Norbert Wiener

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop  · 14 Apr 2001

generation would have instantly thought of Kentucky Fried Chicken. However, that faintly ridiculous impression never lasted past the first en- counter. "How's it going?" Norbert Wiener would invariably ask as he dropped into someone's office unannounced. Then, without waiting for an answer, he would launch into a discourse on whatever

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," marveled a later MIT president, Julius Stratton, a former student of Wiener's who actually rather enjoyed the interruptions.7 "Whatever was on his mind, Norbert Wiener's visit was one of the high points of the day at MIT for me and many others," agreed Jerome Wiesner, then a ris- ing

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ca- reer had been under way for forty years by that point, ever since he entered col- lege, in 1905-at the age of eleven. Norbert Wiener was that rarest of creatures, a former child prodigy who had actually made good. 20 THE DREAM MACHINE Maybe it was his goatee and cigar

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about the relationship between hu- mans and machines, thanks to his work in Memorial Hall. And now, like all the others, he listened avidly as Norbert Wiener articulated a breathtaking vision of where that relationship was taking mankind. "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique," Wiener asserted shortly after

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2 THE LAST TRANSITION ......, I . , 'q. fit - -- Actually, Vannevar Bush would have been a hard man to miss. He was only in his midthirties when Norbert Wiener first encountered him in the 1920s, but he was already a New England classic: a descendant of sea captains, a Yankee inven- tor, a lanky

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completed at nearly a dozen sites in the United States and abroad. And the orig- inal analyzer had undergone numerous upgrades-including several suggested by Norbert Wiener, whose instinct for understanding mathematical concepts in physical terms had produced a steady stream of ideas for "analogy machines," as he called them. Indeed, over

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bore an inscription: "O.K.-FDR." The date was June 12, 1940. Two days later, the German army marched into Paris. A MEMO TO VANNEVAR Norbert Wiener wasted no time. Indeed, he'd felt the coming crisis even more keenly than Vannevar Bush had. For years now, he'd found the Nazi

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connection and were printed out on the Teletype."10 36 THE DREAM MACHINE Either way, the Complex Computer was the hit of the meeting. Even Norbert Wiener seemed to find it a revelation. After he'd spent quite a bit of time play- ing with the Teletype and getting totally exasperated (for

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hardware and each one solving a piece of the conceptual puzzle. But only at the end of the decade were a few people such as Norbert Wiener beginning to put all the pieces together-and even they were only just beginning. :- Ultimately, in fact, it would take the war itself to forge

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us the term "zero-sum game"). Indeed, Janos Neumann, as he was known in his native Budapest, had been just as remarkable a prodigy as Norbert Wiener. The oldest of three sons born to a wealthy Jewish banker and his wife, he was enthralled by the beauty of mathe- matics from the

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mathematicians into exile, von Neumann helped to make Princeton a world- class mecca for mathematics. And by the eve of the war, he reigned alongside Norbert Wiener as one of the two most visible and innovative mathematicians in the country, if not in the world. The two men were good friends, as

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anything-he'd had a much more recent reminder thanks to yet another chain of unexpected in- sights set in motion by his old friend Norbert Wiener. However miffed Wiener may have been in the autumn of 1940, when Vannevar Bush rejected his "impractical" computer proposal, he certainly hadn't let it

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or begotten." John von Neumann was deeply impressed by McCulloch and Pitts's neural- network ideas from the moment he saw their paper (''Johnny,'' was Norbert Wiener's message to his frequent correspondent: "You've got to read this thing!"). Brain science, logic, philosophy, computation, the fundamental nature of mind-they were

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\,' . Logic, computability, high-speed electronics, stored programs, neural networks, the physical embodiment of purpose-J. C. R. Licklider ate it all up, with gusto. Indeed, Norbert Wiener's Tuesday-night supper seminar was the high point of his week in those postwar years. Lick and the rest of the Psycho-Acoustics Lab

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. And quite a lot of socializing, too." The Lickliders, of course, were in the thick of it. Following their marriage, in An imaginative forward glance: Norbert Wiener in hIs element NEW KINDS OF PEOPLE 67 January 1945, their tiny upstairs apartment on Massachusetts Avenue near Harvard Square had become a frequent destination

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them were very much alike in their restless exploration of new directions in psychology, in their love of mathematics, and in their shared fascination with Norbert Wiener's vi- sion of a new science. "It gave me these enthusiastic notions that any good idea could be mathematized," says Miller. ''Just after the

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Wiesner about his information-theory work sometime in late 1946 or early 1947. And that, of course, was the same as telling all of MIT, Norbert Wiener most definitely included. Wiener was not amused. More than once in his long career, the portly math- ematician had been known to snore his way

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be an exclusive characteristic of living things, could indeed be achieved by machines. 90 THE DREAM MACHINE the cybernetic spirit. But the "cybernetical circle,". as Norbert Wiener and his acolytes came to be called, didn't rank very high among his priorities. Once again, Wiener was not amused, and it wasn't

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and government. Shannon hadn't bothered to answer any of them. For all Shannon's unwanted celebrity, it's hard to say whether he or Norbert Wiener bore more responsibility for the Information Bomb. After all, Cybernetics hit the bookstores only a few months after Shannon's paper appeared, and greatly reinforced

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jet engines-a wave of technologies so astonishing that it was hard to tell sober news stories from pulp science fiction. And now here was Norbert Wiener with his vision of a new age in history, helping them make sense of it all. He didn't call it the Information Age; that

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working on communications problems and information the- ory, or Robert Fano, leader of the MIT information-theory group. And of course, you might run into Norbert Wiener wandering the halls almost any- where-at RLE if not at Project Lincoln, of which he heartily disapproved. George Miller, meanwhile, had been somewhat ambivalent

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master's degree with him, looking at how people perform in control tasks-in fact, I think my project grew out of a note that Norbert Wiener had written to Lick-and then I continued down the same direction for my Ph.D." Indeed, Lick was already honing the leadership style that

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odd to talk about the "decline" of a move- ment whose concepts have become so integrated into our culture that we take them for granted. Norbert Wiener could already feel it happening in 1961, when he fretted in the second edition of Cybernetics that the book might seem "trite and commonplace."13

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single, unified new science that encompasses both "the animal and the machine"? No. That dream of unity was already failing by the early 1950s, when Norbert Wiener's supper seminars and the Macy meetings both came to an end. And by mid- decade, with the movement increasingly left to third-raters and

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and/or arms control (he would later serve in the White House as President Kennedy's science adviser). Another factor in the decline, sadly, was Norbert Wiener himself "He had a tragic falling-out with many people in the fifties," says his former assistant Oliver Selfridge. "Norbert could take offense at imaginary

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Psycho-Acoustics Lab- the vision of humans and machines working together as a system. He still had the warm afterglow of the cybernetics movement and Norbert Wiener's dream of understanding both "the animal and the machine" through the same deep principles of control, communication, and information processing. He still had Wiener

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friend's efforts disappear into the midnight ether. By some standards, it's true, very few of those efforts were worth saving: "It was like Norbert Wiener's trying to be a chess player," says Fredkin. "Lick always had better ideas than anyone, but rotten execution." But who cared? Lick was playing

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him was the article itself He knew a little some- thing about computers. He'd even read Vannevar Bush's article about the Memex, and Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings. But interactive computers? Networks of computers? Humans in symbiosis with computers? The idea resonated deeply for him, says

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. Miller, "J. C. R. 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

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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

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),43. 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

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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. Pesl R. Masani (Cambndge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 4: 134. 7. Wiener, I Am a

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), 481. 11. Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Pnnceton, N.J.: Pnnceton Uni- versity Press, 1972), 182. 12. Ibid., 149. 13. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and CommunicatiOn in the Animal and the Machine, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961),6. 14. William Aspray, "The SCientific Conceptualization

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+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

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, 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. John

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: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 389. 12. C. Blalf, "The Passing of a Great Mind," Life, February 25, 1957. 13. Wiener, Cybernetics, 159. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Norbert Wiener, I Am a MathematiCIan: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 325. 16. Ibid., 327-28. 17

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. Norbert Wiener, "Some Moral and TechnICal Consequences of Automation," Saence 131 (1960). 18. Claude Shannon, "The Bandwagon," IEEE TransactiOns InformatiOn Theory 2 (1956). 19. Book Review Digest,

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. 12. Henry S. Tropp, "History of the Design of the SAGE Computer-The AN/FSQ7," Annals of the History of Computing 5 (1983): 340. 13. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and CommunicatiOn in the Animal and the Machine, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1961), vii. 14. Alan M. Turing, "Computing Machinery

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R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Den- nett (New York: BasIC Books, 1981), 53-67. 15. Ibid. 16. QIoted In Steve Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 276. 17. QIoted ibid., 370. 18. QIoted ibid. 19. QIoted ibid

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Work: Snapshots from the FIrst ThIrty-five }tars, edited by Jaime Parker Pearson. BurlIngton, Mass.: Digital Press, 1992. Galison, Peter. "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the CybernetICs Vision." Crztlcal In- qUIry, Autumn 1994. Garfinkel, Simson L. Architects of the InformatIOn Soaety: ThIrty-five }tars of the Laboratory for Computer

