Philosophical analysis of Norbert Wiener’s ideas on information, society, and technology

Indeed, Wiener gave scientific teeth to the idea that in the workings of history, politics, and society, ideas matter. Beliefs, ideologies, norms, laws, and customs, by regulating the behavior of the humans who share them, can shape a society and power the course of historical events as surely as the phenomena of physics affect the structure and evolution of the solar system. To say that ideas—and not just weather, resources, geography, or weaponry—can shape history is not woolly mysticism. It is a statement of the causal powers of information instantiated in human brains and exchanged in networks of communication and feedback. Deterministic theories of history, whether they identify the causal engine as technological, climatological, or geographic, are belied by the causal power of ideas. The effects of these ideas can include unpredictable lurches and oscillations that arise from positive feedback or from miscalibrated negative feedback. An analysis of society in terms of its propagation of ideas also gave Wiener a guideline for social criticism. A healthy society—one that gives its members the means to pursue life in defiance of entropy—allows information sensed and contributed by its members to feed back and affect how the society is governed. A dysfunctional society invokes dogma and authority to impose control from the top down. Wiener thus described himself as “a participant in a liberal outlook,” and devoted most of the moral and rhetorical energy in the book (both the 1950 and 1954 editions) to denouncing communism, fascism, McCarthyism, militarism, and authoritarian religion (particularly Catholicism and Islam) and to warning that political and scientific institutions were becoming too hierarchical and insular. Wiener’s book is also, here and there, an early exemplar of an increasingly popular genre, tech prophecy. Prophecy not in the sense of mere prognostications but in the Old Testament sense of dark warnings of catastrophic payback for the decadence of one’s contemporaries. Wiener warned against the accelerating nuclear arms race, against technological change that was imposed without regard to human welfare (“[W]e must know as scientists what man’s nature is and what his built-in purposes are”), and against what today is called the value-alignment problem: that “the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us.” In the darker, 1950 edition, he warned of a “threatening new Fascism dependent on the machine a gouverner.” Wiener’s tech prophecy harks back to the Romantic movement’s rebellion against the “dark Satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps even earlier, to the archetypes of Prometheus, Pandora, and Faust. And today it has gone into high gear. Jeremiahs, many of them (like Wiener) from the worlds of science and technology, have sounded alarms about nanotechnology, genetic engineering, Big Data, and particularly artificial intelligence. Several contributors to this volume characterize Wiener’s book as a prescient example of tech prophecy and amplify his dire worries. Yet the two moral themes of The Human Use of Human Beings—the liberal defense of an open society and the dystopian dread of runaway technology—are in tension. A society with channels of feedback that maximize human flourishing will have mechanisms in place, and can adapt them to changing circumstances, in a way that can domesticate technology to human purposes. There’s nothing idealistic or mystical about this; as Wiener emphasized, ideas, norms, and institutions are themselves a form of technology, consisting of patterns of information distributed across brains. The 78 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016298