates the principal inventions of this period to navigation, which, he proposes, was the propulsive force behind research. Alongside these major inventions, this period also saw a multitude of discoveries and new applications in banking, armaments, ma­ chinery, architecture (for example, the discovery of a new system for constructing the dome, as applied to Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs), and in agriculture and the making of furniture.

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Mumford’s thesis is incomprehensible unless technique is re­ stricted to the machine; Mumford actually makes this identifica­ tion. His distinction is then valid as a plan for the historical study of machines, but it is totally invalid for the study of technical civilization. When technical civilization is considered as a whole, this classification and explanation are shockingly surr.rr.ary and superficial. Norbert Wiener likewise rejects tbe classification founded on the different sources of energy. For him there has been only one industrial revolution, and that consisted in the replace­ ment of human muscle as a source of energy. And, he adds, there is a second revolution in the making whose object is the replace­ ment of the human brain.

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

From 1941, moreover, Merton worked with Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia’s Office of Radio Research, a group seen by the industry as allied to the critics of the communications monopoly. Lazarsfeld and Merton developed methods for studying radio as a social agent, which they subsequently took pains to discuss with Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics group. Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), the book that made Merton’s name, proceeded sequentially from the sociology of media to the sociology of science – something we miss today when we read only the latter sections. In fact, he had pursued the two fields simultaneously.

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These phenomena occurred across a range of systems the outputs of which “fed back” into the system itself: guncontrol devices, engine governors, electronic circuits. All could in principle be treated as mathematically isomorphic. Tackling them as such, mathematicians and engineers like Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and Norbert Wiener developed a theory of what they called information. Piracy and patenting took on new and central roles in that theory. Wiener in particular took the commitments to openness voiced in the AT&T furor and by proponents of liberalism like Plant and Polanyi, and articulated for them a place in the creation of an information age.

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He also directed them to Radical Software, a periodical emanating from a New York group of artists in the brandnew homeproduction medium of videotape. Operating oxymoronically as the Center for Decentralized Television, Radical Software was heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, and also by Norbert Wiener’s antiproprietorial vision of information. The magazine proclaimed in the first lines of its first issue the imperative to universalize access to information, not least by abjuring copyright. It included what it called a “pirated” interview with Fuller, and invented a symbol to represent the “antithesis” of ©.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

“I think the proposal points to the way all computers will be operated in the future,” McCarthy wrote to the head of MIT’s computing lab in early 1959, “and we have a chance to pioneer a big step forward in the way computers are used.”4 John McCarthy was hardly the only person in Boston who was thinking about how to improve the human-computer interface. A ferment of conversation had been brewing around the issue ever since the late 1940s, when the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, had led a legendary series of weekly seminars in Cambridge to debate questions of man and machine. The notion of getting computers to talk to one another wasn’t impossible to imagine: digital networking had been around nearly as long as the digital computer itself via another born-in-Boston system, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE.

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Many were professionals in their twenties and thirties, with children, mortgages, and graduate degrees. Thus the gulf between the scientific Cold Warriors and the techno-utopians was not as great as it seemed. Many of the ideas that animated the personal-computer crusade, like human-computer interaction and networked collaboration, were the same ones that had consumed the Cambridge seminars of Norbert Wiener in the 1940s and the labs of McCarthy and Minsky and Licklider in the 1950s. The new generation believed in the same principle that had animated government science ever since Vannevar Bush celebrated its “endless frontier” in 1945: technological innovation would cure society’s problems and build a better American future.16 Such technophilia also made this change-the-world movement oddly conservative when it came to disrupting conventional gender roles, reckoning with society’s racism, or acknowledging yawning economic and educational inequalities.

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The environmental and social costs of the era’s tech boom are explored in Lenny Siegel and John Markoff, The High Cost of High Tech (1985). On the culture wars on campus and beyond, see Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America (2015). On broader cultural and political polarization, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2012). The literature on artificial intelligence and “machines that think” is rich and engaging. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) and its popularizing contemporary, Edmund Callis Berkeley’s Giant Brains, or, Machines That Think (1949), remain fascinating and revealing reads. Secondary works that helped inform this part of the story include Daniel Crevier, AI (1993); John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (2015); and Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines (2016).

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

It proves you are real. 5. Bug in the System (About the Dark Side of VR) Paranoid Android After my mother died, sequences of words had shown me the way out of the hospital. “Choose life.” Now that I was a teenager, other sequences of words nearly sent me back in. Ellery had given me his copy of Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings when I started college and became interested in computer science. This is a profoundly terrifying book, written so early in the game that Wiener had to define basic terms. He articulated an approach to the future of computation that he called cybernetics. Wiener realized that someday, when computers would become thoroughly integrated into human affairs, we would only be able to understand people and computers as portions of a system that included both.

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“I hadn’t noticed until you pointed it out.” On Track I had been building up a sense of mission for years and it was finally becoming more focused. I would prod the gang to build machines to make social VR possible, and promote VR as a suitably intense source of fascination to compete with the mind-control games and foolishness that Norbert Wiener worried about. VR would be the alternative to AI. If a high-level strategy was becoming clear, the ground-level tactical game was still vague. Should we try a startup? Try to cajole a university or big company into supporting us in a VR lab? Just earn enough money from games or whatever to make the stuff with no regard for any existing precedent?

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

In 1939, the British Keynesian economist George Shackle published an article titled “The Multiplier in Closed and Open Systems,” a commentary on the theoretical uncertainties inherent in export and import values in an “open economy.”26 The language of open systems also appeared in the work of the sociologist Talcott Parsons, who in 1943 described the “Kinship System of the Contemporary United States” as an “open, multilineal, conjugal system,” one in which individuals choose their marriage partners rather than having marriages arranged on their behalf. In 1945, the term “open systems” appeared again in a different context – this time in the journal Philosophy of Science. Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener published an article, “The Role of Models in Science,” where they contrasted theoretical models that they called “closed box” and “open box.” The distinction between these two types of models came from the number of fixed finite variables that each system had: fewer in closed boxes, many more in open boxes.

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Shackle,” The Austrian Economics Newsletter (1983), available from http://mises.org/journals/aen/aen4_1_1.asp (accessed January 27, 2012). 27 Talcott Parsons, “The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States,” American Anthropologist, New Series, 45 (1943): 22–38; Arturo Rosenblueth and Norbert Wiener, “The Role of Models in Science,” Philosophy of Science 12 (1945): 316–321. 28 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology,” Science New Series 111 (1950): 23–29; Ludwig von Bertalanffy, “An Outline of General System Theory,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 1 (1950): 139–164. 29 W.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

Will you accept that?”48 Asimov’s depiction of psychohistory was inspired by the new field of cybernetics. Along with nuclear fission and rocketry, the costarring technologies in the science fiction of the day, automated control systems were one of the great technological leaps of World War II. Led by Norbert Wiener at MIT, cybernetics built on wartime research in antiaircraft targeting techniques that used past observations of flight trajectories to improve predictions of an aircraft’s future position. Cybernetics took the idea of using sensing and feedback to optimize performance and extended it to the universe generally.

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Thinking about the unthinkable dictated a whole new approach to building cities. By concentrating population, infrastructure, and industrial capacity in nice, big, juicy, megaton-sized targets, they had become a liability in the nuclear age. As early as 1950, none other than the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, wrote in Life magazine, “The decentralization of our cities on the spots on which they stand, plus the release of our whole communications system from the threat of a disastrous tie-up, are reforms which are long overdue. . . . For a city is primarily a communications center, serving the same purpose as a nerve center in the body.”72 While suburbanization was driven by broader economic and technological forces, defense planners certainly welcomed and encouraged the decentralization of population.73 The federal government was much less subtle with businesses, intensively studying and promoting “industrial dispersion” throughout the 1950s.74 Today, our own doomsday scenario is also man-made.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend
by Barbara Oakley Phd
Published 20 Oct 2008

Indeed, studies have shown that the borderline traits of affective instability and impulsivity run in families.54 But since each of the unlucky borderline traits involving impulsivity, mood disturbances, and cognitive dysfunction is, for the most part, separately heritable, it's unlikely that you'd inherit every one of them, even if one of your parents were to be borderline. We have reason to believe that the spotty heritability situation is similar with antisocial personality disorder (which can actually arise from many different causes, some of which are solely environmental), and even psychopathy. An Emergenic Prodigy Speaks of Jewish “Smarts” Norbert Wiener was a child prodigy who received his doctorate from Harvard at age eighteen; he would go on to discover important mathematical properties related to communications, robotics, computer control, and automation. Wiener's father claimed that it was his training methods alone that had made his son so brilliant—otherwise Norbert would have been a perfectly ordinary child.

