1894–1964 · mathematician, MIT

hen Norbert Wiener took his Harvard doctorate in 1913 he was eighteen. He spent his career at MIT, in pure mathematics at first, and during the Second World War on predicting the path of aircraft for anti-aircraft fire, with the engineer Julian Bigelow.

what he did

That war work led to Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow (1943), a short paper arguing that purposeful behaviour, in animals or machines, can be described as behaviour controlled by negative feedback from the goal [paraphrase, not a quotation]. In 1948 he named the field Cybernetics (Wiener, 1948), from the Greek for steersman, and wrote a popular version, The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener, 1950).

He was also among the first to worry in print about machines that learn. In a 1960 essay in Science he argued that a machine able to learn may carry out its instructions in ways its makers did not foresee, faster than they can intervene, so the purpose put into it had better be the purpose we really desire [paraphrase, not a quotation].

why he is here

The 1960 warning is the problem now called specification gaming. The reading room keeps the longer story on purpose.

in the tour: the room of governors and feedback has a placard called "Purpose as feedback" ···

Primary works and sources

1. Rosenblueth, Wiener & Bigelow (1943). Behavior, Purpose and Teleology. Philosophy of Science. doi:10.1086/286788
2. Wiener (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris: Hermann; Cambridge, MA: Technology Press; New York: Wiley.
3. Wiener (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
4. Wiener (1960). Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation. Science. doi:10.1126/science.131.3410.1355

see also

	purpose — governors, feedback and goals
	specification gaming — his warning, in practice
	Claude Shannon — information, the other half of 1948
	essay: the break — Wiener, McCulloch and Pitts, and a message from Mexico City