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: On the HIstOry and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamltos, CalIf.: I EEE Computer Society Press, 1997. Heims, Steve. John von Neumann and Norbert WIener: From MathematIcs to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980. -. ConstructIng a Soaal Science for Postwar Amerzca: The CybernetIcs Group, 1946

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Andrews. Gates: How MIcrosoft's Mogul ReInvented an Industry-and Made HImself the RIchest Man In Amenca. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Masanl, Pesl R. Norbert Wiener. Basel: Birkhauser, 1990. McCarthy, John. "Time-Sharing Computer Systems." In Computers and the World of the Future, edited by Martin Greenberger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

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Century of UNIX. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994. -. Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond. . . Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995. Segal, Irving Ezra. "Norbert Wiener, November 26, 1894-March 18, 1964." In BlOgraphzcal Memoirs, vol. 62. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1992. Shannon, Claude. "A Symbolic Analysis of

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, Richard L., ed. Hzstory of Programming Languages. New York: AcademIC Press, 1981. Wiener, Norbert. "Memorandum on the Mechanical Solution of Partial Differential Equations" (1940). In Norbert Wiener: Collected Works, vol. 4, edited by Pesl R. Masanl. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. -. "A Scientist Rebels." Bulletin of the Atomzc Sczent15ts, January 1947. Atlantic

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

by Thomas Rid  · 27 Jun 2016  · 509pp  · 132,327 words

begun. In 1940, in the midst of all this, a curious story ran its course at the vast campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Norbert Wiener, an eccentric mathematician, read about howitzers and artillery shells and was inspired. Shooting at the blue sky, aided by creaking computers, appealed to the roly

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fundamentally during World War II. It was then that a new set of ideas emerged to capture the change: cybernetics. The famously eccentric MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener coined1 the term, inspired by the Greek verb kybernan, which means “to steer, navigate, or govern.” Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal

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battery, and doing the work of eyes, brain, and arms becomes a major engineering challenge. This engineering challenge would become the foundation of cybernetics. When Norbert Wiener read about the duck-shooting comparison, he instantly fell for it.12 And he would claim again and again, falsely, that he overcame the related

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gun director that resulted in the M-9. D-2’s smallest and possibly most inconsequential contract, at just over two thousand dollars, went to Norbert Wiener, to explore how to predict flight patterns.36 As early as February 1940, five months after Nazi Germany had invaded Poland, Wiener joined a subcommittee

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the first animals into space (fruit flies).2 Sometime in late 1946, a missile researcher from the Boeing Airplane Company in Seattle reached out to Norbert Wiener. In 1946, Wiener’s NDRC-funded yellow-peril study on predicting flight patterns was still classified. The executive told Wiener in a letter that his

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decade were focused on behavior, purpose, and shedding light into black boxes. They did not appreciate the unwieldy, seemingly useless and obscure gadget from Gloucester. Norbert Wiener, remarkably, was an exception. He couldn’t make it to New York that week in March 1952, but he heard about the English machine, and

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still moving together, preserving binocular vision. The brain had simply adapted to the surgical change. Forty years later, cyberneticists were intrigued. In late 1947, when Norbert Wiener was launching his informal discussion circle in Boston, Roger Wolcott Sperry from the University of Chicago published the results of a similar experiment. It was

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. “If war comes, air power has in a sense failed,” the future commander of the mighty US Air Force concluded, in somber tone. For Norbert Wiener, the idea of automated military confrontation was folly. “Behind all this I sensed the desire of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round,” he

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mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.” “Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, said all that way back in the nineteen-forties,” Paul tells his secretary. He and his secretary are incredulous that people would ever

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the term “automation” in the late 1940s, when he was in his midtwenties. The trained engineer was more conservative in his predictions. “Writers such as Norbert Wiener,” he wrote in a withering comment, by comparing “automatic control systems and the nervous system of humans and animals, have made the world of science

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chickens fly right onto our plates.54 Hilton’s optimism was unbridled and ambitious. Keen to help shape the future, she had reached out to Norbert Wiener, seeking his counsel and cooperation. But Wiener, as usual, remained skeptical. On March 5, 1963, he wrote a short note to Hilton expressing his

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Hilton was a tireless organizer and advocate, teaching and networking labor activists across the United States and beyond. For her and her fellow community organizers, Norbert Wiener had become a pop star, an idol, and an inspiration, as she made clear in several letters to him and others. Just as Hilton was

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its fate with its founder: it had become too popular too quickly, and it was often misinterpreted. Hilton dedicated her book The Evolving Society to Norbert Wiener, “whose wisdom and humanity is the foundation upon which the age of cyberculture shall be built.”62 The two (it is unclear if she

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was bound to grow as technology advanced and as cybernetics offered an inspiring vocabulary for coming to terms with machines as organisms. Already in 1943, Norbert Wiener discussed some of these questions with John von Neumann. The two debated similarities between the brain and computers in an interdisciplinary meeting with neuroscientists and

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science, but science fiction: Arthur Clarke’s monumental story 2001: A Space Odyssey, about technological progress and machines acquiring human characteristics. Clarke was mesmerized by Norbert Wiener’s work. The British science fiction writer had read an essay published in Science by the father of cybernetics during the summer of 1960: “Some

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Ts.”19 To bolster his confident case, the science fiction author quoted the cybernetic master himself: “as a careful reading of these remarks by Dr. Norbert Wiener will show.” Clarke understood that machines could escape human control even if they were less intelligent than humans, simply by virtue of the sheer speed

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respiration: “Computer Analysis of Reflex Control and Organization.” In the article, Clynes applied automatic control system theory to the body. Clynes had been fascinated by Norbert Wiener’s ideas on cybernetics and even discussed cybernetics with the famous MIT professor in Ukraine.22 Clynes and his boss considered presenting their findings at

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as with the ever-more-urgent air defense problem. “There was tremendous intellectual ferment in Cambridge after World War II,” he recalled after participating in Norbert Wiener’s weekly cybernetic circle. “I was a faithful adherent to that.”72 Licklider was a researcher and faculty member at Harvard University at the time

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extend that comparison. If the individual mind was a self-regulating system that could be tweaked by oiling the feedback loops, what else was? Norbert Wiener’s and Ross Ashby’s ideas immediately had a spiritual and quasi-religious appeal that went far beyond the fear of automation, or the fear

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first and rather slim sixty-two-page catalog; he reviewed seven, in detail, including several classics that had defined the field. First, of course, was Norbert Wiener’s 1948 Cybernetics: “Society, from organism to community to civilization to universe, is the domain of cybernetics,” Brand wrote, introducing the book to the hippies

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view. It represented an entire subculture. To those steeped in countercultural thought, High Frontiers was also about access to tools. Some thirty-five years earlier, Norbert Wiener and the early cyberneticists had tried to defend their new science against holism in all its forms, from Freud to Hubbard. Now, High Frontiers was

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communard from the Farm in Tennessee, and the WELL’s nineteenth user, lovingly built the cabinet for the VAX. The WELL’s cybernetic origin in Norbert Wiener’s air defense research wasn’t just palpable in Brand’s philosophy, his approach to community organizing, and decades of Whole Earth work. The

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of war. The US Air Force was flying and fighting in cyberspace before Gibson had even coined the term. The same problem that had inspired Norbert Wiener during the Blitz in World War II had kept air force engineers busy throughout the fifties and sixties: human-machine interaction in the cockpit under

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vogue in the early 1990s, meant just that—“to steer or govern”—Arquilla and Ronfeldt pointed out. They stressed that “the prefix was introduced by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s.”22 Ronfeldt especially had been infatuated with cybernetics since the 1970s. He had even suggested, unsuccessfully, an entire set of neologisms inspired

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underdelivered and disappointed the visionaries, with all those unseemly details spoiling the brave prospect of what the future of networked machines had in stock. Thankfully, Norbert Wiener’s devout descendants had already found a solution to that problem. 9.FALL OF THE MACHINES CYBERNETICS STARTED AT WAR—AND EVENTUALLY CAME back to

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the artificial as if made of flesh and blood. This anthropomorphic longing didn’t start with the antiaircraft problem during World War II, or with Norbert Wiener’s attempt to model pilot-plane interaction under enemy fire. The desire to enhance muscles by mechanical means, of course, is older than civilization.

