Dark Hero Of The Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics

256 Pages·2004·4.543 MB·English

by  Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman,

Cover photo: Courtesy of MIT Museum
"Burnt Norton" from Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., copyright ©
1963, 1964 by T.S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2005 by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman
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Designed by Jeff Williams
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conway, Flo
Dark hero of the information age : in search of Norbert Wiener the father of cybernetics / Flo Conway and Jim
Siegelman. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7382-0368-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Wiener, Norbert, 1894-1964. 2. Mathematicians—United States—Biography. 3. Cybernetics. I. Siegelman, Jim.
II.Title.
QA29.W497 C66 2004
For Our Fathers
Robert Patrick Conway, Sr.
and
Leonard P. Siegelman
CONTENTS
Prologue
Time Past, Time Present - ix
PART 1 THE ELEPHANT'S CHILD - 1
1 The Most Remarkable Boy in the World - 3
2 Young Wiener - 28
3 The Wunderkind and the Frau-Professor - 47
4 Weak Currents, Light Computers - 63
5 Wienerwalks - 82
6 Birth of a Science - 103
PART 2 IN THE COURT OF CYBERNETICS - 129
7 The Knights of Circular Causality - 131
8 Breakfast at Macy's - 154
9 The Big Bang: Cybernetics - 171
10 Wienerwalks II - 195
11 Breach and Betrayal - 213
PART 3 AFTERMATH - 235
12 A Scientist Rebels - 237
13 A Government Reacts - 255
14 Wienerwalks III - 272
15 Homage to the Elephant's Child:
The 'Satiable Soul of Norbert Wiener - 295
16 Childhood's End - 312
Epilogue
Time Future: Surviving the Global Society - 337
Acknowledgments – 349
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past. . . .
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
-T.S.Eliot - Burnt Norton
PROLOGUE
TIME PAST, TIME PRESENT
He IS THE FATHER OF THE INFORMATION AGE. His work has shaped the lives of billions of
people. His discoveries have transformed the world's economies and cultures.
He was one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, a child prodigy who became a world-
class genius and visionary thinker, an absentminded profes-sor whose eccentricities assumed mythical
proportions, a best-selling author whose name was a household word during America's first heyday of
high technology.
His footprints are everywhere today, etched in silicon, wandering in cyber-space, and in every corner of
daily life. Yet his words are muted echoes in the memory.
This is the story of a dark hero who has fallen through the cracks in the inhumation age and his fight
for human beings that is the stuff of legend.
Horn on the doorstep of the twentieth century, Norbert Wiener was a descendant of Eastern European
rabbis, scholars, and, purportedly, of the medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. He entered
college at eleven, received his Ph.D. from Harvard at eighteen, apprenticed with renowned European
mathematicians, and, in 1919, joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
His early mathematical work solved practical problems in electronics theory that engineers had been
wrestling with for decades. In the 1920s, he worked on the design of the first modern computer, and
during World War II, he helped create the first intelligent automated machines. Wiener's wartime vision
grew into a new interdisciplinary science of communication, computation, and automatic control,
spanning the forefronts of engineering, biology, and the social sciences. His ideas attracted an eclectic
group of scientists and scholars: computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude
Shannon,
and anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. Wiener named his new science
"cybernetics"—from the Greek word for steersman.
His 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine set off a
scientific and technological revolution. In less than a decade, cybernetics transformed the day-to-day
labors of workers in every industry and unleashed a flood of dazzling devices on postwar society.
Wiener gave the word "feedback" its modern meaning and introduced it into popular parlance. He was
the first to perceive the essence of the new stuff called "information." He worked with eminent
biologists and neurophysiologists to crack the communication codes of the human nervous system, and
with the engineers who incorporated those codes into the circuits of the first programmable "electronic
brains." He led the medical team that created the first bionic arm controlled by the user's own thoughts.
