IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 33

GUEST EDITORIAL

Philip Hall

Heather A. Love

Shiro Uesugi

21CW: Norbert
Wiener in the
21st Century

n this issue of IEEE
Technology and Society Magazine we
acknowledge one of
the quintessential
multi-disciplinarians of our time, Dr.
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the
Father of Cybernetics. During his life,
Wiener influenced mathematics, philosophy, science, technology, ethics,
biology, prosthesis, education, manufacturing, and many other fields. He
was an early practitioner of diversity
and social inclusion, and an advocate
of social responsibility in the development of technology. He predicted the
social impact of robotic, cybernetic,
and other technologies on the future
of society, and after several decades
his writings retain their relevance.
In the year marking the 120th
anniversary of his birth and 50th
anniversary of his death, a host of
scientists, engineers, and interdisciplinary scholars from around the
world came together at the IEEE
Conference on Norbert Wiener in
the 21st Century (21CW) on June
24-26, 2014, in Boston, MA, to
commemorate his life and work [1].
While 21CW considered the current state of technologies that Wiener had worked on, many speakers
addressed Wiener's focus on the
social impact of technology.

Here we share with you several
thought-provoking offerings from
21CW. Firstly, we present abridged
transcripts of keynote talks delivered by Mary Catherine Bateson,
Andrew Pickering, Bruce Schneier,
and Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman.
We then present four distinctly different papers, ranging in topic from
Wiener's philosophical roots to his
influence on today's technology
design and application.
In Norbert Wiener: Odd Man
Ahead, distinguished writer and
cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson reflects that Wiener's
puzzlement about human relations may have provided a necessary link to his questions about
how humans will deal with intelligent machines. She advocates for
extending Wiener's understanding
of cybernetics and human behavior
to the natural world. Only then,
she posits, can we start to understand ourselves as part of a global
system, and start to live with that

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2461174
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

september 2015

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

broader environmental-cybernetic
perspective in mind.
Andrew Pickering is internationally
known as a leader in the field of science and technology studies. In The
Next Macy Conference: A New Interdisciplinary Synthesis, he shows
that one way to think of Wiener in
the 21st century is to return to the
original matrix of cybernetics, the
Macy conferences, and ask what the
next meeting series might look like.
The Macy's were famously interdisciplinary, and Pickering contends that
a shared interest in "unknowability"
bound the contributors together. By
reframing our own conversations
around this concept, he proposes, we
can start to reintegrate cybernetics'
various threads (mathematics, engineering, and the environment, the
humanities and social sciences, the
arts and psychiatry) in the present.
World-renowned security expert
and author Bruce Schneier is widely
respected for his views on cyberwarfare and cyber-crime. Sixty years

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015