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Soon, engineers began envisioning and designing machines that could compete with humans and outperform them—first in strength, then in intelligence. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener added the notion that machines could theoretically even build an improved version of themselves and thus evolve, and evolve faster than humans ever could. From

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patterns through the decades—patterns that are also warnings. One pattern is spiritual. Not always, but often, the machine has become a godhead, an idol. Norbert Wiener, mesmerized by his own invention, wanted to understand magic and religion through his theory of the machine—but he achieved the opposite: the spiritual encroached

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jazzy art of cybernetic wordsmithing, and surely the psychedelic guru would have a fabulous time with Pentagon and NSA slide decks dotted with similar artistry. Norbert Wiener himself disdained such “initial jargon” as a curse of modern times. The newspeak irked him. It often sounded “like a streetcar turning on rusty

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a mistake, even if it is created in our image; only we can make mistakes. And therein lies the ultimate irony. Cybernetics, first and foremost Norbert Wiener, tried to disenchant the machine—but achieved the opposite, the enchantment of the machine. The science of negative feedback itself created a powerful positive feedback

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“sea forts” positioned by theRoyal Navy in the Thames Estuary during World War II to protect London. The forts werean effective defense against German attacks. Norbert Wiener’s initial cybernetic research was a $2,325 defense contract approved in December 1940. Here, Wiener (center) is pictured withtwo senior army officers: Brigadier

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Freeman, a World War II navy veteran, was published in Life magazine on July 11, 1960. Alice Mary Hilton—an author, organizer, and acolyte of Norbert Wiener—was one of the most passionate and eloquent proponents of automation. By 1963, Hilton worked hard to bring about the “age of cyberculture.” By late

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David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 187. 11.Ibid. 12.For instance, Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948), 113. 13.Quoted in Mindell, Between Human and Machine

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Bell System: Communications Sciences (1925–1980) (Indianapolis, IN: AT&T Bell Laboratories, 1984), 359. 40.Quoted in Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 228. 41.Masani, Norbert Wiener, 182. 42.Wiener, Cybernetics, 5. 43.Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 111. Conway and

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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.

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than the film would go. Wiener, quoted in Roy Gibbons, “Machines That Think Called Peril to Man,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 28, 1959, 1. 56.Norbert Wiener, quoted in “Scientist Claims Electronic Brain Could Victimize Man,” Baltimore Sun, December 28, 1959, 1. 57.Stafford, “Man Called Future Slave.” 58.Wiener, quoted

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Times, November 18, 1945, 39. 4.Quoted in Michael S. Sherry, Preparing for the Next War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 19. 5.Norbert Wiener, “Moral Reflections of a Mathematician,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 12, no. 2 (February 1956): 55. 6.George E. Valley, “How the SAGE Development Began

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Marks Fifteenth Year,” New York Times, November 2, 1961, 51. 32.David R. Francis, “Self-Producing Machines,” Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 1961, 16. 33.Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), 4. 34.Ibid., 5. 35.Ibid., 10. 36.L. Landon Goodman, “Automation and Its Social

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Development Association annual conference, April 12, 1956), 1. 37.Alistair Cooke, “Big Brains,” Letter from America, BBC Radio 4, January 21, 1962, 21:00. 38.Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science 131, no. 3410 (May 6, 1960): 1358. 39.Astrahan and Jacobs, “History of the Design,” 349. 40

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(Basel: Burkhäuser, 1990), 225. 2.Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 21. 3.Masani, Norbert Wiener, 184. 4.John von Neumann to Norbert Wiener, November 29, 1946, in ibid., 243. 5.John von Neumann, Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, ed. Arthur W. Burks (Urbana: University of

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Ibid., 121. 13.Ibid., 122. 14.Ibid., 126. 15.David R. Francis, “Self-Producing Machines,” Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 1961, 16. 16.Ibid. 17.Norbert Wiener, “Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation,” Science 131, no. 3410 (May 6, 1960): 1355. 18.Arthur C. Clarke, “Machina Ex Deux,” Playboy, July 1961

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, 66. 19.Ibid. 20.Ibid., 70. 21.Ibid., 66. 22.Manfred Clynes to Norbert Wiener, November 13, 1961, Norbert Wiener Papers, MC 22, box 21, folder 305, Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Libraries, Cambridge, MA. 23.Alexis Madrigal, “The Man Who First Said

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, 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

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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

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Barnwood House. All reprinted with permission of The Estate of W. Ross Ashby. Copyright 2008, W. Ross Ashby Digital Archive, www.rossashby.info. Photo of Norbert Wiener with Palomilla robot. Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Photo of Bigelow and von Neumann. Alan Richards photographer. From the Shelby White and

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, 28 Madison, James, 277 magic automation and, 95–96 and cybernetic myth, 343–44 High Frontiers magazine, 185, 186 and spiritual aspects of cybernetics, 348 Norbert Wiener and, 93–94 magnetron, 19 mainframe computers, 149–50 Major Shared Resource Centers, 324 Makveli (hacker), 315 maladaptive behavior, 58 Maltz, Maxwell, 162–65,

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

by Fred Turner  · 31 Aug 2006  · 339pp  · 57,031 words

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

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his way into the bohemian art worlds of San Francisco and New York. Like many of the artists around him at the time, and like Norbert Wiener, in whose writings on cybernetics they were immersed, Brand quickly became what sociologist Ronald Burt has called a “network entrepreneur.”7 That is, he began

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their new communities. These items included the fringed deerskin jackets and geodesic domes favored by the communards, but they also included the cybernetic musings of Norbert Wiener and the latest calculators from Hewlett-Packard. In later editions, alongside discussions of such supplies, Brand published letters from high-technology researchers next to firsthand

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and this institutional context that gave rise to the computational metaphor and the new philosophy of technology in which it made its first public appearance: Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics.28 A former mathematics prodigy, Wiener had joined the faculty of MIT in 1919 and soon began collaborating with Vannevar Bush, a professor

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had chosen the field of our joint investigations and our respective parts in them. The deciding factor in this new step was the war.30 Norbert Wiener began doing war-related research even before the United States entered the fighting, and soon after the Rad Lab was formed, he turned his attention

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. From a theoretical point of view, this combination of the organic and the mechanical presented a problem. In his 1956 memoir, I Am a Mathematician, Norbert Wiener explained that “in order to obtain as complete a mathematical treatment as possible of the over-all control problem, it is necessary to assimilate the

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their work as a whole. The power of cybernetics and systems theory to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration emerged in large part thanks to the entrepreneurship of Norbert Wiener and the research climate of World War II. Wiener did not create the discipline of cybernetics out of thin air; rather, he pulled its analytical

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emotionally committed adulthood. For the New Communalists, in contrast, and for much of the broader counterculture, cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative. Like Norbert Wiener two decades earlier, many in the counterculture saw in cybernetics a vision of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of

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, figures such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, embraced the systems orientation and even the engineers of the military-industrial research establishment. Together they read Norbert Wiener and, later, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; across the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, they made those writings models for their work. At

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entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of

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But USCO’s founders were also steeped in the literature of cybernetics. Gerd Stern, a European Jew and a World War II– era refugee, saw Norbert Wiener as a child of European transplants like himself and was thoroughly versed in his writings. In large part for this [ 50 ] Chapter 2 reason, light

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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

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with one another, the sensation was brought about by their integration into a single techno-biological system within which, as Buckminster Fuller put it, echoing Norbert Wiener, the individual human being was simply another “pattern-complex.” Brand himself had organized the event in keeping with the systems principles he had encountered at

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h n o l o g y [ 83 ] local and one global, and both familiar from Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas and Integrities and, before that, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics. On the local level, the individual reader is like a god in having the power to conduct his life as he wishes, as

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carried out, they will result in our living lives more in synch with those forces—lives that will be more meaningful, more satisfying or, in Norbert Wiener’s terms, more homeostatically stable. At the global level, like Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer or perhaps a cold war military planner, Brand’s reader enjoys

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tools) and, potentially, a tool for others in his own right. In this dizzying string of analogies, we can hear echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Norbert Wiener, and, of course, Buckminster Fuller. But for many of the readers of the Whole Earth Catalog, the analogies were more than the stuff of Romantic

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local action echoes the notion of the individual’s local role in maintaining universal systems. By acting on a small scale, the individual can imitate Norbert Wiener’s gunner, adjusting his fire, or Buckminster Fuller’s Designer, turning the energies of the universe to his own purposes. He can thereby change the

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the management of information and the control of human organizations in order to do so. During World War II, in the airplane-tracking projects of Norbert Wiener, the integration of man and machine had presented a way to win the war. Now the battlefield had shifted to the workplace. Like Wiener, Engelbart

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MIT, where he worked on a variety of projects descended from MIT’s wartime commitments. He was steeped in the cybernetic theories of his colleague Norbert Wiener, and it showed. In a highly influential 1960 paper entitled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Licklider imagined a form of human-machine Tak i n g t

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on his reading of the mystical cybernetics of a former anthropologist, psychiatrist, and biological researcher, Gregory Bateson. Much as the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Norbert Wiener had presided [ 122 ] Chapter 4 over the Whole Earth Catalog, Bateson’s cybernetic vision permeated CQ. In the late 1960s, Fuller and Wiener had offered

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moved in the 1960s—USCO, the downtown Manhattan art world, the communards of the back-to-the-land movement— cybernetics meant primarily the writings of Norbert Wiener. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, Wiener represents the “first generation” of cyberneticians. This generation, which gathered during and immediately after World War II, understood

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conditioned reflexes. There he met Warren McCulloch and Arturo Rosenblueth, and he heard Rosenblueth present the concept of feedback that he had lately developed with Norbert Wiener and Julian Bigelow. As Steve Heims has pointed out, both physical and social science had up until that time focused on linear models of causality

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of these young programmers gathered on the ninth floor of Technology Square, in Marvin Minsky’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory ( just two blocks away from Norbert Wiener’s old Rad Lab). Within the AI Lab, wrote Levy, echoing Stewart Brand’s 1972 piece for Rolling Stone, there were two kinds of workers

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engineers routinely demonstrated new technologies in order to make manifest not only their immediate applications, but also their broad ability to transform existing social systems. Norbert Wiener’s anti-aircraft predictor, Ross Ashby’s homeostat, and numerous other cybernetic machines each served as a demonstration of the ways that human life could