In his mind's eye, he saw the technical promises of the new world that was dawning and modern
marvels few could imagine at the time. But, alone among his peers, Wiener also saw the darker side of
the new cybernetic era. He foresaw the worldwide social, political, and economic upheavals that would
begin to surface with the first large-scale applications of computers and automation. He saw a relentless
momentum that would pit human beings against the seductive speed and efficiency of intelligent
machines. He worried that the new time- and labor-saving technology would prompt people to
surrender to machines their own purpose, their powers of mind, and their most precious power of all—
their capacity to choose.
And he feared for humanity's future.
Wiener spent his later years tirelessly warning the leaders of governments, corporations, labor unions,
and the public about those far-reaching changes that were coming to work and daily living. He was the
first person to sound alarms about intelligent machines that could learn from experience, reproduce
without limitation, and act in ways unforeseen by their human creators, and he called for greater moral
and social responsibility by scientists and technicians in an age of mushrooming productive and
destructive power. Wiener spoke and wrote passionately about rising threats to human values,
freedoms, and spirituality that were still decades in the offing. His efforts won him the National Book
Award and the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific award.
Yet, even as his new ideas were taking hold in America and worldwide, Wiener's visionary science was
foundering. By the late 1950s, cybernetics was being superseded by the specialized technical fields and
subdisciplines it had spawned, and Wiener himself wound up on the sidelines of his own revolution. his
moral stands were rejected by his peers and a gadget-happy consumer public, and his grim predictions
were dismissed by many as the doomsaying ofan
aging, eccentric egghead. He died suddenly, at age 69, on a trip to Europe in 1964, even as so many of
the things he had predicted were coming to pass.
Wiener's revolutionary contributions have been largely forgotten for reasons that have remained
obscure until now. This book travels back to that abandoned stretch of information age history, a place
removed in time but intimately connected to the technologies and social realities that affect all our lives
in the twenty-first century. It chronicles Wiener's life and work from his precocious childhood through
the opening shots of the cybernetics revolution and the first waves of the information age explosion that
followed. But Wiener's legacy is not only a technical one. As his own writings make clear, cybernetics
was not merely a narrow engineering discipline. It was a new way of thinking about the world—about
life as well as technology—that was utterly different from anything that had come before.
Wiener's science provided powerful new tools for understanding all manner of modern complexities,
from the workings of the human genome, to the flow of human communication, to the dynamics of
today's global economy and the teeming networks of the World Wide Web. The innovations Wiener's
work made possible, and the public stands he took to keep human beings in control of their new
creations, made him a hero to many in his day and to a loyal few in the years since his death. But his
story goes far beyond the known facts about the boy prodigy who became a world-famous scientist.
Two academic biographies from 1980 and 1990, a smattering of professional memoirs in scientific
journals, and Wiener's two-volume autobiography published in the 1950s gave insights into his
childhood years and later life as a math-ematician. But Wiener the man has remained elusive. The
official word from MIT, where he held court for forty-five years, is properly praiseful, but there are
gaping holes in the record and disquieting undertones rumbling below. With his science and social
warnings long gone from public view, and yet so many of his concerns rising again, the time is right to
pick up the search for Norbert Wiener where history left off, to reassess the legacy of his work and the
long range accuracy of his warning shots, and to unravel the mysteries that enshrouded his life and
remained unsolved four decades after his death.
Among those mysteries are unanswered questions about the effects of Wiener's high-pressure childhood
on the events of his adult life; rumors about Wiener's turbulent relations with his colleagues that marred
the early years of the cybernetics revolution; political questions about Wiener's activism in defense of
workers and in defiance of society's "powers that be," as he called them; and deeper philosophical
questions about his later spiritual excursions and his last enigmatic messages on relations between
people and machines.
Equally important are questions about the fate of cybernetics. What lasting contributions can Wiener's
science claim? Why, after stirring so much ferment, did cybernetics all but vanish from the American
scene a decade after Wiener's death? What lost pieces of his revolution need to be reclaimed by
younger generations grappling with the technical challenges and human complexities of a global
information society?
