Where Norbert Wiener appears
30 total
…fried Wilhelm Leibniz. The New Testament prophets included Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener. They delivered the machines. Alan Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent. John von...
se them to fashion new items at the endpoints, without “moving a...particle of matter from one end of the line to the other,” a vision now realized in our world of networked 3D printers. Wiener also imagined machine-to-machine feedback loop...
… by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extr...
…nd co-author (with Ed Regis) of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. In 1950, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings was at the cutting edge of vision and speculation in proclaiming that the machine l...
… had already been noted by the late Heinz von Foerster, one of the architects of cybernetics, who worked with Norbert Wiener from the mid-1940s and in the 1960s founded the field of second-order cybernetics, in which the observer is underst...
…cation engineering. It is this split which separates the age just past from that in which we are now living. —Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine Cybernetics is the study of the how the we...
organizational superintelligences are not just made of humans, they are hybrids of humans and the information technologies that allow them to coordinate. Even in Wiener’s time, the “bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations”...
… later. In one of the founding documents of the study of intelligent machines, The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener does a remarkable job of identifying many of the most significant trends to arise since he wrote it, along with not...
… by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extr...
…ing cars, or humanoid robots. But one thing doesn’t vary: the presence of human beings. That’s certainly what Norbert Wiener imagined when he wrote about the potential of machines to improve human society by interacting with humans and help...
ty and value as “a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy” and expressed the hope that an open society, guided by feedback on human well-being, would enhance that value. Fortunately his belief in the causal powe...
et’s make that destiny a truly inspiring one! 20 See Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014). 68 Jaan Tallinn grew up in Estonia, becoming one of its few computer game developers, when that...
other optimists have largely overlooked. The real danger, he said, is that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the race or that pol...
te. That these transitions occurred together does not mean they are inextricably linked. Just as digital computation was implemented using vacuum tube components, analog computation can be implemented in solid state. Analog computation is a...
…fried Wilhelm Leibniz. The New Testament prophets included Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Norbert Wiener. They delivered the machines. Alan Turing wondered what it would take for machines to become intelligent. John von...
’s proposal for a digital computer. After the visit, George wrote an essay, “Turing’s Cathedral,” which, for the first time, alerted the public about what Google’s founders had in store for the world. “We are not scanning all those books to...
ure-of-ai/. 32 whereas the iron-eating bacterium Thiobacillus ferrooxidans is thrilled. Who’s to say the bacterium is wrong? The fact that a machine has been given a fixed objective by humans doesn’t mean that it will automatically recogniz...
ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting “Nice AI.” But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, selfimproving AI? Wiener’s warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings are now...
n Tallinn, and physicist Max Tegmark, are deeply concerned with the threat of AI, including the existential one, while others, notably robotics entrepreneur Rodney Brooks, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and bestselling author Steven Pinker, ha...
ir roots in the Second World War. They started out as quiet dissident messages—messages that people didn’t pay much attention to, even if they silently and perhaps subconsciously concurred. The first message was: Zhe Soviet Union is compose...
