快猫短视频

鈥淥NCE in a great while a scientific book is published that sets bells jangling wildly in a dozen different sciences. Such a book is Cybernetics.鈥� So wrote Time magazine in 1948. Besides catching the imagination of journalists around the world, the book sent shock waves through the scientific community.

Norbert Wiener, the book鈥檚 author, became an international celebrity for his warning that technology would replace human jobs and create redundancies. Now he is largely forgotten. Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman want to change that. They are convinced that Wiener鈥檚 research and warnings remain as relevant as ever today. Their biography, Dark Hero of the Information Age, attempts to introduce him to a modern audience.

Conway and Siegelman begin by describing Wiener鈥檚 hothousing. He began reading aged 3, recited in Greek and Latin at 5, took up chemistry at 7, wrote his first paper on philosophy at 10, started university at 11 and became a graduate student at Harvard University at 14. This accelerated education was imposed by Norbert鈥檚 father, Leo, who claimed to nurture his son鈥檚 learning by introducing him to 鈥渢he blessedness of blundering鈥�. In reality, this meant that Leo would bully and belittle him until the lessons ended in tears. Wiener spent the rest of his life with a sense of inadequacy, and much of it suffering the effects of manic depression.

Unlike most prodigies, young Wiener would fulfil his potential. He studied biology, philosophy and mathematics in Europe and America, obtained a post at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he learned how to apply his mathematics to electrical engineering, and spent the second world war improving the accuracy of anti-aircraft artillery. All of this combined to prepare him for his role as the father of cybernetics, a term he coined in 1947 based on the Greek word for steersman.

His work interwove engineering, biology, thermodynamics, feedback, computing, information theory, neuroscience and much more. As an expert in none of these, I found that Conway and Siegelman鈥檚 description of Wiener鈥檚 multifaceted research lacked clarity, but there is no doubt that they successfully document the fascinating details of his personal life and rightly emphasise his attempts to warn the public and politicians of the social implications of technology.

Wiener鈥檚 momentous Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine contained long sections of serious mathematics and summarised a whole host of ideas, but it also contained a darker theme. Just as the industrial revolution created machines that made human muscles seem puny, so he warned that the cybernetics revolution 鈥渋s similarly bound to devalue the human brain鈥�.

He spent the rest of his life lobbying politicians and meeting with trade union leaders to warn them of the redundancies that would accompany the growth of mechanisation. Few took any notice of this strange, eccentric figure, but by the time he died in 1964 his predictions were coming true. By the end of the 1960s more than a million American factory workers had lost their jobs as a result of automation.

Today, with so many new technologies emerging, perhaps it is more important than ever to remember his message that technology 鈥渋s a two-edged sword, and sooner or later it will cut you deep鈥�.