Norbert Wiener

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Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

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

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

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

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

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

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

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

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

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

., Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).A few biographical works include Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982); Pesi R. Masani, Norbert Wiener, 1894–1964 (Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990); Flow Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).A few key theorizations and historical treatments include N.

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

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

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

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

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

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

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

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computer Numeric Control, discrete time, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, Turing machine

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

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

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

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

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

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

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

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

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

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

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

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

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

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

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

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

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

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

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

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

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

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

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

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

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

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

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

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

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

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

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

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

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

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

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

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

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

., April 22 and 23, 1953. 21. Samuelson, interview. 22. Martin, interview. 23. Ibid. 24. See, for example, Wiener’s obituary, New York Times, 3.19.64; Paul Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” 1964, Xerox provided by Samuelson; and Norbert Wiener, Ex-Prodigy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953) and I Am a Mathematician (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956). 25. Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Wiener,” op. cit. 26. Ibid. 27. Zipporah Levinson, interview, 9.11.95. 28. Samuelson, “Some Memories of Norbert Weiner,” op. cit. 29. Z. Levinson, interview. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33.

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

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

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

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

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

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

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

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

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

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

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

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

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

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

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

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

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

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

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

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

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

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

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

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

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

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

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

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

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

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

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

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

The Fractalist by Benoit Mandelbrot

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, double helix, financial engineering, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Olbers’ paradox, Paul Lévy, power law, Richard Feynman, statistical model, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto

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

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

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

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

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

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

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

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

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

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

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

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

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

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

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

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

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

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

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

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

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

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

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

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

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, butterfly effect, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, effective altruism, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, Frances Oldham Kelsey, game design, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, Goodhart's law, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hedonic treadmill, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, language acquisition, longitudinal study, machine translation, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, multi-armed bandit, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, premature optimization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Steve Jobs, strong AI, the map is not the territory, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

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

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

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

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

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

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

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

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

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

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

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

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

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

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

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

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

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

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

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

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

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

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

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

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

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, British Empire, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, the market place, upwardly mobile

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

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

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

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

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Herman Kahn, Jacquard loom, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, statistical model, the market place, zero-sum game

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

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

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

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

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

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

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

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

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

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

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

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

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

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

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

The Cultural Logic of Computation by David Golumbia

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, American ideology, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, borderless world, business process, cellular automata, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, creative destruction, digital capitalism, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, finite state, folksonomy, future of work, Google Earth, Howard Zinn, IBM and the Holocaust, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, machine translation, means of production, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application, Yochai Benkler

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

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

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

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

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

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

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

Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins by Garry Kasparov

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, business process, call centre, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, computer age, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Freestyle chess, gamification, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, job automation, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, low earth orbit, machine translation, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, rolodex, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

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

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

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

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, Ford Model T, friendly AI, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

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

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

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., ‘Stephen Hawking: “Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence … ”’, Independent, 1 May 2014: independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-9313474.html 4 Hill, Doug, ‘The Eccentric Genius Whose Time May Have Finally Come (Again)’, Atlantic, 11 June 2014: theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/norbert-wiener-the-eccentric-genius-whose-time-may-have-finally-come-again/372607/ 5 Good, I. J., ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’, Advances in Computers, 1965. 6 Vinge, Vernor, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era’, Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace, 1993. 7 Ulam, Stanislaw, ‘Tribute to John von Neumann,’ Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society: 5, May 1958. 8 Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner, 1954). 9 Appleyard, Bryan, The Brain Is Wider than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2011). 10 www.youtube.com/watch?

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

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

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

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

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

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

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

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

User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

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

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

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

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

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

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

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

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

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

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

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

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

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

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

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

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

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

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

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

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak

Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

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

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

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

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

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

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

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

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

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

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

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

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

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

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

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

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

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

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

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

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

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

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

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

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

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

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

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

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

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

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

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

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

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

carbon-based life, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, Multics, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, silicon-based life

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

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

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

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

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

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

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

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

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

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

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel remarked recently that innovations seem to be drying up, not accelerating.1 Tech startups once dreamed of the next big idea to woo investors in the Valley, but now have exit strategies that almost universally aim for acquisitions by big tech companies like Google and Facebook, who have a lock on innovation anyway, since Big Data AI always works better for whoever owns the most data. The fix is in. The question is ­whether, as Thiel puts it, ­there is now a “derangement of the culture,” or w ­ hether the good ideas have already been 2 snatched up. M EG A BUCK SCI ENCE The polymathic MIT computer scientist and founder of cybernetics Norbert Wiener warned about what he called “megabuck” science in an unpublished manuscript, “Invention: The Care and Feeding of 270 T he F ­ uture of the M yth Ideas,” found among his papers ­a fter his death in 1964.3 In the early 1950s, Turing had completed his fundamental (and it turned out, final) turn t­ oward the f­ uture of invention as human-­level AI; Wiener during the same period had begun serious contemplation about a ­f uture bereft of ideas necessary for AI, and other fields.

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Yong, “The H ­ uman Brain Proj­ect ­Hasn’t Lived Up.” Chapter 18: The End of Science? 1. Peter Thiel, interviewed by Eric Weinstein on “The Portal” podcast, Episode #001: “An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure,” July 19, 2019, https://­w ww​.­youtube​.­com​/­watch​?­v​=­n M9f0W2KD5s&t​=­1216s. 2. Ibid. 3. Norbert Wiener, Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 4. Ibid., 89. 5. Ibid., 96. 6. Ibid., 96. 7. Ibid., 87. 8. Ibid., 87. 9. John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Boston: Addison-­Wesley, 1996). A C K N O W L­E D G M E N T S Many ­people ­were involved both formally and informally in the creation of this book.

Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth

AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, backpropagation, carbon-based life, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, GPT-3, GPT-4, John Markoff, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, speech recognition, stem cell, systems thinking, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, TikTok, Turing test

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

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

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

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

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

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

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

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

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

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

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

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

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

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

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

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

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

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

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

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

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

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

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

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

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

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964) by Unknown

Bretton Woods, conceptual framework, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mars Society, means of production, Norbert Wiener, price mechanism, profit motive, rising living standards, road to serfdom, spinning jenny, technological determinism, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

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

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

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

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

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

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

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

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

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

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

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

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

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

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

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

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

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

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

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

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

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

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

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

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

Machine Translation by Thierry Poibeau

Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, AltaVista, augmented reality, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, Google Glasses, information retrieval, Internet of things, language acquisition, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, natural language processing, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Robert Mercer, seminal paper, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, technological singularity, Turing test, wikimedia commons

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

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

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

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

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

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

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, AltaVista, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bread and circuses, business cycle, Celebration, Florida, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, G4S, game design, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, informal economy, invisible hand, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, McJob, microcredit, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, presumed consent, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, spice trade, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

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

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

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

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

Turing's Vision: The Birth of Computer Science by Chris Bernhardt

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Conway's Game of Life, discrete time, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture

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

Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

Albert Einstein, Columbine, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fake news, Future Shock, global village, Hacker Ethic, helicopter parent, Howard Rheingold, industrial robot, information retrieval, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rodney Brooks, Skype, social intelligence, stem cell, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Great Good Place, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Year of Magical Thinking

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

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

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

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

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

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

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

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

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

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

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight