Late Great Engineers: Norbert Wiener - father of cybernetics

In 1950, writing in The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener states: “The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.” The most pertinent fact to differentiate this statement from the musings of Robert A Heinlein in his novel Citizen of the Galaxy, published in the same decade, in which a spaceship is named after Wiener, is that while Heinlein was scribbling science fiction for entertainment, MIT professor Wiener was postulating the most important early observations on cybernetic theory and automation.

Today, Wiener is thought of as the father of cybernetics – a term he defined as “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine” – and is credited as one of the first to theorise that intelligent behaviour is the result of feedback mechanisms: a significant early step towards the development of artificial intelligence. The publication of Weiner’s book Cybernetics in 1948 is now accepted as the pivotal moment the topic became an independent science. In Cybernetics, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publication MIT News, he “attempted to unify the study of biological and electromechanical systems through common principles of feedback, communication and control.” The article goes on to say that the book’s title, a neologism coined by Wiener and derived from the ancient Greek word kybernetikos (that translates literally as ‘good at steering’), lives on in terms such as ‘cyborg’ and ‘cyberspace’. It also affectionately describes Wiener’s career as, “40 years rambling the Institute’s halls, depositing the ashes of his signature cigar in the chalk trays of his colleagues’ blackboards, volubly holding forth on a bewildering range of topics, and, along the way, helping create the pop-culture archetype of the absent-minded professor.”