Presentation on Norbert Wiener to Humanity Plus conference, Melbourne 2012

1. Norbert Wiener and human
augmentation
Dr Greg Adamson
Board of Governors, IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology
Chair, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Victorian Section
g.adamson@ieee.org
Humanity+ @Melbourne
Conference
5-6 May 2012

2. The challenge
 “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now
modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment.” [HU.46]
 However, “in the field of science, it is perilous to run counter to the
accepted tables of precedence. On no account is it permissible to
mention living beings and machines in the same breath. Living
beings are living beings in all their parts; while machines are made
of metals and other unorganized substances… If we adhere to all
these tabus, we may acquire a great reputation as conservative and
sound thinkers, but we shall contribute very little to the further
advance of knowledge.” [GG.5]
 Eight decades ago Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics (the "cyber" in
cyberspace), began building a bridge between the medical and engineering
sciences. Over the following 30 years his life sciences work included neural,
ethical, social, prosthetic and other dimensions. His ground-breaking 1948
book Cybernetics was sub-titled "Control and communication in the animal
and the machine", and in this he looked at both the prospects and threats
faced by humanity in its increasingly complex relationship with machines.
 Dr Greg Adamson is a member of the organising committee of "Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century", a
conference commemorating the life of Dr Wiener on the 50th anniversary of his death, March 2014,
Boston USA (www.21stcenturywiener.org).
 *References use the following abbreviations followed by page number: CY—Cybernetics, N Wiener,
1948, Cambridge: MIT Press. DH—Dark Hero of the Information Age, F. Conway & J. Siegelman, 2005,
NY: Basic Books. GG—God and Golem, Inc., N Wiener, 1964, Cambridge: MIT Press. HU—The
Human Use of Human Beings, N. Wiener, 1954, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

3. A little about Norbert Wiener,
1894-1964
 At 19 he undertook post-doctoral study under Bertrand Russell
(having written his dissertation on the first volumes of Russell‟s
Principia)
 He made his reputation as a mathematics and his name remains
known to engineers in the Wiener filter and Wiener measure
 He became a prominent scientist in the systems and control field,
and alongside Claude Shannon a major contributor to the foundation
of modern information theory
 He helped transform MIT from a school for engineers to a world
leader in the science and engineering fields
 In 1948 he invented cybernetics, the “cyber” in “cyberspace”
 He became noted for his opposition to weapons development after
his 1948 statement “A Scientist Rebels”
 His automated world became subject of Kurt Vonnegut‟s first SF
writing, Player Piano
 … and today his work is little known to the present generation, even
among those familiar with Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, Claude
Shannon and John von Neumann

4. Tools: A multi-disciplinary
approach
Wiener tackled many scientific and engineering problems, and found
himself most comfortable with a multi-disciplinary approach: “the most
fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been
neglected as a no-man‟s land between the various established fields…”
[CY.2]
 This contrasted to his observation of modern science:
◦ “each member travels a preassigned path, and in which the sentinels of
science, when they come to the ends of their beats, present arms, do an about
face, and march back in the direction from which they have come.” [HU.12]
◦ [a scientist] will regard the next subject as something belonging to his
colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on
his part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy.” [CY.2]
 Wiener‟s definition of multi-disciplinarianism is a lot stronger than
modern current usage: “The mathematician need not have the skill
to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to
understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The
physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical
theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance
and to tell the mathematician for what he should look.” [CY.3]

5. Multi-disciplinary teams
Throughout his working life Wiener worked closely with many
renowned specialists in other fields:
 He collaborated closely with Arturo Rosenblueth, Mexican
neurophysiologist, from 1933
 Julian Bigelow, the key collaborator of Wiener on feedback, later
worked with John von Neumann on Wiener‟s recommendation
 Cybernetics emerged out of a multi-disciplinary discussion beginning
in 1942 sponsored by the Macy Foundation in New York, introducing
psychologists, physiologists and social scientists to mathematicians,
engineers and physicists
 Claude Shannon wrote, “Communication theory is heavily indebted
to Wiener for much of its basic philosophy and theory.” [DH.187]
 He made multiple visits to India in the 1950s at the invitation of
Nehru and Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, founder of the Indian
Statistical Institute, Kolkata
 Four key collaborators, Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, Warren
McCulloch and Walter Pitts co-authored a ground-breaking work on
perception and cognition, “What the Frog‟s Eye Tells the Frog‟s
Brain”, 1959

6. Results: In the life sciences
To begin with some practical examples:
 “If all the auditory cortex were used for vision, we might
expect to get a quantity of reception of information about 1
per cent of that coming in through the eye…This is very poor
vision; it is, however, definitely not blindness, nor do people
with this amount of vision necessarily consider themselves as
blind. In the other direction, the picture is even more
favorable. The eye can detect all of the nuances of the ear
with the use of only 1 per cent of its facilities, and still leave a
vision of about 95/100, which is substantially perfect. Thus
the problem of sensory prosthesis is an extremely hopeful
field of work.” [CY.143]
 “The loss of a segment of limb implies not only the loss of the
purely passive support of the missing segment or its value as
mechanical extension of the stump, and the loss of the
contractile power of its muscles, but implies as well the loss
of all cutaneous and kinesthetic sensations originating in it.
The first two losses are what the artificial-limbmaker now tries
to replace. The third has so far been beyond his scope.”
[CY.26]