Now, after extended conversations with Wiener's surviving colleagues and family members, and a
thorough combing of the archives of the information age, many of those questions can be answered.
Wiener's saga is replete with testimony to his genius and fabled eccentricities. Tales abound of his
gregariousness and the hungering inquisitiveness that gave impetus to his Wienerwegs—his
meandering walks across the MIT campus, suburban Boston, and the New England countryside in
search of fresh insights and an audience for his latest cogitations. And there are numerous, whimsical
accounts of his deafening snoring through his colleagues' lectures (often with a lit cigar dangling
precariously from his mouth).
But Wiener was no cartoon genius. Beyond the legends and comic antics lay the darker realm of
Wiener the self-described "bent twig" whose fast-track upbringing turned back on him in adulthood and
wreaked havoc on his relationships. His small circle of close acquaintances were privy to something
few others knew: that amid his brilliance and deep concern for the devilish forces inherent in the new
technology he helped to sire, Wiener spent his life combatting his own inner demons. His furies sprang
from the deep psychic wounds of his youth, and from his decades-long struggle with the manic
depression that followed.
During his high times, Wiener was ebullient, impulsive, and often petulant. At his low points, he fell
prey to paralyzing depressions that drove him to threaten suicide frequently in the confines of his home
and family, and at times among his MIT colleagues. But, in many ways, Wiener's extremes were
matched by those of his wife, a fastidious frau-professor cast in the Old World mold. In her dutiful
efforts to preserve and protect her high-strung husband, Margaret Wiener took steps to neutralize
Wiener's peers, women in any proximity to him, and anyone she perceived as a threat to his
prominence. One stratagem in particular backfired catastrophically on him, personally and
professionally.
For a decade, Wiener worked productively with the pioneering neuroscien-tist Warren McCulloch and
Walter Pitts, the furtive young genius of cybernetics' next generation. The sudden end of his partnership
with McCulloch, Pitts, and other talented young scientists who came to MIT to take cybernetics
forward was a crisis for Wiener and everyone involved. This split dealt a crippling blow to the
cybernetics revolution at a crucial moment and changed the course of the new technological era in
ways that redound to the present day.
Wiener's activism made him a target in politically perilous times. As newly released government
records reveal, his outspoken stand against military research during the early years of the Cold War
prompted the FBI to investigate his alleged "subversive activities" and "communist sympathies." Cold
War fever also struck at Wiener's science. In the mid-1950s, when scientists and government officials in
the Soviet Union embraced cybernetics, the CIA took steps to as-sess the threat and counter it. But
years of secret inquiries did little to enlighten the American intelligence community about the power of
cybernetics, and some government officials became openly hostile to it. At the peak of the Cold War,
funding for cybernetics research in the United States dried up. The forward motion of cybernetic theory
and applications slowed to a crawl and never fully recovered. That political reaction is only one among
many reasons for Wiener's personal slide into obscurity, but it may be the major factor in the de-cline of
cybernetics in America and its conspicuous absence from the knowl-edge base of the twenty-first
century.
Time has confirmed that Wiener's work was revolutionary in the scientific sense. He identified a new
set of fundamental entities of which the universe is composed: messages, information, and basic
communication and control processes observable in every domain of life. He brought within the bounds
of understanding phenomena of both mind and matter that had eluded philosophers and scientists for
centuries. His was the first interdisciplinary scientific revolution, the first grounded, not in inanimate
nature alone, but equally in the world of living things and in the everyday actions of human beings. It
was also the first American scientific revolution, the first to originate and play out prima-rily in the
United States.
Cybernetics has sired, inspired, or contributed to dozens of new technical and scientific fields, from
artificial intelligence and cognitive science to environ- mental science and modern economic theory.