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, and nonhierarchical social system, much like the media it was inventing. “Mass media,” wrote Brand, mixing his metaphors, were “a form of cultural monocropping.” Citing Norbert Wiener, he depicted mass media as dangers to the health of society. The scientists of the Media Lab, in contrast, were “committed to making the individual

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social change and a habit of working in an informal, networked way. They also came with extensive [ 186 ] Chapter 6 experience in scenario planning. Like Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, the scenario method had its roots in World War II, when American military planners tried to model the possible behaviors of their enemies

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of a keeper hole; outside intervention is almost always necessary.” Like a cybernetician, McIntire read the water as an emblem of social process, inadvertently echoing Norbert Wiener’s words in The Human Use of Human Beings: “We are but [ 192 ] Chapter 6 whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are

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the lifelikeness each kind of system holds.”52 On the one hand, Kelly’s account of “vivisystems” owed a substantial debt to the legacy of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics. Kelly even went so far as to suggest that “a short-hand synopsis of Out of Control would be to say it Networking

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and its social Darwinist cousin, bionomics, that the biological and social worlds were no more than information and that humans were, in the words of Norbert Wiener, not “stuff that abides but patterns which perpetuate themselves.” And it was a very short step from the notion that the control of information makes

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before. After all, what had LSD users hoped to accomplish, if not the “overthrow of matter” by the “powers of mind”? This hope also reflected Norbert Wiener’s older, early cold war hope that somehow the powers of mind represented in computers could contain the “brute force” then represented by the massed

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shift in a cybernetic rhetoric and to claim that it was evidence for the imminent fulfillment of a New Communalist dream. Almost fifty years earlier, Norbert Wiener’s vision of the world as an information system seeking homeostasis had offered cold war Americans a framework with which to imagine their own survival

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of the Whole Earth Catalog some years later, these systems theories promised a solution to the conundrums of their adolescence. On the one hand, as Norbert Wiener had argued as early as the late 1940s, cybernetics and related systems theories offered up a vision of the world in which each of its

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leveled in a single blast, cybernetics, and systems theory more generally, offered a vision of a world united, inextricably connected, and tending, at least in Norbert Wiener’s view, toward the calm of homeostasis. It was this vision of a natural world engaged in constant, complex patterns of coevolution yet tending to

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tactics by which the defense engineers of World War II and the cold war had organized and claimed legitimacy for their own work. Much like Norbert Wiener and the scientists of the Rad Lab, Stewart Brand had made a career of crossing disciplinary and professional boundaries. Like those who designed and funded

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computing. For Stewart Brand and, later, for the writers and editors of Wired, the mirror logic of cybernetics provided substantial support for this denial. For Norbert Wiener and those who followed his lead, the world consisted of a series of informational patterns, and each of those patterns in turn was also in

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than a decade. 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

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” 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

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Became Posthuman. 29. Wiener, Cybernetics, 8. 30. Ibid., 9. 31. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 182 – 88. For a chronicle of Wiener’s shifting relationship to the Rad Lab, see Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age, 115

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, as Peter Galison put it, “Servomechanical theory would become the measure of man.” Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 240. 36. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 184. 37. Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow, “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology”; Galison, “Ontology of the Enemy,” 247; Wiener, Cybernetics, 15, 21. Shannon published his theory in

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were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good or evil.” Ibid., 36. 41. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 343. After World War II, Wiener became increasingly afraid of the ways science could be used to undermine human goals. For a particularly explicit example

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aesthetic terms of planning for nuclear war, see Ghamari-Tabrizi, Worlds of Herman Kahn, esp. 54 –57, 128 –30. 45. Heims, John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener, 302. 46. Bowker, “How to Be Universal,” 108. 47. Ibid., 116. 48. Pickering, “Gallery of Monsters.” For more on Ashby’s homeostat, see Hayles, How

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. “Community Memory.” People’s Computer Company 4, no. 1 (1975): 16. Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Cortada, James W. The Making of the Information Society: Experience, Consequences, and Possibilities. Upper Saddle River

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: St. Martin’s Press, 1980. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The New Industrial State. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994): 228 – 66. ———. “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief.” In The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario

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and the Mathematicians: From Interdisciplinary Interaction to Societal Functions.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977): 141–59. ———. John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980. Helmreich, Stefan. “Artificial Life, Inc.: Darwin and Commodity Fetishism from Santa

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, CA: Sage, 1988. Rogers, Everett M., and Judith K. Larsen. Silicon Valley Fever: Growth of High-Technology Culture. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18 –24. Ross, Andrew. No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman  · 17 Jul 2017  · 415pp  · 114,840 words

son into the shape of a prodigy. Or John Stuart Mill’s father, drilling his son in Greek at the tender age of three. Or Norbert Wiener’s father, declaring to the world that he could turn anything, even a broomstick, into a genius with enough time and discipline. “Norbert always felt

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pinging its way through math and engineering circles. Vannevar Bush had, of course, helped it along. But others were noticing the young mathematician as well. Norbert Wiener, by then no longer a genius in training under his father but a highly respected mathematician in his own right, wrote in 1940 that he

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L. Doob. 19 * * * * * * Wiener He was, according to one writer, “the American John von Neumann”—and the exaggeration was almost excusable. Born in Columbia, Missouri, Norbert Wiener was shaped by a father single-mindedly focused on molding his young son into a genius. Leo Wiener used an extraordinary personal library—and an

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of the addle-pated academic that Wiener did not fulfill. “From every angle of vision there was something idiosyncratic about Norbert Wiener,” mused Paul Samuelson. Hans Freudenthal remembered, In appearance and behaviour, Norbert Wiener was a baroque figure, short, rotund, and myopic, combining these and many qualities in extreme degree. His conversation was a

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two paragraphs should be rewritten with a much more modest and realistic view of the importance of the theory.” Shannon also urged Bello to acknowledge Norbert Wiener for his contemporary work on cybernetics—and to make sure Bell Labs researchers were given their due. Bello did give some credit to Wiener and

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5. Naturally, talk of a Nobel Prize followed Shannon for much of his career. In 1959, he was nominated for the Nobel in physics, alongside Norbert Wiener. Instead, physicists Emilio Gino Segrè and Owen Chamberlain garnered that year’s award for discovering the antiproton. The nomination for Shannon and Wiener was regarded

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phase-out of the stupid, entropy-increasing, and militant human race in favor of a more logical, energy conserving, and friendly species—the computer.” 32 Norbert Wiener (pictured in the center with Shannon and MIT president Julius Stratton on the left) was a former child prodigy, the inventor of “cybernetics,” and the

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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

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”: Claude Shannon to Vannevar Bush. June 5, 1940. Vannevar Bush Papers, Library of Congress. Chapter 8: Princeton “a man of extraordinary brilliancy”: Norbert Wiener to J. R. Kline, April 10, 1941. Norbert Wiener Papers, MITA. “Mr. Shannon is one of the ablest graduates”: H. B. Phillips cable to M. Morse, October 21, 1940. “He

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/watch?v=YEt9P2kp9BE. Chapter 19: Wiener “the American John Von Neumann”: Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 135. “I had full liberty . . . 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

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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

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/norbert-wiener. “Can you show me where”: Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener.” Shannon had taken Wiener’s class: Price, “Oral History: Claude E. Shannon.” “an

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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

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, 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

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. “The Bell people”: Norbert Wiener to Warren McCulloch, May 2, 1927, Norbert Wiener Papers

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, MITA. “the entire field”: Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics

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.php?id=10947. “You know, there’s no Nobel”: 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), 394, n. 327. “After a quarter of a century”: Kazuo Inamori, “Philosophy,” Inamori Foundation, April 12

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: Michigan Historical Collections/Bentley Historical Library Ann Arbor Sesquicentennial Committee, 1974. Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic, 2005. Cook, Gareth. “The Singular Mind of Terry Tao.” New York Times, July 24, 2015. Coughlin, Kevin. “Claude

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Institute of Technology.” MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections. libraries.mit.edu/archives/exhibits/freeman. Freudenthal, Hans. “Norbert Wiener.” In Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/mathematics-biographies/norbert-wiener Friedman, Norman. Naval Firepower: Battleship Guns and Gunnery in the Dreadnought Era. Barnsley, England: Seaforth, 2008. Frize

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.math.uiuc.edu/People/doob_record.html. Jerison, David, I. M. Singer, and Daniel W. Stroock, eds. 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. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society, 1997. Johnson, George

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)

by Benjamin Peters  · 2 Jun 2016  · 518pp  · 107,836 words

as a series of footnotes to Plato, then this book began with an obscure footnote in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman’s popular biography of Norbert Wiener. As I was rereading the book’s references one evening in 2007, I stumbled on a passing reference to a declassified, Freedom of Information Act

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world. Introduction There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-“scientific” narrative method of the professional historian. —Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948, concluding line The Soviet Union was home to hidden networks. The story told

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sciences, it formalized midcentury mind-machine analogies that continue to animate some corners of contemporary artificial intelligence research. In the hands of polymaths such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Donald MacKay, the technical and technocratic insights into a summary set of cybernetic sciences—operations research, systems theory, game theory, and information