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Yolken, “Toxoplasma gondii and Schizophrenia,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 9, no. 11 (2003): 1375–80. 52. Ni et al., “Association between Serotonin”; A. E. Skodol et al., “The Borderline Diagnosis II: Biology, Genetics, and Clinical Course,” Biological Psychiatry 51, no. 12 (2002): 951–63. 53. Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953), p. 158. 54. Larry J. Siever, Harold W. Koenigsberg, and Deidre Reynolds, “Neurobiology of Personality Disorders: Implications for a Neurodevelopmental Model,” in Neurodevelopmental Mechanisms in Psychopathology, ed. Dante Cicchetti and Elaine Walker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 416–17; A.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

Opposite it sits a gushing review of the HP 9100A Calculator, “the best of the new tabletop number-crunchers”. On the previous page sits a review of The Human Biocomputer, an exploration into psychedelics and sensory deprivation by the neuroscientist John Lily, inventor of the flotation tank. The page following it features the McGraw-Hill encyclopaedia of Space. Sitting respectably on page 12, Norbert Wiener’s now seminal work on cybernetics, The Human Use of Human Beings is described as “social, untechnical, ultimate in most of its consideration. Its domain is the whole earth of mind.” Later in the catalogue, Wiener’s other great work, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine is reviewed.

Machine Translation
by Thierry Poibeau
Published 14 Sep 2017

The same goes for translation, which can be seen as decoding a given text (the text is considered “encoded” in an unknown language: in order to be comprehensible, it must therefore be translated; in other words, decoded in the target language). Beginning in 1947, Weaver corresponded with the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener concerning machine translation. He proposed that translation could be considered a “decoding” problem: One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: “This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

Still more recently, they were the pioneers of the electronic and digital revolution, Silicon Valley cowboys who made the imaginative leaps and took the risks in the 1960s and 1970s that allowed the consolidators and businessmen who established the monopolies and made the fortunes in the 1980s and 1990s to flourish. These were not the Bill Gateses of the cyberworld, but people like novelist William Gibson, John Perry Barlow (who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead), and the great cyber-pioneer Norbert Wiener. There is perhaps no better American model of this precapitalist swash-buckler archetype than John D. Rockefeller’s father. On his way to depicting the life of John D., biographer Ron Chernow offers a sidebar portrait of William Rockefeller that captures America’s precapitalist prelude right after the Civil War and immediately before the great capitalist breakout that would be called the Gilded Age.

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Friedman rightly extols the pioneering work of Marc Andreessen in developing the Mosaic web browser, which set an industry standard and turned the internet into a usable technology.80 What he fails to notice is that it was not Andreessen the pioneer but Gates the rational consolidator who fashions the consumer monopoly and makes the fortune off of pioneers who came first. Let others test the market: then jump when the results are in. Let someone else invent: then buy the fruits of their invention. It was a field with pioneers aplenty, a plethora of brilliant people with ingenious ideas going all the way back to the father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener of MIT. There were mathematicians like John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, who invented BASIC but never managed to commercialize their work, as well as other visionaries who either lacked the technical expertise (William Gibson or John Perry Barlow, for example), or creators like Ed Roberts, the inventor of the Altair 8800, whose careers floundered as their fledging companies were bought up before the big money was made.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 7 Feb 2017

This clarifies the physical environment in which all R&D must take place, but the R&D itself, the development of pattern-detection “devices” that can refine the ore, find the needles, is a process that we are only now beginning to understand in a bottom-up way. Up until now we have been able to reason about the semantic-level information needed for various purposes (to inform rational choices, to steer, to build a better mousetrap, to control an elevator) independently of considerations of how this semantic information was physically embodied. As Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, once put it (1961, p. 132): “Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism that does not admit this can survive at the present day.” 23Colgate and Ziock (2010) provide a brief, useful summary of some of the history of definitions of information growing out of the work of Shannon and Weaver. 24Giulio Tononi (2008) has proposed a mathematical theory of consciousness as “integrated information” that utilizes Shannon information theory in a novel way and has a very limited role for aboutness: it measures the amount of Shannon information a system or mechanism has about its own previous state—that is, the states of all its parts.

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Shannon’s enabling stroke was to abstract the concept of information away from thermodynamics, away from the concept of energy (and matter, as noted above); information is information whether electrons or photons or smoke signals or magnetic regions or microscopic pits in plastic disks are involved. It takes energy to transmit and transform information (it isn’t magic, after all) but we can isolate our understanding of the information processing from whatever energetic considerations are in play. Norbert Wiener created the field, and the term, cybernetics. He took the Greek verb for steer or govern—κυβερνάω—kybernao—from which the English word govern is also derived—and noted that while the controller (of a ship, a city, a body, an oil refinery) needs to use energy at some interface (to push the rudder, utter the decree, turn up the temperature), the energy required to run the control system itself is ad lib—whatever you like, and not very much.

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science
by Chris Bernhardt
Published 12 May 2016

McCulloch and Pitts realized that this was a simplified model of how brains actually worked, but studied neural nets to see how logic could be handled by them. Since their nets had basic features in common with neurons and the human brain, their work, they hoped, would shed some light on logical reasoning in people. Their paper caught the attention of both John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. Both were very impressed. Wiener, the famous American mathematician and philosopher, saw the power of feedback loops. He realized that they were widely applicable and used this idea to develop the theory of cybernetics.1 Cybernetics naturally led to the idea of machines that could learn and, in turn, led to the birth of artificial intelligence.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism
by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Published 5 Mar 2019

The first edition of Beer’s 1959 book on the subject, Cybernetics and Management, does not even make reference to computers, and, as Medina is keen to stress, Beer himself was an intransigent critic of how business and government deployed computers. Cybernetics is not management by algorithm. It is not digital Taylorism. During World War II, MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener and his engineering colleague Julian Bigelow were tasked with developing ways of improving the targeting of enemy aircraft. Following consultations with an early neuropsychologist, the two developed an apparatus that automatically helped the human gunner to correct their aim through what they called feedback, a circular method of control through which the rules governing a process are modified in response to their results or effects.

Alone Together
by Sherry Turkle
Published 11 Jan 2011

CHAPTER 3: TRUE COMPANIONS 1 Three recent works by authors who have influenced my thinking are Jessica Riskin, ed., Genesis Redux: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life (New York: Anchor, 2003); and Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Johnson explores how relations between persons and things can be more fluid while arguing a central ethical tenet: persons should be treated as persons. 2 Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966). 3 The literature on the negotiation of technology, self, and social world is rich and varied. I have been particularly influenced by the perspectives described in Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P.

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pagewanted=all (accessed September 9, 2009). 5 I cite this student in Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 271. The full Norbert Weiner citation is “This is an idea with which I have toyed before—that it is conceptually possible for a human being to be sent over a telegraph line.” See Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 36. 6 People drawn to sociable robots seem to hit a wall that has come to be known as the “uncanny valley.” This phrase is believed to have been coined by Masahiro Mori in “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy 7, no. 4 (1970): 33-35, An English translation by Karl F.

Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
by Adam Greenfield
Published 14 Sep 2006

Thesis 45 Users will understand their transactions with everyware to be essentially social in nature. There's good reason to believe that users will understand their transactions with ubiquitous systems to be essentially social in nature, whether consciously or otherwise—and this will be true even if there is only one human party to a given interaction. Norbert Wiener, the "father of cybernetics," had already intuited something of this in his 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings: according to Wiener, when confronted with cybernetic machines, human beings found themselves behaving as if the systems possessed agency. This early insight was confirmed and extended in the pioneering work of Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, published in 1996 as The Media Equation.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

If some of these sentiments sound familiar, it is because they have echoed in dozens of Apple commercials over the years. In a way, this was a theory of radical individualism and self-reliance—a forerunner of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But Brand had studied the works of such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan. All of his intellectual heroes wrote about the importance of looking at systems and networks. This was where the notion of the Whole Earth came in. Brand wanted his readers to think ecologically, to see how everything relates to everything else, to understand their place in the web of life.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

Licklider 147 GENERATIONS There are many mathematicians, early computer scientists, and engineers who deserve to be considered part of the first generation of pioneering Patriarchs. They include Alan Turing, already discussed in chapter 2; mathematician and quantum theorist John von Neumann; cyberneticist Norbert Wiener; information theorist Claude Shannon; and computer architects like the German Konrad Zuse, and Americans J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who developed ENIAC, the room-sized machine at the University of Pennsylvania that we recognize as the first general-purpose electronic computer. These were the Patriarchs who set the parameters for computer science, laying out the issues for software development, building the original architectures for hardware, and creating the cultures of computer science and engineering.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

It starts like this. Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers—Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush. The trend owes its health to an odd array of influences: The youthful fervor and firm dis-Establishmentarianism of the freaks who design computer science; an astonishingly enlightened research program from the very top of the Defense Department; an unexpected market-Banking movement by the manufacturers of small calculating machines; and an irrepressible midnight phenomenon known as Spacewar.