Yet many ofWiener's contribu-tions have been denied, dismissed, or credited to others, and some of the
most profound aspects of his work remain almost wholly unexplored. More than most scientific
revolutionaries, Wiener took the trouble to tell us explicitly why he was so worried about the fate of his
discoveries, and to leave behind some basic instructions to help us save ourselves. He made clear that
our greatest tasks ultimately would be to determine those purposes and values we want to em-brace as
human beings, and how we choose to share our existence with the ma-chines we have created in our
image.
Wiener's most dire predictions have not come to pass, but his legacy is still unfolding in the global
society of the twenty-first century. It can be seen in the fragile bubbles that have roiled the market for
new technologies—Wiener
watched such bubbles form and burst for decades and he cautioned eager investors to "watch your hat
and coat"—and in the global shift toward offshoring of jobs in manufacturing and the new technology
industries themselves.
And another important part of his legacy is only beginning to appear. His work paved the way for the
digital revolution, but Wiener's driving passions were analog. His imagination was inspired, not by
strings of ones and zeros, but by automatic machines that mimicked the movements of human muscles
and limbs, and by intelligent devices that emulated the feats performed by human brains and minds.
The advance of digital technology put many of those analog processes out to pasture, yet today they are
emerging as the dark horses of twenty-first-century science.The latest breakthroughs in biotechnology
and genetic engineering, robotics and sensor technology, and the tantalizing new domain of atomic-
scale nanotechnology promise to change daily living, and life itself, more profoundly than all the
digital technologies to date. They are unleashing formidable new powers that can benefit humankind or,
in some scenarios, extinguish it. This new analog universe is bringing Wiener's science and social
concerns back to the fore, along with his early warning that cybernetic technology is "a two-edged
sword, and sooner or later it will cut you deep."
Throughout his life and long after his death, Wiener remained a mystery even to those who were closest
to him, and nowhere more so than in his own spiritual excursions. Incongruous reports that, in his later
years, Wiener, the prodigal son of Maimonides and self-proclaimed agnostic, held private, weekly
meetings with a Hindu swami have turned out to be accurate in substance and spirit. His lifelong
interest in the cultures of the East also drew him to India in the 1950s, where, at the request of the
Indian government, he laid out a long-range program for that nation's emergence as a technological
power, which has put its scientists and technicians in the front ranks of today's global information
economy.
This giant of the new technological age, who loved to quote dark fables from age-old cultures to
dramatize his warnings to the modern world, was himself the embodiment of another genre of wisdom-
rich parables. Like the Elephant's Child in Kipling's Just So Stories, a character he loved and in form
resembled, Wiener was filled with a "satiable curtiosity" that led him on to great things. His multi-
faceted persona also evoked a second famous pachyderm parable: the Hindu tale of the elephant and
the blind men who struggled in vain to describe it, each from his own isolated grasp. Indeed, the many
witnesses to his life describe many different and sometimes mutually exclusive Norbert Wieners: one
brilliant, one deficient, one robust, one infirm, one playful, one wrathful, one competitive, one
magnanimous, one insecure, one egotistical, one self promoting, one supremely
humble. Like many historical figures, Wiener was a man of paradoxes, yet his mix was extreme even
among celebrated men of genius.
Like dark heroes of old and antiheroes of contemporary culture, he flouted convention and society's
superficial codes to pursue a deeper purpose and higher truth.
Like dark matter whose presence can only be inferred from its effects on the universe around it, his
science and ideas continue to influence every dimension of our world.
PART ONE
The Elephant's Child
1
The Most Remarkable Boy in the World
There was one Elephant—a new elephant—an Elephant's Child— who was full of 'satiable curtiosity,
and that means he asked ever so many questions. ... He asked questions about everything that he saw,
or heard, or felt, or smelt, or touched, and all his uncles and his aunts spanked him. And still he was full
of 'satiable curtiosity!
—Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
On A CRISP NEW ENGLAND morning in the autumn of 1906, the first whiz kid of the twentieth
century came down from his room to meet The World.
The reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's flagship newspaper had traveled north to Boston from New York to
check out the "Youngest College Man in the His-tory of the United States." Daily his paper's pages
blared with news of newfound geniuses, brilliant discoveries, and dazzling inventions that were
transforming so-ciety in the new Machine Age. A year earlier, a twenty-six-year-old Swiss patent clerk
turned Albert Einstein had published three abstruse papers in an obscure journal that were being hailed
as harbingers of a revolution in the physical sci-ences. Newshounds worldwide were sniffing the air for
the next big thing. This one found his big story in a small package.
"Hey, mother!" cried the child's voice from the top of the stairs,"isn't it time to go to college?"
"Yes, dear," the young matron who had greeted the reporter replied, and the patter of his feet became a
clatter on the staircase.
The Journalist was smitten at the first sight of the eleven-year-old "infant prodigy of Boston."
"There burst into the drawing-room a regular boy in knickerbocker stockings with the usual holes in the
knee. . . shirtwaist and gold-rimmed spectacles," he would write a few days later. "Under his arm he
carried a book . . . Hibben's The Problems of Philosophy"
"How do you do, sir?" the boy asked, in a clipped cadence that struck the reporter as rather quaint for a
child his age. He sat politely to entertain the reporter's questions.
"Why, yes, I find it a pleasure to read," he said, stealing a glance out the drawing room window at his
dog beckoning him in the yard. "But I don't see why anyone is interested in me just because I am
young. Other boys are young, too. I don't see anything wonderful in being fond of studying. I wouldn't
study if I didn't want to study."
Tales were already spreading beyond Cambridge about the precocious child of Professor Leo Wiener,
instructor in Slavic languages and literatures at Harvard. The boy, Norbert, had learned his letters at
eighteen months. Under his father's tutelage, he began reading at three, reciting in Greek and Latin at
five, and in German soon after. At seven he took up chemistry, by nine algebra, geometry, trigonometry,
physics, botany, and zoology, and that fall, at eleven, he had entered Tufts College in the neighboring
town of Medford after only three and a half years of formal schooling.
The reporter could not comprehend why an eleven-year-old would prefer Huxley and Darwin to Hansel
and Gretel.
"Philosophy is more interesting than fairy tales—that's all," said young Norbert self-assuredly. "In fact,
philosophy is fairyland to me." The stunned scribe scribbled away as the boy illustrated his point with a
brief discourse on the popular nineteenth-century natural philosopher Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, who
coined the term "ecology" and the tongue-twisting "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" Norbert had
tackled Haeckel's natural insights in German and much preferred them to the paeans of Homer and
other classical poets he had subdued in their original Greek. "Haeckel," he informed the reporter, "tried
to solve the riddle of the universe. Homer only spun stories."
In due time, this young lad would do both, but for now he had enough work balancing the demands of
his college studies with the fleeing pleasures of childhood. "Do I play? Of course, I do!" he said,
fending off the reporter's transparent challenge to his boyish bona fides. "Swimming is my forte. But I
like to study too. When I have participated in the boys' games I turn to my Huxley or my Spencer. I get
suggestions from them which lead my mind to think of greater tilings. But I like mathematics best of
all."
Petite, prim Bertha Wiener sent her son back to his room so she could speak privately with the reporter.
"Of course we are proud of Norbert. What mother and father wouldn't be?" she said softly. But, she
stressed,"we have have tried to bring
him up as other boys are, and we have never let him think that he is any different. We want him to be
just a normal boy—
"Norbert, dear," she called out, "please close your door."
"Yes, mother," said the small voice upstairs.
"I wouldn't for the world have him think that we consider him anything out of the ordinary," she
whispered. "But, of course, we do."
The reporter's rapturous story, "The Most Remarkable Boy in the World," took up the entire front page
and then some of The World Magazine on Sunday, October 7, 1906. It dwarfed that day's coverage of
the launching of the steamship Mauretania, which promised passage from New York to London in only
five days, and an unassuming ad offering apartments on Manhattan's Upper East Side for $11.60 per
month.