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of Soviet cybernetics in general and the rise of a peculiarly Soviet field—economic cybernetics—on which subsequent chapters build. The American Consolidation of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener, the MIT mathematician, inveterate polymath, and son of the founder of Slavic studies in America, is often credited with launching cybernetics with his 1948 book

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between communist and anticommunist debates in postwar France; the local intellectuals helped ascribe a long French intellectual tradition to cybernetics, which softened its reception; and Norbert Wiener visited France repeatedly and promoted his science vocabulary in person. The imprint of cybernetics can still be seen in subsequent generations of French theorists. These

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Jakobson, the aforementioned structural linguist, a collaborator in the Macy Conferences, and a Russian émigré, held the chair in Slavic studies at Harvard founded by Norbert Wiener’s father. And finally, Wiener’s own domineering and brilliant father, Leo Wiener, was a self-made polymath, the preeminent translator of Tolstoy into English

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as exciting possibilities, in the rapidly developing sphere of science and technology, including rumors about a new American field called cybernetics. Between 1947 (the year Norbert Wiener coined the term cybernetics at a Macy Conference in New York) and 1953 (the year after Joseph Stalin died), the state of Stalinist science, having

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Aiken, “Mark III, a Calculator,” Soviet journalist Boris Agapov ridiculed the sensationalist American press for its exultations about the coming era of “thinking machines,” styling Norbert Wiener as an unknown figure “except for the fact that he is already old (although still brisk), very fleshy, and smokes cigars.” Commenting on a Time

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a worrying fashion around “semantic idealism” and dubbed cyberneticists “semanticists-cannibals” for their recursive logics, especially self-informing feedback loops. In addition to American cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, the volume identified those belonging to the group of “semantic obscurantists” as including logician-pacifist Bertrand Russell, his Cambridge colleague Alfred North Whitehead, and Vienna

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the last hundred years’ worth of precybernetic work in Russian.94 Kolman’s internationalism allowed two people west of Berlin to slip into his history—Norbert Wiener and Nikolai Rashevsky, the first Pavlov-inspired biomathematician and a Russian émigré at the University of Chicago. Thus, the battle to legitimize Soviet cybernetics began

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work on Soviet cybernetics, argued in 1964 against any plastic understanding of cybernetics. He legitimated his call for disciplinary coherence by invoking its foreign founder, Norbert Wiener, claiming that “‘terminological inaccuracy’ is unacceptable, for it leads and (has already led) to a departure from Wiener’s original vision of cybernetics toward an

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forward under the fading banner of Soviet cybernetics.122 Conclusion: Wiener in Moscow This brief history of early Soviet cybernetics ends where it began, with Norbert Wiener and the foreign founding of cybernetics. In the early 1960s, travel restrictions for Americans in the Soviet Union began to slacken, and a trickle of

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identity without a founder, and because founders precede identities, all foundations must be laid by what must appear post fact as foreigners. >Figure 1.1 Norbert Wiener with Aleksei A. Lyapunov in Moscow, 1960. Courtesy of Boris Malinovsky. Wiener’s renown in the former Soviet territories has outlasted his memory in the

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, with the visit of an American founder of cybernetics, the son of Leo Wiener, an émigré from Byelostock and founder of Slavic studies in America, Norbert Wiener was christened no less than a Soviet prophet returning home.128 Yet if Wiener were a prophet, he would be the kind whose stinging calls

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, and the Air Force Computation Center.2 Kitov’s optimistic review of computing in the West stemmed from his 1952 discovery of a copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics that had been removed from general circulation (due to the ongoing anti-American campaign against cybernetics) and stored in a top-secret military

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also helped to jumpstart and also consign to limbo local computer network projects. This account highlights three case studies: first, Anatoly Kitov’s discovery of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in a secret military library set into motion an internal transition in Soviet scientific discourse; second, Donald Davies and the British Telecom industry

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behind the OGAS (All-State Automated System) Project. Notes Prologue 1. 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), 392 n. 318. 2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill

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. Robertson (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), 109–112. For more on cybernetics in the United States, see Peter Galison, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1) (1994): 228–266; Geoffrey C. Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–1970,” Social Studies

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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

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: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A

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studies and Norbert’s cold war cybernetics, see Benjamin Peters, “Toward a Genealogy of a Cold War Communication Science: The Strange Loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener,” Russian Journal of Communication 5 (1) (2013): 31–43. 5. This section draws on my previously published work on cybernetics, including Bernard Geoghegan and Benjamin

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, 2013). 22. Claude E. Shannon, “The Bandwagon,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2 (1) (1956): 3. 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

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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. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of

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Stefan Odobleja, see Mihai Draganescu, Odobleja: Between Ampère and Wiener (Bucharest: Academia Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1981); Nicolae Jurcau, “Two Specialists in Cybernetics: Stefan Odobleja and Norbert Wiener, Common and Different Features,” Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (1998), accessed October 11, 2011, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Comp/CompJurc.htm. 41. Peters

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RAS, 1998). 53. Mark M. Rosenthal and Pavel F. Iudin, eds., Kratkiĭ filosofskiĭ slovar’, 4th ed. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1954), 236–237; also quoted in Masani, Norbert Wiener, 261. 54. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, 119. 55. Ilia B. Novik, “Normal’naia Lzhnauka” [“A Normal Pseudoscience”], Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki (Questions of

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. Ibid., 210. 122. 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

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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. Conway

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, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Conway, Flo, and Jim Siegelman. Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Cooley, Charles Horton. Sociological Theory and Social Research: Selected Papers of Charles Horton Cooley. New York

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Press, 1987. Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1) (1994): 228–266. Galloway, Alex. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004. Gardner, Roy

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William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, [1954] 1977. Heims, Steve J. The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991. Heims, Steve J. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914

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Pittsburg Press, 2005. Josephson, Paul R. Totalitarian Science and Technology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Jurcau, Nicolae. “Two Specialists in Cybernetics: Stefan Odobleja and Norbert Wiener, Common and Different Features.” Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (1998), accessed October 11, 2011, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Comp/CompJurc.htm. Kahnemann, Daniel

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and Society 11 (1–2) (2009): 13–30. Peters, Benjamin. “Toward a Genealogy of a Cold War Communication Science: The Strange Loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener.” Russian Journal of Communication 5 (1) (2013): 31–43. Peters, Benjamin, and Deborah Lubken. “New Media in Crises: Discursive Instability and Emergency Communication.” In The

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Conversation during Perestroika. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Roll-Hansen, Nils. The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005. Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18–24. Rudnev, K. N. “Vyichislitel’naya tekhnika v narodnom khozyyaistve” [“Computing technology

Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics

by David A. Mindell  · 10 Oct 2002  · 759pp  · 166,687 words

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

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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

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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

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different wartime engineering cultures: Gordon Brown and the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT, Bell Labs’ electrical computers project, tracking radars at MIT’s Radiation Lab, and Norbert Wiener, George Stibitz, and others thinking about human operators, digital representation, and control systems as generalized information processors. Through the NDRC and its related control systems

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cybernetic or connected characteristics. Ideas of communications, systems, and human interaction were present from the early days of digital computing. Numerous American computing pioneers, including Norbert Wiener, George Stibitz, John Atanasoff, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Claude Shannon, and Jay Forrester, among others, participated in the NDRC’s research program on control

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feedback devices had little interaction with biologists and their ideas of homeostasis, so I have little to say about biological regulation other than to mention Norbert Wiener’s interest in it. Moreover, during the world wars secrecy confined military control engineering within national borders, although the United States and Britain shared technology

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systems together from the first and crafting a new role, that of system integrator, for his own organization. Chapter 10 shows the NDRC working with Norbert Wiener, George Stibitz, and others interested in questions of digital computing and in how the representations employed by their machines related to organizational contexts and industrial

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manufacturing. Also, Sperry’s antiaircraft projects laid the groundwork for research into problems of prediction, computing, and human-machine interaction during World War II. When Norbert Wiener began thinking about human-machine interaction, he was addressing the problem as defined in the 1920s by Sperry and the army. Like hitting a distant

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made the mathematics more consistent and understandable. Bush’s first book, Operational Circuit Analysis , applied the technique to practical problems. It included an appendix by Norbert Wiener on Fourier analysis and frequency domain techniques, which began to relate transient and steady-state analyses. Wiener, who was on the mathematics faculty at MIT

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’s 1934 master’s thesis and his 1938 dissertation both dealt with the cinema integraph , a further line of research into methods of integration. 74 Norbert Wiener, who advised the Bush laboratory on calculating machines, suggested a way to speed up calculation by lightening the load, literally, on the mechanisms. Plot images

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) Thornton Fry had urged him to build a calculating machine to aid electronic-filter design at Bell Labs. Those who attended Stibitz’s demonstration included Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly (who later designed the ENIAC), among others, probably including the members of Section D-2. 29 The following week, Weaver made one

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51 to industrial firms or laboratories. The largest contract cost about $1.5 million, for the Bell Labs gun director; the smallest $2,000, for Norbert Wiener and his assistant to study the theory of prediction. The average cost was about $145,000. The longest contract lasted nearly five years, the shortest

