🔄Norbert Wiener
Original nameNorbert Wiener
American Mathematician, Founder of Cybernetics
The Laws Behind the Technology · Theoretical Founders
CyberneticsFeedback System TheoryEarly Thought on Human-Machine Interaction
Who they are
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was an American mathematician who showed astonishing precocity in childhood, entering university at eleven and taking a Harvard PhD in philosophy at eighteen. During World War II he took part in research on raising the accuracy of anti-aircraft gun automatic-aiming systems in tracking fast-moving targets (such as enemy planes), and this work prompted him to think deeply about the core role of "feedback" in automatic control systems — a system must continually compare its actual output with the expected target and adjust its behavior in real time by the deviation to keep stable, precise control. In 1948 he systematically distilled this idea and published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, founding the wholly new interdisciplinary field of "cybernetics," seeking to describe in a unified mathematical framework both the neural-feedback regulation of living organisms and the working principles of mechanical and electronic automatic control systems, profoundly influencing the theoretical development of automation engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. In his later years Wiener deeply worried about the prospect of technology being misused for war or social control to the harm of human welfare, and was one of the earliest well-known scholars to publicly call for scientists to consider carefully the social-ethical impact of their research.
Primary sourcesNorbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
Key stories
From Anti-Aircraft Guns to "Cybernetics"
During World War II Wiener took part in research on how to let anti-aircraft gun automatic-aiming systems more precisely track fast-flying enemy planes, and this concrete engineering problem prompted him to think deeply about the universal mathematical law of the "feedback" mechanism — a system must continually monitor the deviation between its own actual output and the expected target and adjust its next action in real time accordingly — and this thought, first serving a concrete military-engineering need, was thereafter distilled and elevated by him into the wholly new discipline of "cybernetics," seeking to describe in unity the common control laws of organisms and mechanical systems.
A Scholar Who Early Warned of the Ethical Risks of Technology
Not long after the end of World War II, Wiener publicly wrote to express his deep worry about the ethical risks of automation and control technology if misused for war or social surveillance, and thereby refused to keep providing some of his research to the military; this attitude of actively reflecting on the social consequences of one’s own research in an age of rapid technological development was quite rare among the scientists of the time, and made him a forerunner often mentioned in later discussions of the ethics of technology.
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 extended use of the word "cybernetics" across fieldsThe term "cybernetics" Wiener coined thereafter gave rise to a great body of words widely used in popular culture and science fiction, such as "cyberspace," though their meaning is now far from Wiener’s original rigorous scientific definition.