Dark Hero of the Information Age (Conway, Siegelman, 2005)

In Search of Norbert Wiener the Father of Cybernetics

5.0 out of 5 stars A testimony to a true hero of science and humanity, February 2, 2005
By Michael Fuery (Wodonga, VIC, Australia)

Having read "Dark Hero Of The Information Age" I am now somewhat taken aback when I look around and can recognise the hand and mind of Norbert Wiener throughout much of contemporary life. Be it in learning, language, communication or use of technology Wiener's scientific vision and development of cybernetics has had significant influence over the way human beings interact with each other and with technology.

But, as the authors make the point so clearly, his vision and thinking cannot be separated from his humanity. In their book Conway and Siegelman take the reader on an intimate journey into the complex life of an extraordinary person, complete with his personal struggles and failings as well as his triumphs. It's a journey that reveals just how human Wiener really was and the degree to which his scientific genius was underpinned by his innate sense of ethics and morality.

Today, those who bring new science into the world are sometimes criticised as 'soulless' individuals who only focus on assumed benefits, without regard for unrealised consequences. But Norbert Weiner, several decades ahead of his time, is revealed as a scientist whose motivations were tempered with concern for the protection of people, from both the perspective of social cohesion and that at the level of individual well-being. His legacy, apart from all his unique mathematical and scientific contributions, is that the advance of science is not at the cost of human dignity, and is the challenge that he has left squarely in front of today's scientists and of the community at large.

He lived his life across continents in the northern hemisphere. I was saddened to learn that we in Australia missed a rare opportunity to cross paths with his genius, when an academic appointment he pursued here earlier in his career did not come to fruition. Despite this, we have no doubt indirectly benefited from his wisdom in the many and varied aspects of human endeavour to which he contributed.

The authors bring into the 21st Century a fascinating and relevant story of a 'dark hero' - but also that of someone whose life should illuminate our path ahead, if humanity is to pursue scientific progress without bringing harm to itself.

x 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."

p.14 Norbert strove to do better. He worked harder and studied longer, but in less than a year the daily demands of reading for his lessons produced a severe myopia. By age eight, the eyestrain was so bad the family's doctor ordered Norbert to stop reading for six months, fearing that he might lose his eyesight altogether... for six months, Leo [Norbert's father] made his son do all his reasoning, reckoning, and arithmetic in his head.

The result was profound... He developed a near-photographic memory... That year, Wiener later told an MIT colleague, "I relearned the world. My mind completely opened up. I could see things I never saw before."

p.16 That summer, at age ten, he wrote his first philosophical paper, a treatise on the incompleteness of all knowledge, and titled it with pluck, "The Theory of Ignorance."...In science... uncertainty exists "with every experiment," he insisted. He concluded that, "In fact all human knowledge is based on an approximation."

p.50 I came to see that the mathematical tool for which I was seeking was one suitable to the description of nature, and I grew ever more aware that it was within nature itself that I must seek the language and the problems of my mathematical investigations.

p.113 If then we could not... develop a perfect universal predictor... we should have to cut our clothes to fit our cloth and develop the best predictor that mathematics allowed us to. The only question was... If errors of inaccuracy and errors of hypersensitivity always seemed to be in opposite directions, on what basis could we make a compromise between those two errors?

The answer was that we could make such a compromise only on a statistical basis.

p.125-126 One member of that inner circle [JLJ - familiar with Wiener's WWII -era ideas and concepts] ... was the young mathematician Claude E. Shannon, a recent MIT Ph.D. and a new hire at Bell Labs... Early in the war, Shannon came to learn Wiener's new communications theories at the source. [Julian] Bigelow [JLJ - a colleague of Wiener] was present at many meetings between the two men where he watched Wiener give liberally of his ideas to his younger colleague... In fact, Bigelow said that one of his strongest recollections was "seeing Wiener giving Shannon advice, help and ideas over and over again... I think Wiener was the support for Shannon's ideas and much of his thinking on information theory."

p.133-134 All those purposeful actions [described by Wiener's colleague Arturo Rosenblueth in a 1942 Macy Foundation conference] were governed by circular communication processes and guided to their goals by error-correcting negative feedback - in Wiener's new communication terminology, by information that looped back continuously to its source to show how far off the mark it was straying and the corrections needed for the system to reach its goal. That fundamental insight raised exciting new possibilities for theory and research in... all the sciences... Rosenblueth's talk stole the show at the Macy Foundation conference.

p.135 The short article Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Bigelow published jointly in the distinguished journal Philosophy of Science, titled "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," ...unfurled their proposition that the complex workings of automatic machines and electronic computers - and living nervous systems, too - could all be studied from a unified viewpoint grounded in the advancing science of communication. Formally, now, they declared that their scientific framework offered a whole new way of looking at the ubiquitous communication and control processes carried out, to varying degrees, by intelligent machines, human beings, and all living things, and that each of those remarkable entities achieved their goals through purposeful action governed by negative feedback and the logic of circular causality.

p.178 At the book's midpoint [JLJ - Cybernetics, published by Wiener in 1948], Wiener brought his most important cybernetic terms and concepts together and gave the world... the keys to understanding complex systems of all kinds. He proclaimed the essential unity of information processes and showed how the new technical methods of "control by informative feedback" that engineers were beginning to use ubiquitously to control, organize, stabilize, self-regulate, and govern vast communication networks and intelligent automatic machines were, in their essence, the same universal processes that nature long ago selected as its basic operating system for human beings and all living things.

In so doing, in Cybernetics, Wiener established the universal principle of feedback as more than merely a good technical idea. He gave concrete, practical examples of both negative and positive feedback at work in mechanical, electrical, and living systems

p.190 Wiener approached information, as he had come to cybernetics, from the vantage points of both engineering and biology. For him, information was not merely discrete or continuous, not strictly linear or even circular, not matter or energy, but something altogether new, extended in space and time - and very often alive. In Wiener's view, information was not just a string of bits to be transmitted or a succession of signals with or without meaning, but a measure of the degree of organization in a system.

p.196 I was making dinner, and Norbert came over. I was having trouble with a calculus problem, and I said, "Norbert, how do you do this problem?" He looked at it and said, "The answer is five." I said, "But Norbert, I don't understand." He said, "I'll do it another way." He looked at it, paused. "The answer is five." I never asked him for help again.

p.204-205 Wiener... underwent surgery to remove his cataracts... Wiener feared he would lose his sight completely. To prepare himself, one MIT colleague observed, "he practiced being blind by burying his face in a book and walking the halls by following along with his finger. If he reached an open door of a classroom, he would simply forge ahead and circumnavigate the room while the entire class stared."

p.294 Amar Bose had many of those ineffable experiences during his ten years of close interaction with Wiener. "He'd come into my office when I was working on my doctorate, but we never talked about my thesis. He had all these ideas and he wanted to talk about those things. Then after a while I noticed a strange thing. After he'd leave I could turn back to whatever I was stuck on and just go! It was amazing. At first I thought it was a coincidence, but it happened again and again and again. Your thinking went up to a different plane just trying to envision with him."

For Bose, one final memory summed up the secret of Wiener's singular mind and the force that drove his perambulating genius. "It was one of the last times I saw him. We had lunch in the faculty club. Afterwards, I walked him to his car and, as we were parting, I asked him, "Professor, how have you been able to make all the incredible contributions you have made to mathematics and science?" He looked at me and said just two words: "Insatiable curiosity."

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