The Human Use of Human Beings

Norbert Wiener's Ideas at the Dawn of the Age of Computing

Leon Tabak

Cornell College

Handout for talk on Norbert Wiener

“Our papers have been making a great deal of American ‘know-how’ ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than ‘know-how’ and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”

I wish to share with you a bit of the history of computing. I have chosen as my subject Norbert Wiener because of the magnitude, significance, and durability of his achievements but also because he wrote prolifically, with skill and great passion, about himself, his scientific work, and the responsibilities of a scientist in a democratic society. The books he wrote remain widely available. He directed much of what he wrote to non-technical audiences.

If I succeed in stirring within you an interest in Norbert Wiener, you shall have no difficulty in learning more on your own.

His life intersected the lives of many this century's greatest scientists: G.D. Birkhoff, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Max Born, Vannevar Bush, Richard Courant, G.H. Hardy, David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Edward Landau, J.E. Littlewood, Marston Morse, Bertrand Russell, Claude Shannon, Oswald Veblen, John Von Neumann, Warren Weaver. These names may not yet be familiar to you, but you will surely encounter them as you continue your studies in mathematics, physics, philosophy, anthropology, electrical engineering, et cetera.

Norbert Wiener passed through several of the institutions that figured most prominently in the history of twentieth century science: Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the universities at Cambridge and Göttingen, and the U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground.

He worked on some of the most important problems of his age: helping to secure the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics and articulating an early perspective on the prospects of automation and artificial intelligence.

Read and learn a little about the life of Norbert Wiener. Then follow a path outward into the lives of his teachers, students, and collaborators. Begin to make yourself familiar with some of his science, then focus on a part that most intrigues you. Weigh in your own mind some of the moral questions Norbert Wiener raised fifty years ago; judge for yourself the accuracy of the predications he made. Pick any point in the story I am going to tell you, launch yourself in any direction from that point-you will find a fascinating avenue for research.

You have heard that necessity is the mother of invention. You may not have thought so much about how the uses of an invention change over time. The uses that make computers seem most necessary to us today are not the uses that motivated the computer's inventors. A recollection of the original necessities and of the practical and moral dilemmas that inventors encountered when they first used their machines to solve those problems may help us better understand the current and future potential of computing.

“No, the future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

In 1925, Vannevar Bush conceived of a mechanical aid for the solution of differential equations. He began construction of the first machine, which he first called a ‘Product Integraph’ and in later versions a ‘Differential Analyzer,’ two years later in 1927. Seventy years before our own day, in the year that Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean, a decade before Alan Turing developed his theory of computation, two decades before Presper Eckert and John Mauchly turned on the ENIAC computer, and a half century before the Apple II computer, Bush was experimenting with a machine reporters dubbed a ‘mechanical brain.’

You will not likely find any mention of Vannevar Bush, or the Differential Analyzer, or Bush's colleague Norbert Wiener in your computer science textbook, although each was once known to the nation.

Vannevar Bush, a professor of electrical engineering at M.I.T., later became a dean at M.I.T., and then the Director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during the Second World War. He refined and improved the design of the Differential Analyzer over the course of more than a dozen years.

He recognized that the greater potential of computers lay not in solving problems of calculus, but in the compact storage and easy, rapid retrieval of information of all kinds: text, images, voice, numerical data, and so on. Near the end of the war he outlined his ideas for a non-technical audience. The outline included a description of what we now call hypertext and routinely use to navigate through the World Wide Web. His article, entitled ‘As We May Think,’ appeared in The Atlantic Monthly magazine a few weeks before the end of hostilities in the summer of 1945.

That same month he dispatched to President Truman a report which President Roosevelt had requested prior to his death. In that report, he summarized lessons learned from the experience of managing war-related research. Under the headline ‘Science, The Endless Frontier,’ Bush proposed the creation of the National Science Foundation and a whole program of public support for scientific research and education in peacetime. The President and Congress, persuaded by his arguments, adopted his proposals.

Vannevar Bush's great legacy is the contract he helped broker between government and science. He justified a vastly expanded public investment in research by promising great returns in which all people might share. He forged a partnership between public and private agencies. It sustained the nation through fifty subsequent years of economic growth and cold war.

The U.S. Army took an early interest in Bush's computer (in 1932). Wheels, changeable gears and couplings, movable shafts, and torque amplifiers served to add, multiply, and integrate functions. In the early models, reprogramming required the manual reconfiguration of mechanical connections. Later models substituted electrical connections that allowed faster set-up for new problems. The Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground and the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania acquired a Differential Analyzer. Mathematicians there used it to compute gun elevations as functions of distance to the target and type of projectile for the Army's artillerymen. Engineers at the same two institutions designed and built ENIAC during the war, intending to use it for the same purpose as the Differential Analyzer. When completed in the immediate aftermath of the war, ENIAC and other digital machines displaced Bush's analog computer.

