Historical commentary on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and missed technological forecasts

But Wiener failed to foresee crucial technological developments. Like pretty much all technologists of the 1950s, he failed to predict the computer revolution. Computers, he thought, would eventually fall in price from hundreds of thousands of (1950s) dollars to tens of thousands; neither he nor his compeers anticipated the tremendous explosion of computer power that would follow the development of the transistor and the integrated circuit. Finally, because of his emphasis on control, Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. Focusing on the evils of totalitarianism (political, scientific, and religious), Wiener saw the world in a deeply pessimistic light. His book warned of the catastrophe that awaited us if we didn’t mend our ways, fast. The current world of human beings and machines, more than a half century after its publication, is much more complex, richer, and contains a much wider variety of political, social, and scientific systems than he was able to envisage. The warnings of what will happen if we get it wrong, however—for example, control of the entire Internet by a global totalitarian regime—remain as relevant and pressing today as they were in 1950. What Wiener Got Right Wiener’s most famous mathematical works focused on problems of signal analysis and the effects of noise. During World War II, he developed techniques for aiming anti- aircraft fire by making models that could predict the future trajectory of an airplane by extrapolating from its past behavior. In Cybernetics and in The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener notes that this past behavior includes quirks and habits of the human pilot, thus a mechanized device can predict the behavior of humans. Like Alan Turing, whose Turing Test suggested that computing machines could give responses to questions which were indistinguishable from human responses, Wiener was fascinated by the notion of capturing human behavior by mathematical description. In the 1940s, he applied his knowledge of control and feedback loops to neuro-muscular feedback in living systems, and was responsible for bringing Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts to MIT, where they did their pioneering work on artificial neural networks. Wiener’s central insight was that the world should be understood in terms of information. Complex systems, such as organisms, brains, and human societies, consist of interlocking feedback loops in which signals exchanged between subsystems result in complex but stable behavior. When feedback loops break down, the system goes unstable. He constructed a compelling picture of how complex biological systems function, a picture that is by and large universally accepted today. Wiener’s vision of information as the central quantity in governing the behavior of complex systems was remarkable at the time. Nowadays, when cars and refrigerators are jammed with microprocessors and much of human society revolves around computers and cell phones connected by the Internet, it seems prosaic to emphasize the centrality of information, computation, and communication. In Wiener’s time, however, the first digital computers had only just come into existence, and the Internet was not even a twinkle in the technologist’s eye. Wiener’s powerful conception of not just engineered complex systems but all complex systems as revolving around cycles of signals and computation led to tremendous contributions to the development of complex human-made systems. The 19 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016822