IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 34

ago Wiener had deep insights in
these areas, including his comment
that "... in the long run, there is no
distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies"
[2]. In Ubiquitous Surveillance and
Security, Schneier illustrates how
ubiquitous surveillance breaks
down so much of what our society
has built up, and challenges us to
recognize and understand just how
damaging the loss of our privacy,
freedom, and liberty can be.
Flo Conway and Jim Seigelman's
Reintroducing Wiener: Channeling Norbert in the 21st Century
takes us on a guided tour of Wiener's life, work, and outspoken
social concerns about the human
consequences of new technologies.
Authors of the award-winning book
Dark Hero of the Information Age:
In Search of Norbert Wiener, the
Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books,
2005/2006), Conway and Siegelman
here assess the long-range accuracy of Wiener's warning shots and
"channel" his wisdom into the 21st
century. They offer informed speculation on what Wiener would celebrate in today's technological age,
what he would dread, and his updated guidelines for living and working with the intelligent machines
humans have created in their image.
An "exocortex" is a wearable (or
implanted) computer, used to augment a brain's biological high-level cognitive processes and inform
a user's decisions and actions. In
Securing the Exocortex: A Twenty -f irst Centur y Cyber netics
Challenge, Bonaci et al. focus on
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs),
a special type of exocortex used
to interact with the environment
via neural signals. Use of BCIs
range from medical applications
and rehabilitation to operation of
assistive devices. They can also be
used for marketing, gaming, and

entertainment, where BCIs are used
to provide users with a more personalized experience. BCI-enabled
technology carries a great potential to improve and enhance the
quality of human lives; however,
this technology is not without risk.
Bonaci et al. address a specific
class of privacy issues, brain spyware, where attacks are shown to
be feasible against currently available non-invasive BCIs. Influenced
by Wiener's computer ethics work,
the authors also propose a set of
principles regarding the appropriate use of the exocortex.
Thomas Fischer's Wiener's Prefiguring of a Cybernetic Design
Theory proposes that Wiener's writings - in particular an abandoned
reflection on the process of invention - reveal that Wiener was not
only one of the inventors of cybernetics, but also an early cybernetician of invention (i.e., design).
Developing analogies between
the causal principles observed in
automatic anti-aircraft guns, the
formation of cybernetics as an academic discipline, and the practices
of cybernetics and design, Fischer
argues that Wiener not only operated between what is (scientifically
describable) and what ought to be
(designed), but that he also reflected theoretically on himself doing so,
thereby enacting several concepts of
today's cybernetic design theory.
In Norbert Wiener and the
Counter-Tradition to the Dream of
Mastery, Doug Hill discusses "the
counter-tradition to the dream of
mastery" and Wiener's place in that
tradition. The phrase is used by the
philosopher of technology Langdon
Winner to describe a series of thinkers who for centuries have pointed
out the impossibility of ever achieving control over human or natural
affairs. The powers that our technologies place at our disposal make

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

that understanding especially important to recognize, and at the same
time especially easy to ignore. Wiener spoke often of that dilemma.
Finally, we present Laura Moorhead's award-winning 21CW Best
Student Paper Down the Rabbit
Hole: Tracking the Humanizing
Effect of John Dewey's Pragmatism on Norbert Wiener. Echoes of
pragmatism have long been noted
in the Cold War era and, specifically,
Wiener's cybernetics. Increasingly,
Wiener's work is revisited in the
pursuit of "big data" in education.
Yet, scholars ignore the influence
of pragmatism - and John Dewey,
in particular - on cybernetics and
its reach into education. Moorhead
reveals how Dewey played a role in
Wiener's philosophical underpinning
and views on education, and how
pragmatism had a humanizing effect
on Wiener's efforts and, ultimately,
his ongoing and increasing impact in
technology and education.
We hope you enjoy this special
issue.

Author Information
Philip Hall is a Principal Fellow with
the Department of Electrical and
Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Email: philip@faerberhall.com
Heather A. Love is an Assistant
Professor at the Department of English, University of South Dakota,
United States. Email: Heather.Love@
usd.edu.
Professor Shiro Uesugi is the President of Matsuyama Junior College,
Matsuyama City, Japan. Email: shiro.
uesugi@nifty.com.

References

[1] G. Adamson et al., Eds,. Proc. 2014 IEEE
Conf. Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century
(21CW 2014). New York, NY: IEEE Press, 2014.
[2] N. Wiener, The Human Use of Human
Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.

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september 2015

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