Essay on Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics and Its Historical Predictions

WRONG, BUT MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER Seth Lloyd Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist at MIT, Nam P. Suh Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener’s 1950 popularization of his highly influential book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human beings and machines in a world in which machines are becoming ever more computationally capable and powerful. It is aremarkably prescient book, and remarkably wrong. Written at the height of the Cold War, it contains a chilling reminder of the dangers of totalitarian organizations and societies, and of the danger to democracy when it tries to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism’s own weapons. Wiener’s Cybernetics looked in close scientific detail at the process of control via feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener saw the world as a set of complex, interlocking feedback loops, in which sensors, signals, and actuators such as engines interact via an intricate exchange of signals and information. The engineering applications of Cybernetics were tremendously influential and effective, giving rise to rockets, robots, automated assembly lines, and a host of precision-engineering techniques—in other words, to the basis of contemporary industrial society. Wiener had greater ambitions for cybernetic concepts, however, and in 7he Human Use of Human Beings he spells out his thoughts on its application to topics as diverse as Maxwell’s Demon, human language, the brain, insect metabolism, the legal system, the role of technological innovation in government, and religion. These broader applications of cybernetics were an almost unequivocal failure. Vigorously hyped from the late 1940s to the early 1960s—to a degree similar to the hype of computer and communication technology that led to the dotcom crash of 2000-200 1—cybernetics delivered satellites and telephone switching systems but generated few if any useful developments in social organization and society at large. Nearly seventy years later, however, Ze Human Use of Human Beings has more to teach us humans than it did the first time around. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the book is that it introduces a large number of topics concerning human/machine interactions that are still of considerable relevance. Dark in tone, the book makes several predictions about disasters to come in the second half of the 20th century, many of which are almost identical to predictions made today about the second half of the 21st. For example, Wiener foresaw a moment in the near future of 1950 in which humans would cede control of society to a cybernetic artificial intelligence, which would then proceed to wreak havoc on humankind. The automation of manufacturing, Wiener predicted, would both create large advances in productivity and displace many workers from their jobs—a sequence of events that did indeed come to pass in the ensuing decades. Unless society could find productive occupations for these displaced workers, Wiener warned, revolt would ensue. 18 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016238