About
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was born in Columbia, Missouri, finished a BA in mathematics at Tufts at fourteen, and took a Harvard PhD in mathematical logic at nineteen before studying with Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge and David Hilbert at Göttingen, then spent his career at MIT after what he saw as antisemitism kept him out of a permanent Harvard post. Wartime work on aiming anti-aircraft guns led him to the Wiener filter, to information theory independently of Claude Shannon, and, with Arturo Rosenblueth and Julian Bigelow, to 'Behavior, Purpose and Teleology' (1943); Cybernetics (1948) then named a science of 'control and communication in the animal and the machine,' built on the idea that intelligent, purposeful behavior is the work of feedback. After 1945 he refused government funding and military work, and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and God & Golem, Inc. (1964) turned his field's tools on its consequences. His 1960 warning — that if we hand our purposes to a machine we cannot interfere with, we had better be sure the purpose is the one we really desire — is the sentence Stuart Russell reaches for when he states today's alignment problem.
Key Contributions
- Founded cybernetics with Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
- Co-wrote 'Behavior, Purpose and Teleology' (1943) with Rosenblueth and Bigelow, one of the two founding papers of cybernetics
- Invented the Wiener filter during WWII anti-aircraft research and formulated communication as a statistical problem
- Wrote The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) and God & Golem, Inc. (1964), winner of the 1965 National Book Award
- Warned in 'Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation' (Science, 1960) that the purpose put into a machine must be the one we really desire
Connections
Claude Shannon
InfluencedMathematician & Father of Information Theory
In a footnote to A Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948), Shannon wrote that 'communication theory is heavily indebted to Wiener for much of its basic philosophy and theory,' crediting Wiener's wartime report with the first clear formulation of communication as a statistical problem. The two reached a measure of information at nearly the same moment from different directions — Shannon from coding, Wiener from noise in anti-aircraft prediction. Between them they made 'information' a quantity, which is the premise every language model is trained on.
people.math.harvard.edu · en.wikipedia.org
Stuart Russell
InfluencedProfessor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Russell builds the case for human-compatible AI on a passage Wiener wrote in 1960, after watching Arthur Samuel's checkers program learn to outplay its maker: if we use a mechanical agency we cannot efficiently interfere with, 'we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.' Russell names this the King Midas problem and argues the field's standard model — give the machine a fixed objective — is the mistake itself. The alignment problem was stated in Science sixty years before it had a name.
people.eecs.berkeley.edu · Norbert Wiener, "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation," Science 131(3410): 1355–1358 (1960)
John von Neumann
CollaboratedMathematician & Computer Architecture Pioneer
Wiener and von Neumann together called the 1943–44 Princeton meeting of engineers, physiologists and mathematicians that Wiener later described as the nucleus of the Macy conferences on cybernetics, where both men kept returning; they corresponded about modeling neurons. They then split on the bomb: von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project and the hydrogen bomb, while Wiener refused all military funding after 1945 — the contrast at the center of Steve Heims's double biography. Two founders of the machine age, reading the same mathematics into opposite answers about what it should serve.
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948), Introduction · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death (MIT Press, 1980) — https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.212.4502.1496.a
Marshall McLuhan
InfluencedMedia Theorist & Philosopher
McLuhan read Wiener alongside Shannon and Weaver, put cybernetics on his course reading lists, and quickly rejected Wiener's mathematical theory of communication — yet, as Donald Theall documents, The Human Use of Human Beings had a profound effect on him. What he kept was the picture, not the equations: electric technology as a nervous system wrapped around a whole society — 'we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace.'
Robert K. Logan, "Marshall McLuhan's General System Thinking and Media Ecology," New Explorations 1(2), 2020 — https://ojs.scholarsportal.info/toronto/index.php/nexj/article/download/35261/26983/ · Donald Theall, The Virtual McLuhan (2001), 30, 188