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
by Simon Singh
Published 29 Oct 2013

Curious about what else was making my fellow geeks chortle, I asked people to e-mail me their favorite mathematical jokes, and for the past decade I have received a steady flow of comedic offerings of a nerdy nature, ranging from dismal puns to rich anecdotes. One of my favorites is a story that was originally told by the historian of mathematics Howard Eves (1911–2004). The tale concerns the mathematician Norbert Wiener, who pioneered cybernetics: When [Wiener] and his family moved to a new house a few blocks away, his wife gave him written directions on how to reach it, since she knew he was absentminded. But when he was leaving his office at the end of the day, he couldn’t remember where he put her note, and he couldn’t remember where the new house was.

Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
Published 16 Sep 2019

First, we assume that an organization is a sociotechnical system or ecosystem that is shaped by the interaction of individuals and the teams within it; in other words, that an organization is the interaction between people and technology. In this aspect, the book fits with ideas from the fields of: cybernetics (especially the use of the organization as a “sensing mechanism,” which goes back as far as 1948, when Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine was first published), systems thinking (particularly the work of W. Edwards Deming), and approaches such as the Cynefin framework for assessing domain complexity (described by Dave Snowden and Mary Boone in their 2007 Harvard Business Review paper titled “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”), and adaptive structuration theory (a term coined by Gerardine DeSanctis and Marshall Scott Poole in their Organization Science article, “Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory,” where they emphasized that the impact of technology is not a given, as it depends on how groups and organizations perceive it).

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

Consider the following assertion made by the intellectual fathers of AI, that AI is not developed with the purpose of replacing the human race – and thereby reversing the power dynamics – in a society that is becoming increasingly automated. Instead, it aims to contribute to the optimization and well-being of a human society defined by the unique values that make it human. The following passage from a 1960 article by Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, is particularly compelling in this respect: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete, then we better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colorful imitation of it.”²¹⁵ With this peculiar challenge in mind, I would like to return to the story that I told you earlier, about my executive students asking whether soft skills will have a place in the leadership of tomorrow.

Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 27 Aug 2007

Or to put it another way, the act of computation had become an abstraction embodied in what is now known as software. The history of information technology offers many other examples of invention-by-convergence. Among them: —The modern concept of information and information processing was a synthesis of insights developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and John von Neumann.12 —The hobbyists who sparked the personal computer revolution in the late 1970s were operating (consciously or not) in the context of ideas that had been around for a decade or more. There was the notion of interactive comput- 2990-7 ch11 waldrop 7/23/07 12:13 PM innovation and adaptation Page 125 125 ing, for example, in which a computer would respond to the user’s input immediately (as opposed to generating a stack of fanfold printout hours later); this idea dated back to the Whirlwind project, an experiment in real-time computing that began at MIT in the 1940s.13 There were the twin notions of individually controlled computing (having a computer apparently under the control of a single user) and home computing (having a computer in your own house); both emerged in the 1960s from MIT’s Project MAC, an early experiment in time-sharing.14 And then there was the notion of a computer as an open system, meaning that a user could modify it, add to it, and upgrade it however he or she wanted; that practice was already standard in the minicomputer market, which was pioneered by the Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1960s.15 —The Internet as we know it today represents the convergence of (among other ideas) the notion of packet-switched networking from the 1960s;16 the notion of internetworking (as embodied in the TCP/IP protocol), which was developed in the 1970s to allow packets to pass between different networks;17 and the notion of hypertext—which, of course, goes back to Vannevar Bush’s article on the memex in 1945. 2990-7 ch11 waldrop 7/23/07 12:13 PM Page 126 2990-7 ch12 kurth 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 127 Part IV What Could Be 2990-7 ch12 kurth 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 128 2990-7 ch12 kurth 7/23/07 12:14 PM Page 129 12 Cassandra versus Pollyanna A Debate between James Kurth and Gregg Easterbrook James Kurth: I am an optimist about the current pessimism, but a pessimist overall.

Time Travel: A History
by James Gleick
Published 26 Sep 2016

“There is a strong temptation to throw up one’s hands and proclaim the whole thing is an illusion.” A landmark on that road is an essay published in 1908 by the journal Mind, “The Unreality of Time,” by John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. He was an English philosopher, by then a fixture at Trinity College, Cambridge.*9 McTaggart was said (by Norbert Wiener) to have made a cameo appearance in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as the Dormouse, “with his pudgy hands, his sleepy air, and his sidelong walk.” He had been arguing for years that our common view of time is an illusion, and now he made his case. “It doubtless seems highly paradoxical to assert that Time is unreal,” he began.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

I believe it will mean working towards common goals on earth, and in the wider universe, as we expand our reach. It will be, as Minsky put it in The Society of Mind, how we connect our knowledge that matters. He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Buddha We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 1948 All things arise and pass away. The Buddha When AI starts to think for itself, will it think like a Buddhist? * * * Since 2019, Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, has had a robot priest called Mindar. Mindar is narrow AI; that is, it has one job – delivering a sermon – and that’s what it repeats all day.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't
by Nate Silver
Published 31 Aug 2012

However, the Drake equation has nevertheless been a highly useful lens for astronomers to think about life, the universe, and everything. 90. George E. P. Box and Norman R. Draper, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (New York: Wiley, 1987), p. 424. 91. “Norbert Wiener,” Wikiquote.org. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener. CHAPTER 8: LESS AND LESS AND LESS WRONG 1. Roland Lazenby, The Show: The Inside Story of the Spectacular Los Angeles Lakers in the Words of Those Who Lived It (New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2006). 2. Mark Heisler, “The Times’ Rankings: Top to Bottom/NBA,” Los Angeles Times, November 7, 1999. 3.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

I am assuming that a desktop computer these days has a terabyte of hard-disk space. 12 Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (Random House, 1970), p. 350. The term “information overload” appeared as early as 1962; see Bertram M. Gross, “Operation Basic: The Retrieval of Wasted Knowledge,” Journal of Communication 12 (1967): 67–83, DOI: 10.1111. And Norbert Wiener talked about overloading the nervous system even earlier in his 1948 book Cybernetics (MIT Press, reprinted in 1961). 13 The concept of sensory overload was itself new. It’s often traced back to an article by Georg Simmel, written in 1903, that explained how the overwhelming sensations experienced by city-dwellers can make them reserved and unresponsive.

Frequently Asked Questions in Quantitative Finance
by Paul Wilmott
Published 3 Jan 2007

The very first use of the finite-difference method, in which a differential equation is discretized into a difference equation, was by Lewis Fry Richardson in 1911, and used to solve the diffusion equation associated with weather forecasting. See Richardson (1922). Richardson later worked on the mathematics for the causes of war. 1923 Wiener Norbert Wiener developed a rigorous theory for Brownian motion, the mathematics of which was to become a necessary modelling device for quantitative finance decades later. The starting point for almost all financial models, the first equation written down in most technical papers, includes the Wiener process as the representation for randomness in asset prices.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture
by Antonio Damasio
Published 6 Feb 2018

The entrenched dualism that began in Athens, was grandfathered by Descartes, resisted Spinoza’s broadside, and has been fiercely exploited by the computational sciences is a position whose time has passed. A new, biologically integrated position is now required. Nothing could be more different from the conception of the relation between minds and brains with which I started my career. I began reading Warren McCulloch, Norbert Wiener, and Claude Shannon when I was twenty, and due to several quirks of destiny McCulloch would soon become my first American mentor along with Norman Geschwind. This was a foundational, exhilarating time for science, one that opened the way for the extraordinary successes of neurobiology, the computational sciences, and artificial intelligence.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman
by James Gleick
Published 1 Jan 1992

At that point photons have freed themselves from the pinball game of diffusion and can fly in a straight line until they scatter again, in the earth’s atmosphere or in the sensitive retina of one’s eye. The difference in brightness between the sun’s center and its edge gave an indirect means of calculating the nature of the internal diffusion. Or should have—but the mechanics proved difficult until a brilliant young mathematician at MIT, Norbert Wiener, devised a useful method. If the sun were a coolly radioactive metal ball a few inches across, with neutrons rattling about inside, it would start to look like a miniaturized version of the same problem. For a while this approach proved useful. Past a certain point, however, it broke down. Too many idealizing assumptions had to be made.

