Academic reflection on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and its relevance to modern AI

“INFORMATION” FOR WIENER, FOR SHANNON, AND FOR US David Kaiser David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of Physics at MIT, and head of its Program in Science, Technology & Society. He is the author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival and American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (forthcoming). In The Sleepwalkers, a sweeping history of scientific thought from ancient times through the Renaissance, Arthur Koestler identified a tension that has marked the most dramatic leaps of our cosmological imagination. In reading the great works of Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler today, Koestler argued, we are struck as much by their strange unfamiliarity—their embeddedness in the magic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the MIT polymath, recognized before most observers that “society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it.”. Wiener argued that feedback loops, the central feature of his theory of cybernetics, would play a determining role in social dynamics. Those loops would not only connect people with one another but connect people with machines, and—crucially—machines with machines. Wiener glimpsed a world in which information could be separated from its medium. People, or machines, could communicate patterns across vast distances and use them to fashion new items at the endpoints, without “moving a...particle of matter from one end of the line to the other,” a vision now realized in our world of networked 3D printers. Wiener also imagined machine-to-machine feedback loops driving huge advances in automation, even for tasks that had previously relied on human judgment. “The machine plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor,” he observed. For all that, many of the central arguments in Zhe Human Use of Human Beings seem closer to the 19th century than the 21st. In particular, although Wiener made reference throughout to Claude Shannon’s then-new work on information theory, he seems not to have fully embraced Shannon’s notion of information as consisting of irreducible, meaning-free bits. Since Wiener’s day, Shannon’s theory has come to undergird recent advances in “Big Data” and “deep learning,” which makes it all the more interesting to revisit Wiener’s cybernetic imagination. How might tomorrow’s artificial intelligence be different if practitioners were to re-invest in Wiener’s guiding vision of “information”? When Wiener wrote Zhe Human Use of Human Beings, his experiences of war-related research, and of what struck him as the moral ambiguities of intellectual life amid the military-industrial complex, were still fresh. Just a few years earlier, he had announced 109 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016329