Norbert Wiener

26 November 1894, Columbia, Missouri, United States – 18 March 1964, Stockholm, Sweden (aged 69)

American mathematician who named cybernetics in 1948 and defined it as the science of control and communication in the animal and the machine. He later became one of the first scientists to warn about automation and autonomous machines.

Life

Wiener was the son of Leo Wiener, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who became Harvard’s first professor of Slavic languages and educated his son at home with a demanding method. Norbert entered Tufts College at eleven and took a Harvard PhD in mathematical logic at eighteen. He then studied with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge and David Hilbert in Göttingen before joining MIT in 1919, where he stayed for the rest of his career. He died of a heart attack in Stockholm while travelling, a few weeks after receiving the National Medal of Science.

Influences

Russell gave him logic and a taste for philosophy; Hilbert gave him the mathematics of functions and spaces. The decisive influence on cybernetics, though, was collaboration. Working with the engineer Julian Bigelow on anti-aircraft fire control during the Second World War, and with the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth on the nervous system, he came to see that a gunner, a servomechanism and a reflex arc could all be described as the same kind of goal-seeking feedback system.

Contributions

In mathematics he did foundational work on Brownian motion (the “Wiener process”), harmonic analysis and prediction theory, including the Wiener filter for separating signal from noise. With Rosenblueth and Bigelow he wrote “Behavior, Purpose and Teleology” (1943), which argued that purposeful behaviour could be explained by negative feedback. He was a central figure at the Macy Conferences, and in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) he gave the new field its name, from the Greek kybernētēs, steersman.

His popular book The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) turned to the social consequences: automation, unemployment and the danger of treating people as parts of a machine. In 1947 he publicly refused to share research with military projects, one of the first such refusals by a major American scientist.

Why it matters today

Wiener’s 1960 warning in Science is now quoted as an early statement of the AI alignment problem: if we use a machine “with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere once we have started it”, we had better be sure “that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire”. His insistence that the builders of learning machines are responsible for their effects reads as a direct brief for today’s debates on AI governance.

Further reading

  • Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
  • Norbert Wiener, God & Golem, Inc. (1964)
  • Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age (2004)

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