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to consider the possibilities of predicting the position of airplanes taking evasive action, or “curved flight prediction.” D-2 let further contracts to Bell Labs, Norbert Wiener, and others to study this problem. When Wiener came up with his mathematically optimal predictor, the T-15 served as the baseline for comparison and

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apply them productively to the war effort. The NDRC’s record is not one of unmitigated foresight or success. It had an ambiguous relationship with Norbert Wiener and cancelled his promising work at a critical moment. It rejected a proposal to build an electronic computer that eventually became the ENIAC. Yet the

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and Bigelow: Prediction and Stability In the fall of 1940, during the initial survey of fire control research, Ed Poitras visited MIT and met with Norbert Wiener, who wished to begin applying communications and network theory to servo problems. “[Wiener] wants to tackle the problem of solving for the controller of servos

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,” Stibitz observed when he operated the device. But questions remained, in Weaver’s view, “whether this is a useful miracle or a useless miracle.” 16 Norbert Wiener, after all, was trying to build a machine to predict an uncertain future, one under the control of an enemy pilot trying to escape with

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fire control and prediction played in his thinking, but beginning with “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,” he also recast military control in a civilian mold. For Norbert Wiener, in the midst of the technological war, cybernetics became a civilian enterprise. Most indicative of this alienation and reconstruction is Wiener’s consistent failure to

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National Cash Register Company. Wartime projects distracted the staff before any full-scale hardware was built. 47 Yet the Rapid Arithmetical Machine had some influence: Norbert Wiener wrote a memo about it, and it brought Caldwell into contact with the idea of representing numbers as electronic pulses. His opinions would heavily influence

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immediate present interest.” 59 The NDRC would support the RCA work for a few months, Weaver concluded, and then decide on next steps. But as Norbert Wiener was also about to learn, within the increasingly goal-oriented NDRC, defining a project as “long-range future” amounted to killing it. Indeed, the NDRC

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to find other NDRC divisions willing to support the project but to no avail. 62 The contract terminated on 31 March 1943, just weeks after Norbert Wiener’s. The NDRC was narrowing its horizons. Rejecting the ENIAC Defining computers within control systems and defining electronic digital computers as long-range research shaped

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single telegraph channel from the tape transmitter … and be reproduced in the form of motor rotation at the other end of the line.” 80 Where Norbert Wiener theorized the fundamental notion of “the message” in computing systems, Stibitz implemented it in practice, turning teletype messages into mechanical movements and custom metallic parts

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and digital computing need not establish Harold Hazen, Warren Weaver, George Stibitz, nor their associates as originators of the postwar computing or systems sciences. Like Norbert Wiener, Ivan Getting, and numerous others, they responded to the technologies and organizations in their environment and contributed observations and new ideas. The role played by

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servos for their SCR-584 radar, they used communications theory to describe the noisy echoes from aircraft and to sort valuable data from damaging noise. Norbert Wiener introduced statistics and autocorrelation to the prediction problem and showed how to design optimal feedback loops for particular parameters. Despite these efforts, the antiaircraft problem

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engineers and systems scientists purview over broad arenas. Popular images appeared as well, in part as the result of proselytizing by former NDRC researchers like Norbert Wiener, Gordon Brown, Warren Weaver, and Louis Ridenour. A famous cover of Time magazine portrayed cybernetics as an anthropomorphic automatic computer in a military uniform, reading

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Shannon, fire control raised a problem of electrical communications and hence required an analysis “couched entirely in electrical language.” The authors acknowledged the importance of Norbert Wiener’s work and devoted significant effort to summarizing his statistical approach. Ultimately they rejected it, however, due to problems in applying the rms-error criterion

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and contexts. Rather, the significance of this history depends on its coherence and continuity, and on broad, diverse communities’ remaining connected over long periods. When Norbert Wiener wrote in Cybernetics that in 1942 “it had already become clear to Mr. Bigelow and my- self that the problems of control engineering and of

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) for manufacturing testing. Division 7’s most lasting research concerned the integration components of the control system, particularly in the areas of mathematics and computation. Norbert Wiener, of MIT, studied a statistical method for predicting the future trajectory of an airplane based on its past performance (6, 29). As a part of

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Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland NARL National Archives, Radiation Laboratory Records, Waltham, Massachusetts NWCL Naval War College Library, Newport, Rhode Island NW Papers Norbert Wiener Papers, MIT Archives, Cambridge, Massachusetts OSRD Record Group 227, Office of Scientific Research and Development, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland OSRD7 Record

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GAP George A. Philbrick GRS George R. Stibitz GSB Gordon S. Brown HLH Harold L. Hazen IAG Ivan A. Getting KTC Karl Taylor Compton NW Norbert Wiener PRB Preston R. Bassett SHC Samuel H. Caldwell TCF Thornton C. Fry WW Warren Weaver Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Naval Control Systems Chapter 3

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Bush Papers Samuel Caldwell Papers Computers at MIT Oral History Collection Harold Hazen Papers Steve J. Heims Papers Servomechanisms Laboratory Papers Claude E. Shannon Papers Norbert Wiener Papers Karl Wildes Paper s National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland RG 38. Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations

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the Cinema Integraph.” S.M. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1939. Hustveldt, Erling. “Battleship Gunfire Control.” MS, University of Maryland, 15 March 1990. Kailath, Thomas. “Norbert Wiener and the Development of Mathematical Engineering.” MS, Stanford University, Palo Alto, 1996. Owens, Larry. “Straight-Thinking: Vannevar Bush and the Culture of American Engineering.” Ph

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–1940.” Technology and Culture 32, no. 1 (1991): 69–81. ———. “Nicholas Minorsky and the Automatic Steering of Ships.” IEEE Control Systems , November 1984, 10–15. ———. “Norbert Wiener and Control of Anti-Aircraft Guns.” IEEE Control Systems , December 1994, 58–62. Bijker, Wiebe E., Thomas Parke Hughes, and T. J. Pinch, eds. The

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. Government Printing Office, 1959. Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ———. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21 (winter 1994): 228–66. Gannon, Robert. Hellions of the Deep: The Development of American Torpedoes during World War

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Press, 1998. Heims, Steve J. Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953 . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. ———. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death . Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980 . Hewlett, E. M. “The Selsyn System of Position Indication.” General Electric Review

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Technical Journal 3 (July 1924): 400–408. ———. “Transmitted Frequency Range for Telephone Message Circuits.” Bell System Technical Journal 9 (July 1930): 483–86. Masani, Pesi. Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 . Basel: Burkhäuser Verlag, 1990. Mason, W. P. “Electrical and Mechanical Analogies.” Bell System Technical Journal 20 (October 1941): 405–14. Massachusetts Institute of

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. “Officer Development in the Interwar Navy: Arleigh Burke—The Making of a Naval Professional, 1919–1940.” Pacific Historical Review 44 (1975): 503–26 . Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10 (1943): 18–24. Routledge, N. W. Anti-Aircraft Artillery, 1914–55 . New York: Brassey

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Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. ———. I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy . Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956. ———. Norbert Wiener: Collected Works, with Commentaries . Ed. Pesi Masani. Vol. 4. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. ———. “A Scientist Rebels.” Atlantic Monthly 179 (January 1946): 46. Wildes, Karl, and

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI

by John Brockman  · 19 Feb 2019  · 339pp  · 94,769 words

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

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’s a fitting place to begin. NEW TECHNOLOGIES = NEW PERCEPTIONS Before AI, there was cybernetics—the idea of automatic, self-regulating control, laid out in Norbert Wiener’s foundational text of 1948. I can date my own serious exposure to it to 1966, when the composer John Cage invited me and four

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machines, nor the artists, nor, least of all, myself. “WE MUST CEASE TO KISS THE WHIP THAT LASHES US.” Two years after Cybernetics, in 1950, Norbert Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings—a deeper story, in which he expressed his concerns about the runaway commercial exploitation and other unforeseen consequences

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solve problems that would take several lifetimes to solve on classical computers. In the essay that follows, he traces the history of information theory from Norbert Wiener’s prophetic insights to the predictions of a technological “singularity” that some would have us believe will supplant the human species. His takeaway on the

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’s tragic death in a hiking accident while descending Pyramid Peak with Seth. They were talking about quantum computing. The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener’s 1950 popularization of his highly influential book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human

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years. He is co-author of “the” definitive AI textbook, with an estimated 5-million-plus English-language readers. Among the many issues raised in Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) that are currently relevant, the most significant to the AI researcher is the possibility that humanity may

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, 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

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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

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problems. Writing at a time when vacuum tubes were still the primary electronic building blocks and there were only a few actual computers in operation, Norbert Wiener imagined the future we now contend with in impressive detail and with few clear mistakes. Alan Turing’s famous 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence

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scientists are often limited in how they see the big picture, beyond their particular field, by the tools and metaphors they use in their work. Norbert Wiener is no exception, and I might guess that neither am I. When he wrote The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener was straddling the end

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about our Universe to know that it has the potential to wake up much more fully than it has thus far. AI pioneers such as Norbert Wiener have taught us that a further awakening of our Universe’s ability to process and experience information need not require eons of additional evolution but

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the AGI control Earth? Should we aim to control superintelligent machines? If not, can we ensure that they understand, adopt, and retain human values? As Norbert Wiener put it in The Human Use of Human Beings: Woe to us if we let [the machine] decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined

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me to that eatery and would end up dominating my subsequent work. THE FIRST MESSAGE: THE SOVIET OCCUPATION In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener looked at the world through the lens of communication. He saw a universe that was marching to the tune of the second law of thermodynamics

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information processing is sufficient to explain it—the notion that the late Jerry Fodor dubbed the computational theory of mind. The touchstone for this volume, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, celebrated this intellectual accomplishment, of which Wiener himself was a foundational contributor. A potted history of the mid

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this momentous transformation never happened and one morning engineers will hand total control of the physical world to untested machines, heedless of the human consequences. Norbert Wiener explained ideas, norms, and institutions in terms of computational and cybernetic processes that were scientifically intelligible and causally potent. He explained human beauty and value

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presence or absence of spaceships, flying cars, or humanoid robots. But one thing doesn’t vary: the presence of human beings. That’s certainly what Norbert Wiener imagined when he wrote about the potential of machines to improve human society by interacting with humans and helping to mediate their interactions with one

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computer. Historically, the search for computational models of human cognition is intimately intertwined with the history of artificial intelligence itself. Only a few years after Norbert Wiener published The Human Use of Human Beings, Logic Theorist, the first computational model of human cognition and also the first artificial-intelligence system, was developed

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mysticism of an earlier age—as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zigzag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener

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weren’t appreciated until many years later. In one of the founding documents of the study of intelligent machines, The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener does a remarkable job of identifying many of the most significant trends to arise since he wrote it, along with noting the people responsible for

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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

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the distinction between power and communication engineering. It is this split which separates the age just past from that in which we are now living. —NORBERT WIENER, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine Cybernetics is the study of the how the weak can control the strong. Consider

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the actual person. This notion of analogous structure is sometimes confused with the notion of analog encoding of messages, but the two are logically distinct. Norbert Wiener was much impressed with Vannevar Bush’s digital Differential Analyzer, which could be reconfigured to match the structure of whatever problem it was given to

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that matter for advancing the controller’s goals. Thus, in cybernetics, the goal of the controller becomes the perspective from which the world is viewed. Norbert Wiener adopted the perspective of the individual human relating to vast organizations and trying to “live effectively within that environment.” He took the perspective of the

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be used for good or for ill. Big Data brings us to interesting times.” At our group meeting in Washington, Connecticut, he confessed that reading Norbert Wiener on the concept of feedback “felt like reading my own thoughts.” “After Wiener, people discovered or focused on the fact that there are genuinely chaotic

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bit, the AI is likely to make a horrible mistake. It has absolutely no sense of context. In some ways, it’s as far from Norbert Wiener’s original notion of cybernetics as you can get, because it isn’t contextualized; it’s a little idiot savant. But imagine that you took

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deep connections between science and art had already been noted by the late Heinz von Foerster, one of the architects of cybernetics, who worked with Norbert Wiener from the mid-1940s and in the 1960s founded the field of second-order cybernetics, in which the observer is understood as part of the

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’re thinking; it’s whether we’re capable of teaching them ethical behavior. We’re barely capable of teaching each other ethical behavior.” In 1950, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of vision and speculation in proclaiming that the machine like the djinnee, which

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important, but art for cybernated life is more important. —NAM JUNE PAIK, 1966 Artificial intelligence was not what artists first wanted out of cybernetics, once Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society came out in 1950. The range of artists who identified themselves with cybernetics in the

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has never been the biggest factor: Consider, say, ancient Athens versus the rest of the world at the time. * Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Revenge” (1878). * Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1947. * Warren Weaver, “Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff  · 24 Aug 2015  · 413pp  · 119,587 words

have the potential to be our servants, partners, or masters. At the very dawn of the computer era in the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener issued a warning about the potential of automation: “We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines,” he wrote

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intelligent machines that is fundamentally changing the way we live. The impact of both computing and robotics had been forecast before these laboratories were established. Norbert Wiener invented the concept of cybernetics at the very dawn of the computing era in 1948. In his book Cybernetics, he outlined a new engineering science

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markets for both menial and expert jobs. Rather than extending that debate here, however, I am interested in exploring a different question first posed by Norbert Wiener in his early alarms about the introduction of automation. What will the outcome of McCarthy’s and Engelbart’s differing approaches be? What are the

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we’re very close to that point.”2 At the dawn of the Information Age, the pace and consequences of automation were very much on Norbert Wiener’s mind. During the summer of 1949, Wiener wrote a single-spaced three-page letter to Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers

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has refused to back down. His response to his critics is, in effect, “Be careful what you wish for!” Gordon has also pointed out that Norbert Wiener may have had the most prescient insight into the potential impact of the “Third Industrial Revolution” (IR3), of computing and the Internet beginning in about

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decade since ENIAC, the first general purpose digital computer, had been heralded in the popular press as a “giant brain,” and just two years after Norbert Wiener had written his landmark Cybernetics, announcing the opening of the Information Age. Shockley’s initial insight presaged the course that automation would take decades later

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the new discipline included cybernetics, automata studies, complex information processing, and machine intelligence.13 McCarthy wanted to avoid the term “cybernetics” because he thought of Norbert Wiener, who had coined the term, as something of a bombastic bore and he chose to avoid arguing with him. He also wanted to avoid the

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1960s. When Taylor arrived at the agency in 1961 he found an engineering culture in love with a body of mathematics known as control theory, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic legacy. These NASA engineers were designing the nation’s aeronautic as well as astronautic flight systems. These were systems of such complexity that

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is equally profound.”8 Felsenstein’s interpretation of the golem fable was perhaps more optimistic than most. Influenced by Jewish folklore and the premonitions of Norbert Wiener, he was inspired to sketch his own vision for robotics. In Felsenstein’s worldview, when robots were sufficiently sophisticated, they would be neither servants nor

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mass-produced portable computer. Indeed, Felsenstein had a broad view of the impact of computing on society. He had grown up in a household where Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings held a prominent place on the family bookshelf. His father had considered himself not merely a political radical

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robotics. Traditional robotics, Felsenstein decided, would lead to machines that would displace humans, but “golemics,” as he described it, using a term first introduced by Norbert Wiener, was the right relationship between human and machine. Wiener had used “golemic” to describe the pretechnological world. In his “The Golemic Approach,”10 Felsenstein presented

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, one moving toward the man-machine symbiosis that J. C. R. Licklider had espoused and another in which machines will increasingly supplant humans. Just as Norbert Wiener realized at the onset of the computer and robotics age, one of the future possibilities will be bleak for humans. The way out of that

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Salisbury. As a young engineer Salisbury viewed himself as less of an “AI guy,” and more of a “control person.” He was trained in the Norbert Wiener tradition and so didn’t believe that intelligent machines needed autonomy. He had been involved in automation long enough to see the shifting balance between

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-oriented approach meant that he could assume that 3-D graphics would be commercially available within just several decades. Negroponte represents the “missing link” between Norbert Wiener’s early insights into computing and its consequences, the early world of artificial intelligence, and the explosive rise of the personal computer industry during the

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dressed the part of an Edwardian dandy, complete with a cape, and who occasionally lapsed into double-talk and wordplay. He was squarely in the Norbert Wiener cybernetics tradition, which had taken hold with more force in Europe than in the United States. Pask was also subtly but significantly at odds with

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and capitalism. Perhaps his timing was off, but his basic point, as echoed a half century later at the dawn of the computer era by Norbert Wiener, may yet prove correct. Today, the engineers who are designing the artificial intelligence–based programs and robots will have tremendous influence over how we will

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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

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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

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/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

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-norbert-wieners-letter-uaw-president-walter-reuther. 5.Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In

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Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics, Kindle ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), Kindle location 246. 6

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. 9.“Wiener Denounces Devices ‘For War’: M.I.T. Mathematician Rebuffs Bid to Harvard Symposium of Calculating Machinery,” New York Times, January 9, 1947. 10.Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1947. 11.John Markoff, “In 1949, He Imagined an Age of Robots,” New York Times, May 20, 2013, http

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.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm. 16.Mark D. 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

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.Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 29. 19.“Machines

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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

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-Norbert-Wiener.pdf. 20.Defense Science Board, “The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems,” U.S. Department of Defense, July 2012, http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/

Turing's Cathedral

by George Dyson  · 6 Mar 2012

Italian mathematical biologist and viral geneticist; at the IAS in 1953, 1954, and 1956. Julian Himely Bigelow (1913–2003): American electronic engineer and collaborator, with Norbert Wiener, on antiaircraft fire control during World War II; chief engineer of the IAS Electronic Computer Project (ECP), 1946–1951. Andrew Donald Booth (1918–2009): British

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War II. Marina (née von Neumann) Whitman (1935–): Economist, U.S. presi-dential adviser, and daughter of John von Neumann and Mariette Kovesi von Neumann. Norbert Wiener (1894–1964): American mathematician and founder, with Julian Bigelow and John von Neumann, of what would become known as the Cybernetics Group. Eugene P. Wigner

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recruited widely, with a knack for discovering future mathematicians and making the best use of their talents during the war. One of his recruits was Norbert Wiener, a twenty-four-year-old mathematical prodigy well trained after two years of postdoctoral study in Europe, but socially awkward and discouraged by the failures

