Norbert Wiener

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

Any labor which is in competition with slave labor, whether the slaves are human or mechanical, must accept the conditions of work of 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

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