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Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who spent his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded cybernetics, the study of control and…

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On the Coordinates: 3.3.4 Ethics of Technology and AI · 6.18 Philosophy of Information

1894 – 1964 · Columbia (Missouri), Cambridge (Harvard and MIT), Massachusetts

Traditions: American

Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician who spent his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded cybernetics, the study of control and communication in animals and machines. He treated information as a basic category, neither matter nor energy. In The Human Use of Human Beings he became one of the first to warn about the social and ethical consequences of automation, making him a founding figure of computer and information ethics.

Key ideas

  • Feedback and control processes are common to living organisms and machines.
  • Information is a fundamental quantity in its own right, distinct from matter and energy.
  • Automation could devalue human labour and must be governed by human purposes.
  • Machines that learn and act on our behalf may pursue goals we specified badly, so responsibility cannot be handed to them.

Major works

  • Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
  • The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)
  • God and Golem, Inc. (1964)

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In the Coordinates

The questions of philosophy where Norbert Wiener takes a place, from The Coordinates of Thought.