The History of Terrorism
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Activists from New York (state)
Andrew Dickson White
Cornell University
Norbert Wiener
Attachments
Norbert Wiener
Parents
1639-Today Harvard University
1892-Today General Electric (NYSE: GE)
1959-Today National Medal of Science
AI and slavery links
American agnostics
American pacifists
American systems scientists
Analysands of Helene Deutsch
Child prodigies
Control theorists
Cornell University
Cyberneticists
FBI Subversive Surveillance List
Guggenheim Fellows
Harvard University faculty
Jewish agnostics
Jewish American scientists
Jewish pacifists
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
National Book Award winners
Probability theorists
Surveillance in the United States pioneers
Tufts University
Whistle Blowers/Others who Openly Discuss Government Corruption
Children
"'Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor."
"'My father would be doing his homework for Harvard and I had to stand beside him and recite my lessons by memory, even in Greek, at six years old, and he would ignore me until I made the simplest mistake, then he would verbally reduce me to dust, ' he...
"After popularizing cybernetics, Wiener became a kind of labor and antiwar activist. He reached out to unions to warn them of the danger of automation and the need to take the threat seriously."
"All through the war, he worked on a specialized computer apparatus that used microwave radar to watch, pinpoint, and then predict a plane's future position on the basis of its pilot's actions in order to more effectively blast it out of the sky."
"Developed by MIT professor Norbert Wiener, cybernetics defined the world as a giant computational machine."
"During World War II, Wiener met a problem that tested the limits of his brilliant multidisciplinary brain."
"For years, he was suspected of having communist sympathies, his life documented in a thick FBI file that was closed upon his death in 1964."
"He began to see that in a society mediated by computer and information systems those who controlled the infrastructure wielded ultimate power."
"He began to see that the communication of information wasn't just an abstract or ephemeral act but had a powerful physical property to it."
"He increasingly hinted at insider knowledge that a 'colossal state machine' was being constructed by government agencies 'for the purposes of combat and domination,' a computerized information system that was...
"He saw giant corporations using his ideas to automate production and cut labor in their quest for greater wealth and economic power."
"He saw scientists and military men taking the narrowist possible interpretation of cybernetics to create better killing machines and more efficient systems of surveillance and control and exploitation."
"He turned down offers from giant corporations that wanted help automating their assembly lines according to his cybernetic principles, and refused to work on military research projects."
"He was against the massive peacetime arms buildup taking place after World War II and publicly lashed out at colleagues for working to help the military build bigger, more efficient tools of destruction."
"He was recruited to work on a quixotic top-secret venture to build an automatic aiming-targeting mechanism that could increase the effectiveness of ground-to-air antiaircraft cannons."
"His life of frantic study and pitiless criticism from his father didn't prepare himm for the social dimension of life: he was clumsy, couldn't talk to women, had few friends, was depressive, and could barely take care of himself."
"His parents arranged his marriage to Margaret Engemann, an immigrant from Germany who had had trouble finding a husband."
"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."
"In his later years he looked a bit like Hans Moleman from 'The Simsons'"
"It also earned him a spot on J. Edgar Hoover's FBI subversive surveillance list."
"Military circles received it as a revolutionary work as well. What Karl Marx's 'Das Kapital' did for the nineteenth-century socialists, Wiener's 'Cybernetics' did for America's anticommunist Cold Warriors."
"The replacement of human labor with machines-and the social destabilization, mass unemployment, and concentrated economic power,that such change would cause-is what worried Wiener the most."
"The son of a strict and ambitious academic and Slavic scholar, Wiener was forced to memorize entire books and recite them from memory and to perform complex algebra and trigonometry in his head."
"Where Wiener saw danger, Lick saw opportunity. He had no qualms about putting this technology in the service of US corporate and military power."
"Wiener envisioned a bleak future and realized that he himself was culpable, comparing his work on cybernetics to that of the world's greatest scientists who unleashed the destructive power of atomic weapons."
"Wiener's vocal support of labor and his public opposition to corporate and military work made him a pariah among his military contractor-engineer colleagues."
1948 Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (book)
1948-Today Cybernetics
1949 "'The impact of the thinking machine will be a shock certainly of comparable order to that of the atomic bomb,' he said in a 1949 interview."
1949-Today AI = Slave Labor
1950 The Human Use of Human Beings (book)
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
J. C. R. Licklider
Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
Norbert Wiener is credited as being one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms, that could possibly be simulated by machines and was an important early step towards the development of modern AI.
Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics
Soon after the group was formed, Wiener suddenly ended all contact with its members, mystifying his colleagues.
This emotionally traumatized Pitts, and led to his career decline. In their biography of Wiener, Conway and Siegelman suggest that Wiener's wife Margaret, who detested McCulloch's bohemian lifestyle, engineered the breach.
Walter Pitts
Warren Sturgis McCulloch
Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society.
Jumps
Margaret Engemann