IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 42

Norbert WieNer PaPers, MC 22, box x. MassaChusetts iNstitute of teChNology iNstitute, arChives aNd sPeCial ColleCtioNs, CaMbridge, Ma.

control engineering, and made the
first explicit connections between
feedback in the technical sense and
the feedback loops wired into the
human nervous system's living electrical networks.
Wiener's work came together
with the publication in 1948 of
Cybernetics, his new science of
"control and communication in
the animal and the machine" [5].
But Wiener was just getting started. With the dropping of the atomic
bomb, Wiener worried deeply about
the direction of all the war's new
knowledge and technical developments. In an article in the Atlantic
Monthly, "A Scientist Rebels," he
declared he would no longer allow
any of his work to be used by "irresponsible militarists," to create bigger and more lethal weapons, and
he urged other scientists to join him
[6]. Later, he took his growing concerns about postwar science and
technology to the wider public. In
The Human Use of Human Beings,
he explained cybernetics and its farreaching social implications in layman's terms and expressed his dire
concern about the coming impact
of automation on labor and human
workers [7]. His final popular work,
God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on
Certain Points where Cybernetics
Impinges on Religion, addressed
sensitive questions of ethics that
had begun to churn at the center of
the cybernetics revolution [8]. The
mythical figure of the Golem provided a timely metaphor for the new
age of self-acting intelligent technology. Without perfect programming
and tireless human oversight, Wiener warned, that technology would
become "a two-edged sword, and
sooner or later it will cut you deep"
[8, pp. 53-56].
Wiener's work speaks profoundly
to the twenty-first century. As Bigelow said, Wiener was always working
on "the problem after next" [4]. No

Norbert Wiener, age 11, "The Most Remarkable Boy in the World." From Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World magazine, October 7, 1906.
concept he learned about from Bigelow in 1941 and quickly perceived
as a universal scientific principle
[4]. His war work solving basic feedback problems of self-regulation
and human sensorimotor response

42

drew Wiener back to his first love,
biology, and to his good friend Dr.
Arturo Rosenblueth of Harvard Medical School. Together, Wiener and
Rosenblueth applied Cannon's physiological concept of "homeostasis" to

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

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