- Person
- Norbert Wiener
- Lived
- 1894–1964
- Field
- Mathematics, cybernetics
- From
- American
The story
Norbert Wiener, born in Missouri in 1894 to Jewish parents, was a child prodigy who became one of the most original mathematicians of the twentieth century at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During the Second World War his work on aiming anti-aircraft guns led him to the idea of feedback, which he developed into a new science of control and communication in animals and machines. His book Cybernetics, published in 1948, helped lay the foundations for automation, robotics and computing.
Wiener understood earlier than most what such machines could do to working people. On August 13, 1949, he wrote from New Hampshire to Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Introducing himself as an MIT mathematics professor and the author of Cybernetics, he explained that he had repeatedly tried to reach the labour movement. Industrial machines, he wrote, could be programmed much as computing machines are, and this would lead to the factory without employees, for example an automatic automobile assembly line. In the hands of the industrial system of the day, he warned, the unemployment produced by such plants could only be disastrous. He thought a crisis might come within ten to twenty years.
Wiener also told Reuther that he had turned down, unconditionally, a request from an industrial company to help develop such machinery, and he offered to work with the union instead. It was consistent with his growing sense of responsibility: in 1947 he had published 'A Scientist Rebels' in The Atlantic Monthly, urging scientists to consider the ethical consequences of their research, and after the war he refused military funding.
Wiener was not against machines. He advocated automation to raise living standards and end poverty in developing countries, and argued in The Human Use of Human Beings that technology should serve people rather than replace them. His letter is now often cited in debates about artificial intelligence and the future of work.
Why it matters
Wiener's early insistence that new technology must serve people, and his concern for workers displaced by machines, still frame public debates about automation and artificial intelligence.
About Norbert Wiener
Child prodigy turned MIT mathematician who founded cybernetics, the science of feedback and control, and was among the first to warn that automation and thinking machines must serve human beings.
More about Norbert Wiener
Sources
- Father of Cybernetics Norbert Wiener's Letter to UAW President Walter Reuther Libcom
- Norbert Wiener MacTutor History of Mathematics, University of St Andrews
- Norbert Wiener EBSCO Research Starters
- Norbert Wiener Wikipedia
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