Work at the Aberdeen Proving Ground during the First World War had constituted a kind of apprenticeship in applied mathematics for Norbert Wiener. Through that work, he met the leaders of the small community of mathematicians then working in the United States. These included, for example, Oswald Veblen and Marston Morse. The war ended in November of 1918; in 1919, Wiener joined the faculty of mathematics at M.I.T. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had just moved from the Boston side of the Charles River into newly constructed buildings on the Cambridge side. Wiener had no graduate degree in mathematics. He was twenty-five years old. Mathematics existed at M.I.T. primarily as a service to engineers. Teaching had priority over research. The Institute took a chance in hiring Norbert Wiener and won hugely on the gamble. He rapidly climbed to the top of his profession, even as the ambitions and reputation of his university also grew.

Wiener established his own reputation by constructing a mathematical theory of Brownian motion. Bertrand Russell had personally placed Albert Einstein's papers into Wiener's hands and emphasized their importance. Brownian motion had fascinated and puzzled scientists throughout the nineteenth century, ever since botanist Robert Brown had noted the strange jiggling of pollen suspended in water. Einstein connected the amount of motion to the size and thermal energy of atoms in the medium surrounding the jostled particles. Einstein's arguments helped establish the atomic theory. To do so, he had to consider only the magnitudes of the particles' displacements. Wiener concerned himself not just with distances, but with the nature of the trajectories that carried particles from one place to another.

The trajectories appeared to be all twists and turns; the curves that described the particles' motions appeared to be all corners. Particles, recoiling from collisions with the atoms of the liquid or gas in which they were suspended, seemed to dart about randomly. The enormous number of atoms in any macroscopic sample precluded any effort to apply Newton's laws to all pairs of particles.

On the other hand, the outcome of a single collision might be described in terms of a probability and the aggregate behavior of many particles by a statistical distribution. Wiener found a way to usefully describe an ensemble of trajectories statistically. To sum the chaotic paths of the particles and compute their averages, he needed a more general theory of integration; serendipitously, the French mathematicians Borel and Lebesgue had recently developed such a theory. Wiener had inherited books that described the mathematical tools they had created and which he then needed from his sister's financé, who had died in the war. He pioneered their application to physical problems.

Norbert Wiener returned to the service of his country when war broke out again twenty years later. This time, he took up the problem of fire control rather than ballistics. That is, he shifted his attention from stationary targets to moving targets. Aircraft had gained great speed between the wars; their greater velocities had compounded the difficulty of shooting them down. The destructive power of their armaments had also grown; the magnified threat underscored the urgency of learning to shoot accurately at darting, turning targets.

Fire control is a real-time computational problem; ballistics is a batch problem. At the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Wiener and his colleagues could compute the right elevation needed to strike a target at a given distance years before anyone fired the gun at an enemy. In the ballistics problem, individual computations did not so much challenge the mathematicians as the sheer number of computations needed to fill tables with separate entries for every type of gun, shell, and range to target. A solution to the fire control problem, by contrast, requires a rapid categorization of the problem and a computation of elevation and bearing before the target disappears from view (or kills the defender).

Radar provides input to the antiaircraft gun's fire control computer. The computer's outputs feed into motors that steer the gun. Wiener recognized the challenge of finding the right place for the human being in a system that had to respond faster than human reflexes. Wiener analyzed feedback, studied defeating oscillations, and recognized the importance of properly coupling sensors to actuators. He framed the problem of fire control as one of control and communication.

Wiener went on to investigate how the body regulates the heart's beating, to design prosthetic limbs, and to model nerve actions with mathematics and electronics. Common themes emerged from these diverse projects. They motivated him to propose a new, unified field of study. Cybernetics encompassed the study of control and communication, perception and manipulation, computation in machines and living organisms.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush the National Medal of Science. Also present on the White House lawn for the ceremony was Jerome Wiesner, then Johnson's science advisor, once Wiener's student and collaborator, later to become president of M.I.T.

Norbert Wiener died a few months later. He was by then an icon of M.I.T., a picture of the absent-minded professor, an instrument and a representative of M.I.T.'s transformation into a great center of research. In the course of my preparation for this talk, I found a page of anecdotes about Wiener on the World Wide Web-in German. It is clear to me that there are many people other than myself who know Norbert Wiener only through his writings and yet feel some affection for his person. We draw inspiration from the example of his life, to achieve and to do what is right.

“There was much trial and I went up many false alleyways in going through the maze of life. Yet I doubt that a more single-purposed and unmistaking career would have been better for me in the long run. I do not think that a scientist is at his best until he has learned to draw success from confusion and failure and to improvise new and effective ideas on the basis of procedures which he has begun fortuitously and without purpose. The man who is always right has not learned the great virtue of failure. Intellectual achievement involves a calculated risk and in many cases even an uncalculated risk; but one thing is sure: where nothing is ventured, nothing is gained.”

