IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 41

KEYNOTE

Flo Conway and
Jim Siegelman

Reintroducing Wiener:
Channeling Norbert
in the 21st Century
he arc of Norbert
Wiener's fascinati n g l i fe b e c a m e
clear to us one day
in the M.I.T. Institute
Archives. In one box of the Wiener
collection, we found a yellowed
1906 New York World broadsheet
headlined, "The Most Remarkable
Boy in the World," filled with the
image of an adorable little boy
standing on a stack of immortal
books [1]. That little boy was young
Wiener, a world-renowned prodigy
in multiple fields whose eyes were
"almost uncanny in their gaze" [1].
In this short space, we want to reintroduce you (or, for some, introduce
you) to the adult Wiener's most
important contributions to today's
science and technology, and to his
farsighted concerns for the human
impact of the new technologies his
cybernetics revolution helped to sire.
Wiener's early work was impressive. Already, in the 1920s, he presented new insight into Brownian
motion, Heaviside's calculus, and
the mathematical analysis and measurement of electric signals. He took
a radical new statistical approach

to communication engineering, in
Wiener's war work went far beyond
which he reconceived the communiantiaircraft fire. Early in 1942, Wiecation process as a set of mathematner sent a report to his overseers in
ical probabilities. He was the first to
Washington. His monograph, with
describe electronic signals as "data"
its daunting math and engineering
and "series of data," as he called
theories, was promptly classified,
them in 1930 [2, p. 259]. And, in his
bound with bright yellow covers, and
first stab at quantifying the new comdubbed Wiener's "Yellow Peril" [3]. In
modity of information, Wiener proit, Wiener severed the entire practice
posed a novel "binary" system, as he
of control from its origins in power
called it then, to represent electronic
engineering and brought it bodily
data as a series of two probable choices designated by
a 0 or a 1. Other engineers
introduced important new
technical terms, formulas,
Today's robots embody exactly
and working methods during those years. But the fact
the kinds of autonomous learning
remains: there simply was
and self-programming capacities
no rigorous science of communication before Wiener
that Wiener worried about most.
applied his groundbreaking
work on probability, wave
motion, and harmonic analysis to practical problems of commuinto the camp of communication.
nication engineering.
He also described that elusive comThe Second World War brought
modity of information, and the meaWiener's work to the fore. His warsure of information contained in any
time assignment was to develop an
message, as the mathematical likeautomated, radar-guided fire conlihood of that particular message
trol system for antiaircraft artillery,
emerging from a larger "measure or
a project he completed with M.I.T.
probability of possible messages" [3,
engineer Julian Bigelow, though
p. 4]. Wiener's other wartime revelatheir device never saw combat. But
tion was feedback, an engineering

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2461194
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

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