…

His readers—and at first they were few—found no fancy mathematics, just this shift of vision, a bit of physical intuition laid atop a foundation of clean, classical mechanics. Few immediately recognized the power of Feynman’s vision. One who did was the Polish mathematician Mark Kac, who heard Feynman describe his path integrals at Cornell and immediately recognized a kinship with a problem in probability theory. He had been trying to extend the work of Norbert Wiener on Brownian motion, the herky-jerky random motion in the diffusion processes that so dominated Feynman’s theoretical work at Los Alamos. Wiener, too, had created integrals that summed many possible paths a particle could take, but with a crucial difference in the handling of time. Within days of Feynman’s talk, Kac had created a new formula, the Feynman-Kac Formula, that became one of the most ubiquitous of mathematical tools, linking the applications of probability and quantum mechanics.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Already in China, the implementation of 3-D printing and other automated solutions is threatening hundreds of thousands of high-tech manufacturing jobs, many of which have existed for less than a decade.43 American factories would be winning back this business but for a shortage of workers with the training necessary to run an automated factory. Still, this wealth of opportunity will likely be only temporary. Once the robots are in place, their continued upkeep and a large part of their improvement will be automated as well. Humans may have to learn to live with it. It’s a conundrum that was first articulated back in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener, the inventor of cybernetics and the feedback mechanisms that turned plain old machines into responsive, decision-making robots. Wiener understood that in order for people to remain valuable in the coming technologized economy, we were going to have to figure out what we can do—if anything—better than the technologies we have created.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict
by Kenneth Payne
Published 16 Jun 2021

And while humans were ‘in the loop’, with the power to initiate action, once the shooting was underway, there was little they could do. And all this before electronic and digital computing. The wartime problem of anti-missile gunnery inspired one of the great early thinkers of Artificial Intelligence, Norbert Wiener. Wiener was fascinated by the concept of feedback loops, the central idea in his concept of ‘cybernetics’.9 This was a larger idea than computing and larger even than AI. Once you started seeing feedback loops in complex systems, you could see them everywhere—especially in biology, but also in sociology.

Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child
by Alissa Quart
Published 16 Aug 2006

By adulthood, however, in 1937, the New Yorker could present the adult Sidis as a freakish itinerant clerk working a string of low-level soul-crushing jobs, living in a sordid rooming house. To add to the pathos, Sidis had developed a mania for train schedules and nothing else. He died in 1944. An extensive account can be found in The Prodigy: A Biography of William Sidis, America’s Greatest Child Prodigy, by Amy Wallace (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986). Norbert Wiener also started college at eleven and got a doctorate from Harvard at eighteen. Ultimately Wiener wrote that his father’s domination ruined his childhood in his remarkably good and honest memoir, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1964). When he made a mathematical mistake, wrote Wiener, his “gentle and loving father was replaced by the avenger of the blood.”

Data Action: Using Data for Public Good
by Sarah Williams
Published 14 Sep 2020

But while the analysis proved useful, some argue that the work of the bureau was never truly integrated into the planning processes of Los Angeles; with no pathways to create planning action, it ultimately failed. Despite that failure, the bureau performed the data analytics necessary to secure important grant funding and turned to more policy-driven questions, unlike some of the models developed by enthusiasts of cybernetics.82 Cybernetics, championed at MIT by Norbert Wiener, is an interdisci-plinary approach to examining how humans and machines communicate with and control each other. Its use for urban planning provided the ability to perform computational analysis that included theories of the city as a biological system and machine.83 Jay Forrester, a researcher and professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, applied cybernetics theory to modeling the dynamics of industry, including supply chains and resource flows.84 After a chance meeting with John F.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Some, like Shannon, are widely celebrated. Andrew Viterbi is best known as a co-founder of Qualcomm, but perhaps his greatest feat was to develop a recursive algorithm for efficiently computing complex chains, overcoming the computing costs that grew exponentially with the size of the chain. The precocious MIT star Norbert Wiener, author of Cybernetics (1948), extended Markov sequences from discrete to continuous phenomena and contributed the idea of pruning improbable results.4 This advance helped calculations of rocket or airplane trajectories during World War II, using Markov math to predict the future location of moving objects by observing their current positions.

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
by T. R. Reid
Published 18 Dec 2007

.: Princeton University Press, 1972), which is strangely organized but has the immediacy that could be conveyed only by one who was present at the creation of the modem electronic computer. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), are the first complete biographies. Von Neumann’s seminal paper “Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument” is reprinted in John Diebold, ed., The World of the Computer (New York: Random House, 1973). There are far more books than any one person could read on the inner workings of integrated circuits, microprocessors, calculators, and computers.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

William James drew attention to the significance of the physiological trigger in inducing an emotional state. He observed that “[w]e feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, and afraid because we tremble.”29 We call this afferent feedback. (The term “feedback” was first popularized by Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics theory, in the 1950s.) In an interesting study conducted in the 1970s, researchers were able to lend scientific credibility to James’s theoretical musings. Electrodes were placed on the faces of subjects. The researcher then arranged the subjects’ faces into emotional expressions—smiles and frowns—without their realizing it, simply by asking them to contract various muscles.

…

The T-groups brought together a small number of strangers with the goal of teaching them how to function better in groups. The participants spent two to three weeks together to give them sufficient time to reorient their behavior and solidify their new psyche before returning to their communities. One of the critical features of T-groups is feedback—a concept that was just then being popularized by Norbert Wiener in his work in the new field of cybernetics. As part of the sensitivity training, each participant is asked to share his or her own perceptions of everyone else in the group. In doing so, the individual often reveals as much about himself—his attitudes, biases, emotional concerns, and his preconceived ideas and opinions about human nature and relationships, and so forth, all of which, in turn, become the subject of feedback from others.

The Transhumanist Reader
by Max More and Natasha Vita-More
Published 4 Mar 2013

Cecconi, F., Alvarez-Bolado, G., Meyer, B., Roth, K., and Gruss, P. (1998) “Apaf1 (CED-4 Homolog) Regulates Programmed Cell Death in Mammalian Development.” Cell 94 (September 18), pp. 727–737. Published 5-10092. Göttingen: Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Conway, Flo and Siegelman, Jim (2005) Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books. 8 The Hybronaut Affair A Ménage of Art, Technology, and Science Laura Beloff Techno-Organic Environment Alfons Schilling began his long-term investigations on perception during the early 1960s by designing motion paintings,1 and continued the research with design of optical instruments called Vision Machines.2 Schilling’s experiments were constructed as head-worn objects, or instruments, in various shapes and sizes, which transformed the viewer’s perception through first-hand experience.

…

In Engines of Creation, Drexler gives a visionary and authoritative account of the consequences for “nature” of new technological developments, particularly of nanotechnology, the engineering of molecular computers which can self-assemble and replicate within human cells or build complex structures in outer space, which contains for artists some of the most radical implications since Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (Wiener 1948), published in 1948. Wiener’s ideas led effectively to the computer revolution, the Information Society, and to the Telematic Culture. It may very well be that Drexler’s writing signals the stirrings of a twenty-first-century revolution, the molecular revolution, the first shots of which have already been fired with the synthesis of chemicals with internal moving parts, a prototype of the molecular machine which will lead us in a matter of decades to the optical molecular computers which may make our present “electronic space” an obsolescent environment But following McLuhan’s idea that the content of a new medium is the medium which preceded it, the rear-view mirror effect, we telematic artists can be optimistic that the molecular society of tomorrow will realize with ease the ideas of telepresence, connectivity, distributed authorship, and interactivity, which we are working with today.

America in the World: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy
by Robert B. Zoellick
Published 3 Aug 2020

He grew up in an era of invention—gas-powered cars, airplanes, X-rays for medicine, commercial motion pictures—and the expanding technologies of telephony, the phonograph, electricity, and the radio. Bush combined a high aptitude for math with a tinker’s spirit. He liked to shape things with his hands. The mathematician Norbert Wiener later described Bush as “one of the greatest apparatus men that America has ever seen—he thinks with his hands as well as his brain.”12 Bush’s attributes and interests drew him toward engineering. Zachary explains that Bush’s idea of an engineer was a “pragmatic polymath.” Bush described the engineer as “not primarily a physicist, or a businessman, or an inventor but [someone] who would acquire some of the skills and knowledge of each of these and be capable of successfully developing and applying new devices on the grand scale.”

