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Norbert Wiener

Original nameNorbert Wiener

American Mathematician, Founder of Cybernetics

Those Who Conceived That "a Machine Could Think" · Pioneers

CyberneticsFeedback Mechanism TheoryEarly Philosophical Thought on Human-Machine Relations

Who they are

Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was an American mathematician who in 1948 published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, founding the interdisciplinary theory of "cybernetics," systematically expounding how "feedback" explains both the self-regulation of organisms and the automatic control systems of machines, a theory that thereafter profoundly influenced the development of computer science, robotics, and cognitive science. Wiener was also one of the earliest scientists to publicly warn of the social impact automation might bring, and in his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings he already discussed such issues as automation possibly causing mass unemployment and humanity possibly losing its capacity for autonomous judgment through over-reliance on automatic decision systems — issues that became a focus of public discussion again seventy years later in the age of generative AI.

Primary sourcesWiener, Cybernetics (1948)Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

Key stories

A Warning Seventy Years Ago, Still Solid Read Today

As early as the 1950s Wiener proposed that automation, while raising production efficiency, might also cause mass skill-based unemployment, and a more hidden risk — that as humanity outsources ever more decisions to automatic systems, it may gradually lose the ability to understand and oversee how the systems actually work. When Wiener raised these issues they were seen more as philosophical speculation, but in today’s world where generative AI is widely applied to content production and decision support, they have become concrete and urgent public-policy issues again.

Relationships

Ally

♟️Claude Shannon

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The cross-field life of the word "cybernetics"The root "cybernetics" thereafter gave rise to a great many modern tech terms such as "cyberspace," its influence far exceeding the disciplinary bounds Wiener first envisioned.

Appears in

"Can Machines Think?" — The Birth of AIThe Naming of "Machine Learning" and the Prelude of Cybernetics

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