IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 43

doubt he would view today's technical innovations with both fascination and dread. He would love today's
technology that's brilliant, helpful,
and playful like he was. He would
jump for joy to see the new artificial
limbs, sprung from his prototype Boston Arm, which have restored wounded warriors to mobility and enabled
Paralympic athletes to go for gold.
But he would surely despair at the
accuracy of his more dire predictions.
In 1950, he posited that the advent
of intelligent machines would "produce an unemployment situation"
that would make "the depression of
the thirties ... seem a pleasant joke"
[7, p. 220]. The statement was considered overblown at the time, and
many insist it still is, but "the trend
and the bearing," as Wiener put it,
is turning in his direction [5, p. 29].
M.I.T.'s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew
McAfee report that, after decades of
robust technological job creation,
advances in computing, robotics,
and automation software are now
destroying jobs faster than they
are creating them [9]. Significantly,
today's robots embody exactly those
kinds of autonomous learning and
self-programming capacities Wiener worried about most. Manufacturing jobs are also vanishing at a
greater rate, as a percentage of the
U.S. economy, than during the Great
Depression [10]-[11]. So maybe Norbert wasn't so far off after all!
Wiener would hate cybercrime.
He would be at swords' points with
the American military, and every military, over their increasing reliance on
intelligent cyberwarfare weapons systems that have a penchant for tragic
errors. As he said, this "compulsion
of scientific warfare is driving us pellmell, head over heels into the ocean

september 2015

of our own destruction" [7, pp. 176177]. The only solution, said Wiener,
was greater moral and social responsibility by scientists and engineers.
He drove home his point: the new
technologies and the knowledge that
undergirds them should be used, not
for profit, power or personal gain, but
for the benefit of all humankind.
Wiener's gaze was uncanny
indeed. He transformed the domain
of the natural sciences, and the
practices of control and communication engineering, "fundamentally
and irreversibly" [12, pp. 15-16]. He
laid a new foundation of universal
principles that bridged the worlds
of physics, living things, human
beings, and all the domains we
inhabit. He opened the frontiers
of science and technology to new
dimensions of experience and connected the living systems of the
human body, brain, and mind to
the technologies we have created in
our image.
Let us reintroduce you to Norbert Wiener in the 21st century, the
most remarkable boy in the world
and, in our view, the most remarkable man of the information age,
who gave us the tools and the guidance we need that may yet "help tip
the balance toward our continued
existence on this earth" [12, p. 213].

Author Information
Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman are
authors of Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert
Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics
(Basic Books, 2005/2006). email:
floandjim@stillpointpress.net.

Acknowledgment
This article is an abridged version
of a Keynote delivered at the IEEE

∕

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

2014 Conference on Norbert Wiener
in the 21st Century (21CW) in Boston, MA, June 24-26, 2014.

References

[1] New York World, Oct. 7, 1906.
[2] P.R. Masani, Ed., Norbert Wiener 18941964 (Collected Works), vol. II, Boston,
MA: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1990.
[3] N. Wiener, "The Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time
Series" (monograph), Report 370, Feb. 1,
1942. Records of NDRC, Sec 2, Div D, National Archives & Records Service, Washington
DC. Published as: Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time
Series, with Engineering Applications.
Cambridge, MA: Technology Press and New
York, NY: Wiley, 1949.
[4] J. Bigelow, interview, Princeton, NJ, Apr.
28, 1999.
[5] N. Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and
Communication in the Animal and the
Machine (CYB). Paris: Hermann et Cie/
Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1948, revised
ed. 1961.
[6] N. Wiener, "A scientist rebels," Atlantic
Monthly, p. 79, Jan. 1947.
[7] N. Wiener, The Human Use of Human
Beings: Cybernetics and Society (HUHB).
Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1950; 2nd
ed., 1954; New York: Avon Books, 1967;
New York: Da Capo Press, 1988.
[8] N. Wiener, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics
Impinges on Religion. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T.
Press, 1964.
[9] E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, Race
Against the Machine: How the Digital
Revolution is Accelerating Innovation,
Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly
Transforming Employment and the Economy. Lexington/Cambridge, MA: Digital
Frontier, 2011/2012.
[10] R. D. Atkinson et al., "Worse Than the
Great Depression: What Experts Are Missing
About American Manufacturing Decline,"
Information Technology and Innovation
Foundation, Mar. 2012.
[11] B. Miller and R. D. Atkinson, "Are
Robots Taking Our Jobs, or Making Them?"
Information Technology and Innovation
Foundation, Sept. 2013.
[12] D. H. Feldman and L. T. Goldsmith,
Nature's Gambit: Child Prodigies and the
Development of Human Potential. New
York, NY: Basic, 1986, pp. 15-16.

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