…

Smith, American Science Policy Since World War II (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990), 3–6 places Bush in the larger context of science policy development. Smith notes three phases, with Bush’s work critical to the first phase. 11. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 8, 23; Isaacson, Innovators, 218. 12. Zachary, Endless Frontier, 8, 21–22. For the original Wiener quote, see Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 112. 13. See Zachary, Endless Frontier, 4 (for quotes) and 28 (organizing people). 14. See Zachary, Endless Frontier, 8 (moral code) and 149 (“public entrepreneur” phrase of Eugene Lewis). 15. When I was the U.S. trade representative—leading a small, entrepreneurial agency that had to coordinate with many others—my guidance to colleagues was, “Just keep pressing until someone says no, and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain
by Werner Loewenstein
Published 29 Jan 2013

Well, you would be wrong. Mathematicians themselves insist that some of their most profound thinking is unconscious. There is firsthand testimony in a fascinating book by the mathematician Jacques Hadamard, in which he offers his insights and those of two other distinguished mathematicians, George Polya and Norbert Wiener. All three stress that many of their cogitations are unconscious. There is no shortage of other testimony of this sort, and quite a few go further back. Poincaré, for example, describes in one of his lectures how the crucial idea for one of his famous theorems (on the fuchsian function) suddenly came to him as he put his foot on the steps of a bus coming from the town of Coutances.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

As writer Archibald MacLeish described it, “To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now that they are truly brothers.”11 Soon after that, the development of the Internet—also an outgrowth of the Cold War funding—concretized this sense of lateral, peer-to-peer relationships between people in a network. Hierarchies of command and control began losing ground to networks of feedback and iteration. A new way of modeling and gaming the activities of people would have to be found. The idea of bringing feedback into the mix came from the mathematician Norbert Wiener, back in the 1940s, shortly after his experiences working for the military on navigation and antiaircraft weapons. He had realized that it’s much harder to plan for every eventuality in advance than simply to change course as conditions change. As Wiener explained it to his peers, a boat may set a course for a destination due east, but then wind and tides push the boat toward the south.

Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 14 Oct 2019

HAL, unlike Asimov’s clueless robot, suffers from the psychological pain of this cognitive dissonance: “He was … aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity—the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth.”17 The result is a computer “neurosis” that turns HAL into a killer. Reflecting on real-life machine morality, the mathematician Norbert Wiener noted as long ago as 1960 that “we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”18 Wiener’s comment captures what is called the value alignment problem in AI: the challenge for AI programmers to ensure that their systems’ values align with those of humans.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017

Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 249. 63. Mauricio Santillana, D. Wendong Zhang, Benjamin Althouse, and John Ayers, “What Can Digital Disease Detection Learn from (an External Revision to) Google Flu Trends?,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 47, no. 3 (2014): 341–347. 64. Ibid. 65. See Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961); William Ashby, Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Methuen, 1979); Heinz Von Foerster, Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition (New York: Springer, 2002). 66.

The Road to Conscious Machines
by Michael Wooldridge
Published 2 Nov 2018

The Turing Test The development of the first computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s prompted a flurry of public debate about the potential of these wondrous feats of modern science. One of the highest-profile contributions to the debate at the time was a book entitled Cybernetics, written by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematics professor called Norbert Wiener. The book made explicit parallels between machines and animal brains and nervous systems, and touched on many ideas relating to AI. It attracted huge public interest, despite the fact that it was surely incomprehensible to any but the most dedicated and mathematically adept reader. Questions such as whether machines could ‘think’ began to be seriously debated in the press and on radio shows (in 1951, Turing himself participated in a BBC radio show on this very subject).

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

It wasn’t just scientists who succumbed to the cybernetics craze—this new understanding soon fully penetrated the zeitgeist. Engineers built robots whose operating systems purported to model the human brain, and imbued them with consciousness-like qualities thanks to their ability to “perceive light” or return to their charging stations of their own accord.25 By the time Norbert Wiener published the hugely influential book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communications in the Animal and the Machine in 1948, the idea was already wildly popular and the book became an international bestseller, despite containing, as the historian of science Matthew Cobb has pointed out, “vast tracts of equations that were incomprehensible to most readers (and were full of errors).”26 In other words, the idea was so compelling, there wasn’t much point in bothering with whether it was based in fact.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

Twenty-One Applications of Predictive Analytics Appendix C. Prediction People—Cast of “Characters” Notes Acknowledgments About the Author Supplement: A Cross-Industry Compendium of 147 Examples Index Foreword This book deals with quantitative efforts to predict human behavior. One of the earliest efforts to do that was in World War II. Norbert Wiener, the father of “cybernetics,” began trying to predict the behavior of German airplane pilots in 1940—with the goal of shooting them from the sky. His method was to take as input the trajectory of the plane from its observed motion, consider the pilot’s most likely evasive maneuvers, and predict where the plane would be in the near future so that a fired shell could hit it.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Deloitte, who did these calculations, describes the falling price of basic info-tech as exponential: ‘The current pace of technological advance is unprecedented in history and shows no signs of stabilizing as other historical technological innovations, such as electricity, eventually did.’26 It has become commonplace to think of information as ‘immaterial’. Norbert Wiener, one of the founders of information theory once claimed: ‘Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.’27 But this is a fallacy. In 1961, IBM physicist Rolf Landauer proved, logically, that information is physical.28 He wrote: ‘Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation.

The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer
Published 28 Apr 2013

We won't any longer be able to identify ourselves with these 'production labels'. In other words, we will be forced to seek other identities, other reasons that give a purpose to our lives. Keynes concluded that 'no country can look forward ... without a dread' to this unprecedented historic shift. Nor was Keynes the only one to foresee such problems. Norbert Wiener, the originator of cybernetics, was also one of the very first to warn us of the social implications of computers: Let us remember that the automatic machine [i.e. computer-driven production equipment] ... is the precise economic equivalent of slave labour. Any labour, which competes with slave labour, must accept economic conditions of slave labour.

Some Remarks
by Neal Stephenson
Published 6 Aug 2012

During Leibniz’s era, the only person who had thought seriously about such machines was Leibniz himself; building on earlier work by Blaise Pascal, he designed, and caused to be built, a mechanical computer, and envisioned coupling it to a formal logical system called the Characteristica Universalis. He invented binary arithmetic, and, according to no less an authority than Norbert Wiener, pioneered the idea of feedback. 3. In particular, the monads’ production rule scheme clearly presages the modern concept of cellular automata. Quoting from Mercer’s work: “The Production Rule of F is a rule for the continuous production of the discrete states of F so that it instructs F about exactly what to think at every moment of F’s existence.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

By now, he’s been mediating reality for most of his life. Mann, now a professor at the University of Toronto, has wanted to be a cyborg since he was a teen. “Cyborg” stands for “cybernetic organism,” a word coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline and popularized by the inventor of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, to represent a merger of human and synthetic components. To many, the word and all it evokes is a chilly vision, mechanical and dehumanized, the ultimate bitter victory of technophilia at the expense of all that is humane about humans. Mann has always thought differently, and he wrote a passionate manifesto in 2001 that struck a chord with me after I had spent a year tasting augmented realities: Rather than smart rooms, smart cars, smart toilets, etc., I would like to put forward the notion of smart people.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

Quoted in Morgenstern (1976), ‘The Collaboration between Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann on the Theory of Games’, Journal of Economic Literature, 14 (3), 810. 7 Morgenstern’s diary, April–May 1942. Quoted in Leonard, Robert J. (1995), ‘From Parlor Games to Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory 1928–1944’, Journal of Economic Literature, 33 (2), 730. 8 Nasar, 94. 9 Ibid. 10 Quoted in Heims, S. (1980). John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press), 327. 11 Quoted in Poundstone, W. (1992), Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Anchor Books), 168. 12 Quoted in Ferguson, N. (2017), The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (London: Allen Lane), 260. 13 Hertzberg, H. (2001), ‘Comment: Tuesday, and After’, New Yorker, 24 September 2001, 27.

Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern
by Jing Tsu
Published 18 Jan 2022

As a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, Samuel H. Caldwell earned his reputation as a computing pioneer during and after the Second World War. He worked on the differential analyzer—an early analog computer—and the logical design of switch circuits. Caldwell interacted with all the right people: cyberneticians like Norbert Wiener and important gatekeepers in the field like Warren Weaver and Vannevar Bush. Developing the Sinotype as the GARF research director would be his last big project. In 1959, Caldwell published a paper with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia that detailed the concept and specifications of the machine.

Chaos: Making a New Science
by James Gleick
Published 18 Oct 2011

address at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, 29 December 1979. SUPPOSE THE EARTH Yorke. “PREDICTION, NOTHING” Lorenz, White. THERE MUST BE A LINK “The Mechanics of Vacillation.” FOR WANT OF A NAIL George Herbert; cited in this context by Norbert Wiener, “Nonlinear Prediction and Dynamics,” in Collected Works with Commentaries, ed. P. Masani (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1981), 3:371. Wiener anticipated Lorenz in seeing at least the possibility of “self-amplitude of small details of the weather map.” He noted, “A tornado is a highly local phenomenon, and apparent trifles of no great extent may determine its exact track.”

Beautiful security
by Andy Oram and John Viega
Published 15 Dec 2009

In 2003 he was included on the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum Wall of Fame, and in 2001 he was inducted into the CRN Industry Hall of Fame. In 1999 he received the Louis Brandeis Award from Privacy International, in 1998 a Lifetime Achievement Award from CONTRIBUTORS 267 Secure Computing Magazine, and in 1996 the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for promoting the responsible use of technology. In 1995, Newsweek named Zimmermann one of the “Net 50,” the 50 most influential people on the Internet. Zimmermann received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Florida Atlantic University in 1978.

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past)
by Cixin Liu
Published 11 Nov 2014

Of course, if we can’t figure out the pattern of the suns’ movements soon, the end of the world will not be too far away.” He bowed at Wang as well, a more modern bow. “Von Neumann.” “Didn’t you bring us thousands of miles to the East specifically to solve the problem of calculating these equations?” Newton asked. Then he turned to Wang. “Norbert Wiener and that degenerate who just ran away also came with us. We encountered some pirates near Madagascar. Wiener fought the pirates by himself so that the rest of us could escape, and he died valiantly.” “Why did you have to come to the East to build a computer?” Wang asked Von Neumann. Von Neumann and Newton looked at each other, puzzled.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States
by Joy Lisi Rankin

Other speakers included John Mauchly, well known to this community as the cocreator of World War II’s ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), Amer­i­ca’s first 112 A ­People’s History of Computing in the United States electronic computer; Marvin Minsky, the codirector of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence group; and Norbert Wiener, a leading proponent of cybernetics, an influential approach to scientific prob­lems of control and communication. McCarthy was in good com­pany, then, when he delivered his centennial lecture “Time-­Sharing Computer Systems”; what has been overlooked about McCarthy’s lecture is that he advocated for both time-­sharing and a public computing utility.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Frank Pasquale, “Reclaiming Egalitarianism in the Political Theory of Campaign Finance Reform,” University of Illinois Law Review (2008): 599–660. 6. AUTONOMOUS FORCES 1. David Silver, Julian Schrittwieser, Karen Simonyan, Ioannis Antonoglou, Aja Huang, Arthur Guez, Thomas Hubert et al., “Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge,” Nature 550 (2017): 354–359. 2. Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994): 228–266. 3. Future of Life Institute, “Slaughterbots,” YouTube, November 13, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw; Jessica Cussins, “AI Researchers Create Video to Call for Autonomous Weapons Ban at UN,” Future of Life Institute, November 14, 2017, https://futureoflife.org/2017/11/14/ai-researchers-create-video-call-autonomous-weapons-ban-un/?

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

To give a significantly different instruction, or to correct a bug, meant to physically replace hardware components. The cost efficiency of computing resources would be vastly improved if computers were made more flexible. This required an architecture where the physical components were given an open-ended function so that more instructions could be provided in software code. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, sketched on such a digital computer and his ideas were implemented towards the end of the Second World War. MIT scientists hoped for a deepened symbiosis between man and machine. By shortening the feedback loops between the computer and the user, they envisioned a computer that would function as a complement to the human brain.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

.” ††† Very briefly, the answers to these questions are yes, kind of, and no. PART 1 MIND AND MACHINE CHAPTER 2 THE HARDEST THING TO ACCEPT ABOUT OURSELVES The tendency of these new machines is to replace human judgment on all levels but a fairly high one, rather than to replace human energy and power by machine energy and power. — Norbert Wiener, 1949 ABOUT TWENTY YEARS AGO, BUSINESSES AROUND THE WORLD settled on a division of work between people and computers that seemed very sensible. The machines would take care of basic math, record keeping, and data transmission. This would free up people to make decisions, exercise judgment, use their creativity and intuition, and interact with each other to solve problems and take care of customers.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

For decades it would inspire visionary inventors to devise balky new technologies in an effort to deliver an upgrade to the human brain. By far the most ambitious and influential acolyte of the Memex dream was Douglas Engelbart, best known today as the father of the computer mouse. Engelbart, a former radar technician and student of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, woke up one day in 1950 with an epiphany: The world had so many problems, of such accelerating complexity, that humankind’s only hope of mastering them was to find ways to get smarter faster. He vowed to devote his life to developing a “Framework for the Augmentation of Human Intellect.”

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
by Charles Petzold
Published 28 Sep 1999

Information theory is concerned with transmitting digital information in the presence of noise (which usually prevents all the information from getting through) and how to compensate for that. In 1949, he wrote the first article about programming a computer to play chess, and in 1952 he designed a mechanical mouse controlled by relays that could learn its way around a maze. Shannon was also well known at Bell Labs for riding a unicycle and juggling simultaneously. Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard at the age of 18, is most famous for his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (1948). He coined the word cybernetics (derived from the Greek for steersman) to identify a theory that related biological processes in humans and animals to the mechanics of computers and robots.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

Each node had no accountability, so nodes could accumulate in a “friction-free” way, even though there is no such thing as a free lunch, and the friction would surely appear later on in some fashion. We were all impatient and bored and leapt at the thrill of quick adoption. Ted was the source point for much of what we hold familiar today. For instance, he called the new medium “hypertext.” Ted was very fond of cyber-, which originally related to navigation, and which Norbert Wiener adopted into cybernetics because navigation was a great example of the core process of feedback in an information system. But Ted’s preferred prefix was hyper-, which, he once told me, when I must have still been a teenager, also captured something of the frenetic edge that digital obsessions seem to bring into human character.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
by John Brockman
Published 5 Oct 2015

Because of the power and influence of industrial technology, he believed that political power would flow to engineers, whose deep knowledge of technology would be transformed into control of the emerging industrial economy. It certainly didn’t work out that way. Veblen was speaking to the Progressive Era, looking for a middle ground between Marxism and capitalism. Perhaps his timing was off, but his basic point, as echoed some thirty years later at the dawn of the computer era by Norbert Wiener, may yet be proved correct. Perhaps Veblen wasn’t wrong, merely premature. Today, the engineers who design the artificial-intelligence-based programs and robots have a tremendous influence over how we use them. As computer systems are woven more deeply into the fabric of everyday life, the tension between intelligence augmentation and artificial intelligence becomes increasingly visible.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

(As filmmaker Alex Rivera put it in his cult hit Sleep Dealer, “all the work without the worker.”) Amazon’s own website all but confirms this charge, boasting that the company “significantly lowers costs” by “leveraging the skills of Mechanical Turk Workers from around the world.” MIT mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener once warned that under capitalism the very job of new technology was to intensify the exploitation of workers. “Crowd-sourced” work marketplaces have certainly contributed to this problem. Many labor advocates and scholars believe that online platforms like MTurk are ripe for disruption, and some have designed alternatives.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
by Jim Holt
Published 14 May 2018

Neither his uncle Szolem nor his dissertation committee (headed by Louis de Broglie, one of the founders of quantum theory) paid much heed to his effort to explain the significance of power laws, and for a long time thereafter Mandelbrot was the only mathematician to take such laws and their long tails seriously—which is why, when their importance was finally appreciated half a century later, he became known as the father of long tails. Having launched himself with his offbeat thesis as a “solo scientist,” Mandelbrot sought out other similarly innovative mathematicians. One such was Norbert Wiener, the founder (and coiner) of “cybernetics,” the science of how systems ranging from telephone switchboards to the human brain are controlled by feedback loops. Another was John von Neumann, the creator of game theory (and much else). To Mandelbrot, these two men were “made of stardust.” He served as postdoc to both: first to Wiener at MIT, and then to von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had a nightmarish experience.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century is a portentous look at how audiovisual technologies might evolve. Other sources include “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, which imagines the future of human knowledge augmentation and the memex; J.C.R. Licklider’s Man-Computer Symbiosis, which half predicted the iPhone through a skewed lens; Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, which outlines the ways that a computer control system can influence lives; and Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s Personal Dynamic Media, which outlined a vision for personal computing that would set the enduring standard. The core of the chapter is Frank Canova, who was kind enough to demo the original Simon for me and whom I interviewed at his office in Santa Clara. 2.

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

In contradiction to popular mythology about them, these researchers had less allegiance to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. military than they did to the pure pursuit of knowledge and the expansion of human capabilities. Although their budgets may have come partly from the Pentagon, their aims were decidedly nonmilitary As seminal essays by World War II technologists Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, and J.C.R. Licklider made clear, the job before them was to convert a wartime technology industry into a peacetime leap forward for humanity. Bush, FDR’s former war advisor, wrote of a hypothetical computer or “Memex” machine he intended as an extension of human memory. Wiener, the founder of “cybernetics,” believed that lessons in feedback learned by the Air Force during the war could be applied to a vast range of technologies, giving machines the ability to extend the senses and abilities of real people.

Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight
by David A. Mindell
Published 3 Apr 2008

The Oxford English Dictionary shows that uses of the term system exploded after 1950, including systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, general systems theory, and a host of others.48 Each field had its own innovators, its own emphasis, and its own home institutions and professions, but they shared common concerns with feedback, dynamics, flows, block diagrams, human-machine interaction, signals, simulation, and the exciting new possibilities of computers.49 Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) exemplified the trend, arguing that feedback control and statistics evoked analogies between computers and organisms, social systems, even the mind itself.50 The idea of the cyborg, part human, part machine, emerged as Wiener-inspired NACA researchers considered the future mix of mechanical and organic necessary for spaceflight.51 Chauffeurs and Airmen in the Age of Systems 37 The management aspects of systems engineering formalized in the mid-1950s when the air force stretched its resources to quickly build an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

A Man for All Markets
by Edward O. Thorp
Published 15 Nov 2016

Whether to try for this was a difficult decision. MIT had become one of the world’s great mathematics centers, following its transformation by projects for the government during World War II from a technical school to a scientific powerhouse. Simply walking down the hall, I would chat with people like the prodigy Professor Norbert Wiener (cybernetics) and the future Abel Prize winner Isadore Singer. The C. L. E. Moore Instructorship program, of which I was part, had brought in new PhDs like John Nash, who later won the Nobel for economics, and future Fields Medal winner Paul Cohen. Though there’s no Nobel Prize for mathematics, the Fields and the Abel prizes have that status.

Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism's Challenge to Democracy
by Benjamin Barber
Published 20 Apr 2010

Tom Peters, Liberation Management: Necessary Disorganization for the Nano-second Nineties (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 6. 15. William Gibson, with his trilogy of works in the early eighties (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), introduced the notion of cyberspace (from Norbert Wiener’s classic study of interactive communications technology and cybernetics in the late forties) into general parlance. Technically, the term refers to the invisible electronic information space between the computer keyboard (input) and the computer screen (output). The New York Times devoted nearly an entire issue of its Book Review to computer-generated books and the literary culture of cyberspace in 1994, and since then it has reviewed CD-ROM “books” as well. 16.

Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence
by James Bridle
Published 6 Apr 2022

In the preparation of this chapter, I am particularly indebted to Andrew Pickering, whose extensive work on the British-based cyberneticians Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, Grey Walter and Ross Ashby can be found in numerous papers, and is summarized in The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 6. Walter, ‘An Imitation of Life’. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. The origin of the term is in Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948). 10. For a description of the homeostat and its operation, see W. R. Ashby, ‘Design for a Brain’, Electrical Engineering, 20, December 1948, pp. 379–83. 11. Walter, ‘An Imitation of Life’. 12.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 31 Dec 1998

Cybernetic chauffeur Self-driving cars that use special sensors in the roads. Self driving cars are being experimented with in the late 1990s, with implementation on major highways feasible during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Cybernetic poet A computer program that is able to create original poetry. Cybernetics A term coined by Norbert Wiener to describe the “science of control and communication in animals and machines.” Cybernetics is based on the theory that intelligent living beings adapt to their environments and accomplish objectives primarily by reacting to feedback from their surroundings. Database The structured collection of data that is designed in connection with an information retrieval system.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

Instead, most individuals who viewed computers as tools for liberation were politically agnostic, more focused on forming alternative communities, and inclined to embrace new technology as a means to better achieve personal liberty and human happiness—what one scholar has labeled as the “New Communalists.” Stewart Brand, Stanford University biology graduate turned publishing entrepreneur, became a leading voice for the New Communalists through creating The Whole Earth Catalog. Deeply influenced by cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, electronics media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, Brand pressed NASA to publicly release a satellite photo of the Earth in 1966. Two years later the photo adorned the cover of the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Publishing regularly between 1968 and 1971, Brand’s catalog identified and promoted key products or tools for communal living and, in doing so, sought to help “transform the individual into a capable, creative person.”

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner
Published 15 Mar 2012

It seemed lost on Shannon that the scientist who had declared that any message could be sent through any noisy channel with almost perfect fidelity was now himself a proven exception. Transmissions could reach Claude Shannon. But then they would fail to go any farther. Information theory, in the meantime, was getting ready for the masses. In 1953, one of the premier science journalists of the era, Francis Bello of Fortune magazine, profiled Shannon along with Norbert Wiener, an MIT mathematician who was putting forward theories on the command and control of machines, a discipline closely related to Shannon’s work on information. Wiener called his work cybernetics. “Within the last five years a new theory has appeared that seems to bear some of the same hallmarks of greatness,” Bello wrote.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

At this point an ‘explosion’ will clearly occur; all the problems of science and technology will be handed over to machines and it will no longer be necessary for people to work. Whether this will lead to a Utopia or to the extermination of the human race will depend on how the problem is handled by the machines. The important thing will be to give them the aim of serving human beings.” The AI pioneer Norbert Wiener discussed the problem of retaining human oversight over advanced AI systems (Wiener, 1960): “Though machines are theoretically subject to human criticism, such criticism may be ineffective until long after it is relevant. To be effective in warding off disastrous consequences, our understanding of our man-made machines should in general develop pari passu with the performance of the machine.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

Specifically concerning what computers implied for the future of work and jobs, however, the consensus suddenly did the reverse: for two decades, experts had worried about where automation was leading our economy, but starting in the late 1960s the smart set couldn’t wait to get to superautomated Tomorrowland. A significant early worrier had been the mathematician Norbert Wiener—college graduate at fourteen, Harvard professor at nineteen, at MIT the godfather of artificial intelligence—who back in 1948 published Cybernetics, a groundbreaking book that gave a new technological field a name. It was remarkably popular, and talking about it to a reporter back then, Wiener succinctly and accurately foresaw the future of work—that is, our present.

Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney , Benjamin Peters , Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip
Published 9 Mar 2021

—are not yet good enough to represent network nodes and their gaps (even if the roughly fifty billion nodes on the internet stretch even machine abstraction). Rather, it is that such network design visuals are themselves the gaps in the modern understanding of networks.2 To twist that old line often attributed to the mathematician and early information age polymath Norbert Wiener, the best model of a cat is a cat, preferably the same cat: so too is the most reliable model of a complex large-scale network that same network at work in the world. A network on paper or screen is no computer network, and often computer network models obscure what embedded organizations might actually use the network for.

Hyperion
by Dan Simmons
Published 15 Sep 1990

The breeze was suddenly cold; I hugged my arms. ‘How does all this . . . Old Earth, the resurrection projects, the cybrids . . . how does it lead to creating the Ultimate Intelligence?’ ‘I don’t know, Brawne. Eight standard centuries ago, at the beginning of the First Information Age, a man named Norbert Wiener wrote: “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?” Humanity dealt with this inconclusively with their early AIs. The Core wrestles with it in the resurrection projects. Perhaps the UI program has been completed and all of this remains a function of the ultimate Creature/Creator, a personality whose motives are as far beyond the Core’s understanding as the Core’s are beyond humanity’s.’

The Future of War
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 9 Oct 2017

The first was whether one side might be able to configure its nuclear forces so as to launch a disarming first strike, transforming an apparent balance of power into one-sided dominance. The other, even if there was no premium in striking first, was the potential interaction of human failings and technical malfunctions that would turn an otherwise manageable situation into a global cataclysm. Norbert Wiener, who had developed his ideas on cybernetics from his work on anti-aircraft weapons during the Second World War, had become increasingly alarmed at the implications of developing air defence systems which had to work so quickly that there was barely a chance for human intervention.4 The theme of lost control over a situation hurtling towards tragedy was the basis of the movies Dr.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
by Nick Bostrom
Published 3 Jun 2014

See, for example, Baum et al. (2011) and Armstrong and Sotala (2012). 9. It might suggest, however, that AI researchers know less about development timelines than they think they do—but this could cut both ways: they might overestimate as well as underestimate the time to AI. 10. Good (1965, 33). 11. One exception is Norbert Wiener, who did have some qualms about the possible consequences. He wrote, in 1960: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it, because the action is so fast and irrevocable that we have not the data to intervene before the action is complete, then we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire and not merely a colourful imitation of it” (Wiener 1960).