7. Results: The human-machine
continuum
 “In the ear, the transposition of music from one fundamental
pitch to another is nothing but a translation of the logarithm of
the frequency, and may consequently be performed by a
group-scanning apparatus” [CY.141]
 “…our inner economy must contain an assembly of
thermostats, automatic hydrogen-ion-concentration controls,
governors, and the like, which would be adequate for a great
chemical plant. These are what we know collectively as our
homeostatic mechanism.” [CY.115]
 “It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living
individual and the operation of some of the newer
communication machines are precisely parallel in their
analogous attempts to control entropy through
feedback.”[HU.26]
 He also turned the machine analogy on hits head: “When
human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are
used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but
as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw
material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a
machine, is in fact an element in the machine.” [HU.185]

8. Results: Entropy and
information
 Wiener had a non-deterministic view of external reality. He
saw information and entropy as opposite ends of a
continuum. In this his focus on philosophical questions is
clear: “Information is information, not matter or energy”.
[CY.132]
 He didn‟t avoid straying into the controversy: “Now that
certain analogies of behavior are being observed between the
machine and the living organism, the problem as to whether
the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes, semantic … If
we wish to use the word „life‟ to cover all phenomena which
locally swim upstream against the current of increasing
entropy, we are at liberty to do so.” [HU.32]
 “There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy
in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase,
and the existence of these islands enables some of us to
assert the existence of progress.” [HU.36]
 Progress was a concept he treated with care, for example
identifying our environmental dependence and comparing
resource use to the Mad Hatter‟s Tea Party. [HU.46]

9. Conclusion I: Limited possibilities
Wiener identified several limit to his work:
 Analogue and digital models of the brain: “machines that measure,
as opposed to machines that count, are very greatly limited in their
precision. Add to this the prejudices of the physiologist in favor of all-
or-none action, and we see why the greater part of the work which
has been done on the mechanical simulacra of the brain has been
on machines which are more or less on a digital basis. However, if
we insist too strongly on the brain as a glorified digital machine, we
shall be subject to some very just criticism” from both physiologists
and psychologists. [HU.65]
 On application to the social sciences: “…the human sciences are
very poor testing-grounds for a new mathematical technique: as
poor as the statistical mechanics of a gas would be to a being of the
order of size of a molecule, to whom the fluctuations which we
ignore from a larger standpoint would be precisely the matters of
greatest interest.” [CY.25]
 In addition to practical limits, he identified limits we should impose,
including in weapons development and automation:
◦ “there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies”,
[HU.129]
◦ “Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb, it had
occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality
of unheard-of importance for good and evil. The automatic factory and the

10. Conclusion II: Unlimited
possibilities
While addressing societal concerns, he looked at the capacity of
humans to manage their affairs and technology:
 “Thus there is a new engineering of prostheses possible, and
it will involve the construction of systems of a mixed nature,
involving both human and mechanical parts. However, this
type of engineering need not be confined to the replacement
of parts that we have lost. There is a prosthesis of parts which
we do not have and which we never have had.” [GG.76]
And to finish, Wiener placed no theoretical limits on human
transformation whatsoever:
 “it is conceptually possible for a human being to be sent over
a telegraph line… At present, and perhaps for the whole
existence of the human race, the idea is impracticable, but it
is not on that account inconceivable. Quite apart from the
difficulties of bringing this notion into practice in the case of
man, it is a thoroughly realizable concept in the case of the
man-made machines of a lower degree of complexity.”
[GG.36]

11. Writings about Wiener
 John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From mathematics to the
technologies of life and death (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980),
Steve J. Heims. The writer‟s critical perspective regarding military
technology leads to a co-biography supportive of Wiener but not of
von Neumann.
 Norbert Wiener 1894-1964 (Boston: Virkhauser Verlag, 1990,Vita
Mathematica Vol 5), P.R. Masani. A mathematician‟s biography
written by a long-time collaborator, who edited Wiener‟s collected
works.
 Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the
Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005/2006), Flo
Conway and Jim Siegelman, also available from Amazon as an e-
book. The most recent autobiography, addresses the complexity of
Wiener‟s life and work.
 Ex-Prodigy: My childhood and youth (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1953), Norbert Wiener. Wiener‟s „warts and all‟
autobiography, part 1.
 I am a mathematician: The later life of a prodigy (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 1956), Norbert Wiener. Autobiography from 1919 to
1953.

12. Conference on Norbert Wiener in
the 21st Century, Boston March
2014
Key supporters:
 Dr Amar Bose, CEO, Bose, former student and colleague of
Norbert Wiener
 Dr Vint Cerf, VP and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
 Dr Robert Vallée, chair World Organization of Systems and
Cybernetics
 Dr Mary Catherine Bateson, writer and cultural anthropologist
 Vernor Vinge, mathematician and multi-award winning
science fiction writer
 Dr Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation
 Dr Rafael Capurro, chair, International Centre for Information
Ethics
 Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, authors, Dark Hero of the
Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of
Cybernetics
Details at www.21stcenturywiener.org

13. IEEE Society on Social
Implications of Technology
 Part of the 400,000-member Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
 40th anniversary of SSIT this year
 Publishes Technology & Society magazine and holds the
International Symposium on Technology and Society annually
 Co-organising IEEE Conference on Technology and Society
in Asia 2012, Singapore 27-29 October
 SSIT is engaged in issues surrounding technology including
ethics, environment, development, social responsibility,
gender
www.ieeessit.org