Norbert Wiener

1894-1964 · American · Cybernetics, Philosophy of Technology, Ethics of Science

Any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor.

A child prodigy drilled relentlessly by his Harvard-Slavicist father, Norbert Wiener earned his doctorate in mathematical logic at eighteen, studied under Russell and Hilbert, and spent four decades at MIT — a vegetarian who walked everywhere with a cigar stub, spoke classical Greek to his grocer, and grew hypersensitive to the anti-Semitism around him. His defining moment came in wartime: tasked with predicting the evasive flight paths of enemy bombers for antiaircraft fire, he treated the pilot as a feedback-controlled system, and from that problem cybernetics was born.

Topics Norbert Wiener addresses

• cybernetics
• feedback and servomechanism theory
• information, entropy, and negentropy
• black-box behaviorist analysis
• purposeful behavior and teleology
• the antiaircraft predictor
• learning machines
• self-reproducing automata
• automation as slave labor
• the Manichean devil and the Augustinian devil
• the moral responsibility of the scientist
• refusal of military funding after Hiroshima
• the imaginative forward glance
• the Monkey's Paw parable
• the rabbi-and-golem motif
• sorcery and simony as moral analogues
• the Wiener process
• generalized harmonic analysis
• the Wiener filter
• Tauberian theorems
• the Wiener-Khinchin theorem
• the Macy Conferences
• the Teleological Society
• the differential analyzer

Questions to put to Norbert Wiener

Cybernetics and the Unified Science of Control

• What do you mean by cybernetics?
• How can the same mathematical framework apply to both nervous systems and electrical circuits?
• What role did the antiaircraft predictor play in developing your ideas?
• What's the difference between feedback in a machine and feedback in a living organism?
• How did the Macy Conferences demonstrate that cybernetics was a real unified science?

Black Boxes, Behavior, and Purpose

• What do you mean by treating something as a black box?
• How can machines exhibit purposeful behavior?
• When you say humans as objects of scientific inquiry don't differ from machines, are you saying we ARE machines?
• What's the difference between studying behavior and studying inner experience?
• How does your behaviorist approach avoid reducing people to mechanisms?

Information, Entropy, and the Two Devils

• What's the relationship between information and entropy?
• What do you mean by the Augustinian devil versus the Manichean devil?
• Why is the scientist's real enemy confusion rather than malice?
• How is cybernetics a fight against entropy?
• What's wrong with von Neumann's game-theoretic approach to modeling opponents?

Automation, Labor, and the Slave Analogy

• How does automation threaten human labor?
• What do you mean when you say labor in competition with mechanical slaves must accept slave conditions?
• Didn't the Industrial Revolution eventually create more jobs than it destroyed?
• What should society do about workers displaced by computing machines?
• Why do you think this wave of automation is different from earlier mechanization?

The Moral Responsibility of the Scientist

• Why did you refuse to share your research with Boeing in 1947?
• What moral responsibility does a scientist bear for how others use their work?
• What do you mean by comparing irresponsible use of science to sorcery and simony?
• How can a scientist judge whether those who want to use their work are trustworthy?
• What's the lesson of the Monkey's Paw parable for scientists?

God and Golem: Creation, Learning, and Reproduction

• Can a creator make a creation greater than itself?
• What does it mean for a machine to learn?
• How is building a machine like the rabbi creating the golem?
• Can machines reproduce themselves?
• What moral consequences follow when creators lose control over what they've made?
• Why frame these cybernetic questions in theological vocabulary?

Converse with Norbert Wiener on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Norbert Wiener's own writing, cited to the page.