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life
by Robert Wright
Published 1 Jan 1994

Rosenau, James (1983) “ ‘Fragmegrative’ Challenges to National Security,” in Terry L. Heyns, ed. (1983), Understanding U.S. Strategy: A Reader. National Defense University. ——— (1990) Turbulence in World Politics. Princeton University Press. Rosenau, James, and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds. (1992) Governance Without Government. Cambridge University Press. Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow (1943) “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10: 18–24. Rossabi, Morris, ed. (1983) China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries. University of California Press. Rothman, Mitchell S. (1994) “Evolutionary Typologies and Cultural Complexity,” in Stein and Rothman, eds. (1994).

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

From this point of view, factory automation can be regarded as a blessing because it meant that industrial robots, controlled by computers, could eliminate the need for direct human intervention in operating machines. Instead of having workers specializing in machine tending, many routine tasks could suddenly be performed by robots with a higher degree of accuracy. As automation progressed, more complex and creative functions became more plentiful. Computers, as Norbert Wiener declared, made possible “more human use of human beings.”5 On the downside, these allegedly mindless, degrading, machine-tending, routine jobs were the ones that employed a large share of the American middle class. Numerous studies have shown that routine jobs were overwhelmingly clustered at the middle of both the skill and the income distribution.6 As computer-controlled machines reduced the need for routinized chores, middle-class Americans saw their jobs disappear.

Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
by Robert Wright
Published 28 Dec 2010

Rosenau, James (1983) “ ‘Fragmegrative’ Challenges to National Security,” in Terry L. Heyns, ed. (1983), Understanding U.S. Strategy: A Reader. National Defense University. ——— (1990) Turbulence in World Politics. Princeton University Press. Rosenau, James, and Ernst-Otto Czempiel, eds. (1992) Governance Without Government. Cambridge University Press. Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow (1943) “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10: 18–24. Rossabi, Morris, ed. (1983) China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th–14th Centuries. University of California Press. Rothman, Mitchell S. (1994) “Evolutionary Typologies and Cultural Complexity,” in Stein and Rothman, eds. (1994).

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time
by Sean M. Carroll
Published 15 Jan 2010

(Two particles that are separated by a few light years aren’t going to interact noticeably, no matter what their momentum is.) So the laws of physics pick out “measuring average properties within a small region of space” as a sensible thing to do. 136 A related argument has been given by mathematician Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics (1961), 34. 137 There is a loophole. Instead of starting with a system that had delicately tuned initial conditions for which the entropy would decrease, and then letting it interact with the outside world, we could just ask the following question: “Given that this system will go about interacting with the outside world, what state do I need to put it in right now so that its entropy will decrease in the future?”

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

Scranton was polite and focused on situations in which innovation is messy, “distinguished from more familiar analytic and synthetic innovation approaches,” as if the latter were the norm, which it is obviously not. I looked for more stories, and the historian of technology David Edgerton presented me with a quite shocking one. We think of cybernetics—which led to the “cyber” in cyberspace—as invented by Norbert Wiener in 1948. The historian of engineering David Mindell debunked the story; he showed that Wiener was articulating ideas about feedback control and digital computing that had long been in practice in the engineering world. Yet people—even today’s engineers—have the illusion that we owe the field to Wiener’s mathematical thinking.

Derivatives Markets
by David Goldenberg
Published 2 Mar 2016

The details we have to leave out are usually covered in such courses. 16.1 ARITHMETIC BROWNIAN MOTION (ABM) ABM is a stochastic process {Wt(ω)}t≥0 defined on a sample space (Ω,ℑW,℘W). We won’t go into all the details as to exactly what (Ω,ℑW,℘W) represents but you can think of the probability measure, ℘W, which is called Wiener measure, to be defined in terms of the transition density function p(T,y;t,x) for τ =T–t, Norbert Wiener gave the first rigorous mathematical construction (existence proof) for ABM and, because of this, it is sometimes called the Wiener process. It has the following properties, 1. W0=0 (starts at 0). 2. For every set of times t0=0<t1<t2<…tn–1<tn the increments (changes) Wt1–Wt0,Wt2–Wt1,…,Wtn–Wtn-1 are independent (independent increments). 3.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

The original insights of Goethe and Whitehead were now receiving the highest caliber of scientific corroboration.18 By the middle of the twentieth century, leading thinkers were developing the holistic way of thinking into a formal science of its own, which they called systems theory. Austrian biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy was determined to place systems thinking on a firm mathematical foundation. His efforts were paralleled in the United States by Norbert Wiener and other researchers, who developed the science of cybernetics, an investigation of the dynamics of control and communication in both nature and machines. As he pursued this inquiry, Wiener became impressed by how patterns seemed to be a fundamental characteristic of reality. With words that reprise the insights of the Neo-Confucians a thousand years earlier, he observed: “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

“Swedenborg approximated”: Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 297. “The genius which”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Swedenborg,” Representative Men. “This man, who appeared”: Ibid. “a freak”: Samuel Rosenberg, The Confessions of a Trivialist (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 76. RBF recalled discussing Sidis with the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, another former prodigy of the same era at Harvard (Amy Wallace, The Prodigy [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1986], 157). “mythical Harvard”: Hatch, 30. Waldo Fuller: RBF, CP, 380. “busted” his knee: RBF, “Later Development of My Work,” in BFR, 75, and RBF, EIK, session 7. RBF referred to breaking his knee for the second time “shortly after freshman practice started at Harvard” (RBF to J.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

Although commercial aviation was primitive in 1939, still it was easy to forecast from the rapid progress in the size and speed of aircraft over the 1920–40 period that much larger aircraft could fly much longer distances, and indeed within only a few years the DC-6 and DC-7 were spanning the continent and the globe before the epochal introduction of the Boeing 707 jet in 1958. What was missing at the 1939–40 World’s Fair was any vision of the computer revolution that created IR #3. But Norbert Wiener, a visionary, in a 1949 essay that was ultimately rejected by the New York Times, got a lot of the future of IR #3 right. Among his 1949 predictions were these: These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price….

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

Boyd had set the terms for its military exploitation. Boyd was widely read in the scientific literature of the time and picked up easily on developing theories which used simple propositions to explain complex phenomena. From these he drew language and insights to describe the sort of conflicts that interested him. From Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics to Murray Gell-Mann’s complexity theory emerged some core themes about the interaction of parts within systems, adaptation to changing environments, and outcomes that seemed indeterminate but were not beyond explanation. The conclusions for practical strategists that emerged from these theories rarely did justice to the elegance of the originals, and could lead to the suspicion that the main result was to develop more impressive language for matters that were already well understood.

Surfaces and Essences
by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
Published 10 Sep 2012

Page 334The analogy of Munich raised the stakes… Khong (1992), p. 184. Page 337One of the most interesting fndings of researchers… Khong (1992), p. 217. Page 338These findings may leave us feeling… Gentner, Rattermann, and Forbus (1993), p. 567. Page 368When I look at an article in Russian… Personal letter from Warren Weaver to Norbert Wiener, quoted in Weaver (1955). Page 363Parfois, le succès ne fut pas au rendez-vous… Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, in the obituary “Sagan, l’art d’être soi”, in Le Monde, 26 September, 2004. Chapter 7 Page 388All summer long, without a care… La Fontaine (1668), Book I, p. 1. Page 400The real problem with the interface is… Norman (1990), p. 210.

The Art of Computer Programming: Sorting and Searching
by Donald Ervin Knuth
Published 15 Jan 1998

Remarks Ignore foreign royalty (except British) Achtzehnhundert zwolf Treat apostrophe as space in French Ignore accents on letters Ignore designation of rank Names with dates follow those without ... and the latter are subarranged by descriptive words Arrange identical names by birthdate Works "about" follow works "by" Sometimes birthdate must be estimated Ignore designation of rank Treat hyphen as space Book titles follow compound names & in English becomes "and" Ignore apostrophe in names Ignore an initial article ... provided it's in nominative case Names precede words Dix-huit cent douze Dix-neuvieme Eighteen forty-seven Eighteen twelve (a book by Norbert Wiener) SORTING Text of card IBM journal of research and development. ha-I ha-ehad. la; a love story. International Business Machines Corporation al-Khuwarizml, Muhammad ibn Musa, fl. 813-846 Labour. A magazine for all workers. Labor research association Labour, see Labor McCalPs cookbook McCarthy, John, 1927- Machine-independent computer programming.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet
by David Kahn
Published 1 Feb 1963

Byrne concluded by betting $5,000 or the total royalties of the first three months after publication of his book that no one would be able to solve the message in Chaocipher that he printed in extenso in the final pages. He flung the challenge also at the amateurs of the American Cryptogram Association and the New York Cipher Society and at Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, and to other believers in the capabilities of the electronic calculating machines. Nobody ever claimed the money, and Byrne died a few years later. One may presume that the reason both for the failure of the public to read his cipher and the failure of the government to adopt it was that while the cipher probably had many merits, its many demerits outweighed them for practical use.