When I was writing about AI last night, something kept nagging at me. I wanted to quote someone, but their name kept eluding me. And then this morning I remembered: Norbert Wiener, the inventor β or one of the principal inventors β of cybernetics. I like the guyβ¦or I like what I read about him.
One story about him sticks in my mind: A child prodigy, he was bad with people and utterly unable to talk to women. So his German parents who were of Jewish heritage helped him out by arranging a marriage to a nice German girlβ¦who, after their marriage, turned into a big fan of Adolf Hitler. Norbert was involved in both the theoretical and practical work of creating the first partially autonomous computer systems β including a WWII weapons system that was to help predict the movement of an airplane so a machinegunner could better hit it.
He helped create the field of computer science and then turned against it almost immediately after bringing it into being. He saw giant corporations using his ideas to automate production and cut labor in their quest for greater wealth and economic power. He began to see that in a society mediated by computer and information systems those who controlled the infrastructure wielded ultimate power.
In fact, he saw cybernetics in even starker terms than nukes. The replacement of human labor with machinesβand the social destabilization, mass unemployment, and concentrated economic power, that such change would causeβis what worried Wiener the most. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. Norbert remained a lifelong critic of computer technology. It ultimately led him to a deeper criticism of the entire U.
Anyway, Norbert first raised the alarm seventy-six years ago. And not much has changed, except things have progressed farβ¦.