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a soldering gun. “One could hardly imagine a more improbable environment,” Julian Bigelow adds. “How does all of this fit in with the Princetitute?” asked Norbert Wiener, in March of 1945. “You are going to run into a situation where you will need a lab at your fingertips, and labs don’t

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as a whole. According to Leibniz, relation gave rise to substance, not, as Newton had it, the other way around. “Back to Leibniz!” is how Norbert Wiener titled an article on quantum mechanics in 1932. “I can see no essential difference between the materialism which includes soul as a complicated type of

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go see my department head, and he grabbed me and said, ‘We can’t let you go, we need you. We’ve got this fellow, Norbert Wiener, going around saying he knows how to win the war singlehandedly, so to speak, with his intellectual ideas. Nobody can find out what he’s

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third regime is still under debate. “I think in those days we were very optimistic,” says Charney. “I remember at that time receiving reports that Norbert Wiener had regarded von Neumann and [me] as practically gonifs—thieves. That we were trying to mislead the whole world in thinking that one could make

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that all the evidence concerning them is indirect, and that we can neither isolate them nor multiply them at will,” von Neumann had written to Norbert Wiener in November 1946, suggesting that one way to find out how nature makes its copies would simply be to look. In December 1946, after consultation

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the Institute for Numerical Analysis and at RAND. Von Neumann would finally be able to assemble the cross-disciplinary information systems laboratory that he and Norbert Wiener had proposed in 1946, before the push to develop the hydrogen bomb had drawn a curtain between them and their work. If the California laboratory

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molecular machines, while our understanding of technology has diminished as machines approach the complexity of living things. We are back to where Julian Bigelow and Norbert Wiener left off, at the close of their precomputer “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology,” in 1943. “A further comparison of living organisms and machines … may depend on

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time as the Institute for Advanced Study computer project was being launched. “I did think a good deal about self-reproductive mechanisms,” he wrote to Norbert Wiener in November 1946. “I can formulate the problem rigorously, in [the same way in] which Turing did it for his mechanisms.” Von Neumann envisioned an

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resources are being put to use. Codes are becoming multicellular, while the boundaries between individual processors and individual memories grow indistinct. When Julian Bigelow and Norbert Wiener formulated their Maxims for Ideal Prognosticators in 1941, their final maxim was that predictions (of the future position of a moving target) should be made

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a computational meteorology group that resolved some of the differences between John von Neumann’s reasons for believing that weather could be made predictable and Norbert Wiener’s reasons for believing that it could not. Hedi Selberg transferred her expertise to the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and Ralph Slutz became director of

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of pugnacity. But, as the ends of wars have the same distribution, the background appears to be composed of a restless desire for change.”34 Norbert Wiener died of cardiac arrest on a visit to Stockholm in 1964. Disillusioned over military ambitions in general and the use of nuclear weapons against civilians

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Ray Moulton, in David Alan Grier, “Dr. Veblen Takes a Uniform: Mathematics in the First World War,” American Mathematical Monthly 108 (October 2001): 928. 6. Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 254; ibid., p. 258; ibid., p. 259; ibid., p. 257. 7. Oswald Veblen to Simon Flexner

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Research Conference on the History of Computing, Los Alamos, June 10–15, 1976, draft, n.d. (quoted text was deleted from the published version), JHB; Norbert Wiener to John von Neumann, March 24, 1945, VNLC. 55. James B. Conant to Frank Aydelotte, October 31, 1945, IAS; James Alexander to Frank Aydelotte, August

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. 53. 42. Herman H. Goldstine to Colonel G. F. Powell, Office of the Chief of Ordnance, May 12, 1947, IAS. 43. Norbert Wiener, “Back to Leibniz!” Technology Review 34 (1932): 201; Norbert Wiener, “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz,” Philosophy of Science 1, no. 4 (October 1934): 480. 44. G. W. Leibniz to Henry Oldenburg

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, GBD. 2. Julian Bigelow, interview with Richard R. Mertz. 3. 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

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. 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

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. Norbert Wiener, “Principles Governing the Construction of Prediction and Compensating Apparatus,” submitted with S. H. Caldwell

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, Proposal to Section D2, NDRC, November 22, 1940, in Pesi R. Masani, Norbert Wiener: 1894–1964 (Basel: Birkhauser, 1990), p

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. 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. Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 243; Alice Bigelow, interview with author. 11. Jule Charney, “Conversations with George Platzman,” recorded August 1980

…

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

…

; Claude E. Shannon, “An Algebra for Theoretical Genetics,” PhD dissertation, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, April 15, 1940. 14. John von Neumann to Norbert Wiener, November 29, 1946, VNLC; John von Neumann to Mina Rees, Office of Naval Research, January 20, 1947, VNLC. 15. Nils A. Barricelli, “Numerical Testing of

…

, II: Origin of the Genetic Code as a Primordial Collector Language; The Pairing-Release Hypothesis,” BioSystems 11 (1979): 21–22. 4. John von Neumann to Norbert Wiener, November 29, 1946, VNLC. 5. Ibid. 6. John von Neumann to Irving Langmuir, November 12, 1946, VNLC. 7. Von Neumann, “Problems of Hierarchy and Evolution

…

, IAS-BS. 34. Lewis F. Richardson, “The Distribution of Wars in Time,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 107, no. 3/4 (1944): 248. 35. Norbert Wiener, in “Revolt of the Machines,” Time 75, no. 2, January 11, 1960, p. 32. 36. Stanislaw Ulam, “Further Applications of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

…

, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3 on alternative models of computation, 14.1, 14.2, 18.1 and analog computing on antiaircraft fire control, with Norbert Wiener on Barricelli and artificial intelligence on computational inefficiency, 6.1, 16.1 and Cybernetics movement and delays in ECP Guggenheim fellowship (1951) and IAS housing

…

logic and Institute Woods, 3.1, 18.1 at Princeton University and von Neumann, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 14.1, 18.1 and Norbert Wiener in World War I in World War II, 4.1, 6.1 Veblen, Thomas Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929), 3.1, 3.2 Verne, Jules Verrazzano

…

, at the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1923. (Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives Center, Institute for Advanced Study; photograph by Wilhelm J. E. Blaschke, Oslo, 1936) Norbert Wiener (far right), with U.S. Army mathematicians at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, 1918, worked on ballistics with Oswald Veblen in World War I and founded

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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

…

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

…

the Chief of Ordnance set up a special mathematical section at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. One of the early recruits was the young Norbert Wiener, who was to feature prominently in another research tributary of the mainstream of ballistic technology -- the automatic control of antiaircraft guns -- and who was later

…

in their pockets, or was mechanically encoded in special aiming apparatus called automata. (An entirely different mathematical research effort by Julian Bigelow, Warren Weaver, and Norbert Wiener was to concentrate on the characteristics of these automatic aiming machines.) The answer to the firing table dilemma, as Goldstine was one of the first

…

biological systems, was born when yet another unusual mind was drawn into the software quest through the circumstances of war. Because of the discoveries of Norbert Wiener and his colleagues, discoveries that were precipitated by the wartime need for a specific kind of calculating engine, software has come to mean much more

…

they did their most important work. All except Eckert were also more than a little bizarre. But for raw prodigy combined with sheer imaginative eccentricity, Norbert Wiener, helmsman of the cybernetic movement, stands out even in this not-so-ordinary crowd. Norbert's father, a Harvard professor who was a colorful character

…

the allies needed a way to put firing tables directly into the radar-guided mechanism of antiaircraft guns. After the end of World War I, Norbert Wiener joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an instructor of mathematics. It turned out to be the beginning of his lifelong association with that institution

…

his role as a research administrator, Bush knew that antiaircraft technology was one of his top priorities. As a scientist, MIT researcher, and friend of Norbert Wiener's, Bush was also concerned with the task of building high-speed mechanical calculators. The allies' two most pressing problems in the early years of

…

excited and dramatic debates that characterized the formative years of cybernetics. Biographer Steve Heims, in his book about the two men -- John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener -- noted the way their contrasting personae emerged at these events: Wiener and von Neumann cut rather different figures at the semiannual conferences on machine-organism

…

, quantum theory did away with the clockwork and predictability. Around thirty years ago, a few people began to look at the world and see, as Norbert Wiener put it, "a myriad of To Whom It May Concern messages." The idea that information is still a fundamental characteristic of the cosmos, like matter

…

machines and continued building the mechanical mice that could learn how to run simple mazes. In 1956, Robert Fano, the electrical engineering student who witnessed Norbert Wiener's "Entropy is information!" exclamations back in the summer of 1947, brought Shannon to MIT from Bell Laboratories. His professional standing was so far beyond

…

. 236 (1950). [7] Ibid. [8] Hodges, Turing, 488. Chapter Four: Johnny Builds Bombs and Johnny Builds Brains [1] Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), 371. [2] C. Blair, "Passing of a great Mind," Life,, February 25, 1957, 96. [3] Stanislaw Ulam, "John von Neumann

…

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,

…

. 5 (1943), 115-133. [8] Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think (San Francisco: W. H Freeman, 1979) 66. [9] Heims, von Neumann and Wiener, 205. [10] Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy (Cambridge, Mass: MIT press, 1966), 325. [11] Wiener, Cybernetics. [12] Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man (New

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