Norbert Wiener

A society that treats people as components in a control loop, managed by information they do not hold, degrades them into messages in somebody else's system.

The origin that never washed out

Wiener's wartime job was an anti-aircraft predictor: model a pilot's evasive behaviour accurately enough to put a shell where he is about to be. The founding gesture of cybernetics is treating a human being as a predictable feedback system under fire, and the field has carried that starting point ever since. See the Macy Conferences for the room it came out of.

The refusal

In January 1947 Wiener published "A Scientist Rebels" in the Atlantic, refusing further military funding and giving his reasons in public.

That is rare enough to be worth stating plainly. A founder of a field tried to withdraw his technology from the institution that had paid for it, in print, at the height of his reputation. It did not work. It remains the clearest available precedent for the question this project keeps asking about its own funding.

Read the two editions against each other

The Human Use of Human Beings appeared in 1950 and was substantially revised in 1954. The second is more pessimistic, and the changes are informative about what four years of watching the field's uptake did to him.

Serious objections

• The warnings are general where the engineering is precise. Wiener is much better at identifying the danger than at saying what institutional arrangement would avoid it.
• Feedback and information became metaphors that spread far beyond where the mathematics applies, and Wiener's own popular writing helped that happen.
• The refusal, whatever its integrity, changed nothing about the field's funding, which is itself a finding about how little individual conscience does against an incentive structure.