A large photoengraving, half as big as the boy himself, spanned the broadsheet from top to bottom,
portraying the preadolescent in a jaunty sailor suit, standing akimbo, hands in his knicker pockets, legs
turned out in his dark stockings and high-button shoes. The beatific shot was superimposed over an
illustration that depicted Norbert poised atop opulently bound editions of Darwin's Origin of Species
and Plato's Dialogues.
The text mirrored the image of the little Hercules, describing him as a child of the gods, "a healthy boy.
. . heavily built, almost fat. His legs and arms are thick. His chest is broad. His skin is smooth and his
muscles hard. His head is the average size."
"But his eyes tell the story," the reporter proclaimed. "They are big and black and blazing. There is
something almost uncanny in their gaze.To quote the boy's own words, they seem already to have
solved the riddle of the universe."
Next the reporter interviewed Professor Leo Wiener at his office in Harvard Yard. "I hate to talk about
the boy," Leo Wiener lied, "not because I am not proud of him but because it might get to his ears and
spoil him." In an act of generosity he would not make publicly again, the professor praised his son's
"keen analytical mind" and "tremendous memory." "He doesn't learn by rote, as a parrot might, but by
reasoning," he said. The professor lauded his son's mastery of Caesar, Cicero, Ovid, Virgil, and
comparative philology.
"But his inclination is always toward philosophy," he declared, gainsaying his son's expressed
preference for mathematics and insisting that his son was "lazy and doesn't study as much as the
average boy his age."
The faint praise left the reporter a bit confused and uncertain of his subject's fate. He ended his piece as
he began, with bombast, and a caveat:
"Whatever he may be in the future, Norbert Wiener is the youngest college man—beg pardon, boy—in
the history of the United States, if not in the history of the world."
In that simple time when the art of overstatement was young, when newspapers were the nation's
primary source of information, radio was in its experimental
stages, and electricity itself was still a miracle to many, the child who would father the information age
stepped onto the world stage and became one of the first media darlings of the American Century.
The infant prodigy of Boston was, in many respects, a child of the old order of knowledge. His
philosophical forebears harked back to Greece and Rome. His scientific ideas derived from the
patriarchs of classical physics and calculus, Newton and Leibniz, and from the trailblazers of biology in
Britain during Victoria's long reign and their counterparts on the European continent.
But the Wiener boy's genome followed a different line of descent that would shape his life and his
thinking in tangible ways.
"I am myself overwhelmingly of Jewish origin," he said at the outset of his autobiography, Ex-Prodigy:
My Childhood and Youth, published in 1953. Neither he nor his father nor his father before him were
religious Jews, yet he embraced his Jewish roots and the values his forefathers had carried down
irrespective of ritual. The adult Wiener credited much of his success to the Jewish "attitude toward life"
derived from surmounting centuries of ethnic and religious prejudice. He lauded Judaism's love of
learning and traced with pride the distinguished Tal-mudic scholars in the Wiener line—including one
celebrated Jewish sage who had lived seven hundred years before.
According to a family legend, the Wiener clan traced back to the twelfth-century Jewish philosopher
and physician Moses Maimonides. The revered Moses ben Maimon, known to religious Jews as the
"Second Moses" or by his Hebrew initials simply as "the Rambam," was born in Cordoba, Spain, in
1135. Like Norbert Wiener, he was a child prodigy. In 1159, his family fled Spain to escape the
persecution of Cordoba's Jews by a fanatical Muslim sect and eventually settled in Egypt, where Jews
were welcome. There young Maimonides earned a reputation as an adept translator and healer and was
appointed personal physician to the Court of Sultan Saladin the Great in Cairo. The Rambam was a
repository of the knowledge of his time and the foremost Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages. His best-
known work, titled The Guide of the Perplexed, was read widely in the Middle East by Jews and