Norbert Wiener emphasized the necessity of purpose and the unavoidability of chance. He recognized life where there was progress in spite of error. Machines might one day acquire the same kind of intelligence, he believed. He dreamed of machines able to learn, cooperate, and reproduce.

Norbert Wiener lived his life in a world smaller than our own and in a more romantic time. Fewer mathematicians populated the world then. (The number of mathematics PhDs in the United States in the few decades that immediately preceded the Second World War was of the same order of magnitude as the number graduated annually today.) There were fewer centers of research. (The weekly colloquium at Harvard University was the only colloquium for mathematicians in the Boston area in those days. It drew participants from as far away as Brown University.) A bright and ambitious student could hope to make himself known to all of the leaders in a scientific field and to visit a significant fraction of the great institutions at which they made their homes. Norbert Wiener did this in his late teens and early twenties.

Wind on the sails supplemented the power of the steam engine on the ship that carried the newly graduated Ph.D. across the Atlantic Ocean in 1915. Costumed immigrants crowded the hold on the return voyage. In those days, a traveler utilizing second class tickets on steamships and railroads might spend two weeks making his way between home in America and a university in Europe. In Cambridge, England or Göttingen, Germany, an abundance of rooming houses and coffee houses made visits affordable to students and junior professors. The prevalent style of traveling and living also bred a kind of intimacy among scholars.

No single discipline was large enough to contain all of his interests or talents. He chose not one but several scientific professions. He won the highest prize of the American Mathematical Society while also contributing significantly to the development of electrical engineering, quantum mechanics, and our modern understanding of the responsibilities that must go with a scientific profession.

His enthusiasm, stirred by discussions with medical attendants during his recuperation from a fall, spurred the development of an improved prosthetic arm. He joined Mexican cardiologist Arturo Rosenblueth in studies of the rhythms of the human heart. With the electrical engineer and future MIT president Jerome Wiesner, he developed a glove for deaf persons that sensed vibrations. That work, undertaken in the years that immediately followed the Second World War, anticipated the invention by others in our own time of data gloves that enable people to manipulate virtual objects in virtual worlds, and machines that read to the blind.

A student and collaborator of the most famous mathematicians of the first half of the twentieth century, he retained early interests in biology and philosophy. In the later phases of his career, he recruited physiologists, sociologists, and historians to his program of research. He saw everything in a broad context. He anticipated technical advances and their social consequences. He worked purposefully.

The Department of Mathematics at MIT invited him to join its faculty though he had no graduate degree in mathematics (and would never earn one), had failed miserably in his first attempts to teach, and had published nothing in the mathematical literature. He was twenty-four years old. By age thirty, he had climbed to the top ranks of the mathematical profession. Two years before his fortieth birthday, the American Mathematical Society awarded him its Bôcher Prize. As it happened, he shared the prize that year with Colby College alumnus Marston Morse. John von Neumann, his peer and sometime antagonist, won the prize five years later. (The AMS awards the prize only every five years.)

A person with sufficient creativity and insight could in those days redirect a scientific field from the outside. Einstein needed no institutional support to explain Brownian motion, the quantum nature of light, and relativity. Oliver Heaviside never obtained an academic appointment but had recast Maxwellís equations in vector form and made a science of telegraphy. Two Ohio bicycle mechanics had just invented aviation. Norbert Wienerís own father had come to the United States as an immigrant from Russian and begun life in this country as a laborer, then risen to establish himself as a professor of languages at Harvard University without ever earning a college degree.

George Birkhoff sat in on the first course he taught. While a generation of students learned analysis from G.H. Hardyís book, Norbert Wiener learned analysis from G.H. Hardy. Bertrand Russell personally put Einsteinís and Bohrís papers into his hands and emphasized their importance. At the invitation of Oswald Veblen, he joined the mathematical research group at the Aberdeen Proving Ground during the First World War. He visited Felix Klein, Edmund Landau, and J.E. Littlewood. Among the teachers who later wrote letters of recommendation for him were David Hilbert and Richard Courant. He co-authored an early article with Max Born. He collaborated with Vannevar Bush and John von Neumann.

“Knowledge is inextricably intertwined with communication, power with control, and the evaluation of human purposes with ethics and the whole normative side of religion.”

Near-sightedness, physical clumsiness, and a slowness to acquire social skills set him apart from others. Identification with handicapped persons strengthened his sense of compassion The act of writing a two volume autobiography helped him understand how his personal history and self-perceptions affected the development of his professional interests and skills. His writing reveals a sensitive personality. A capacity for introspection, an inclination to feel lasting injury from small slights, and a great magnanimity of spirit defined his sensitivity.

A strong capacity to endure coexisted with his sensitivity. In his judgment, the intellect could not prosper without an accompanying moral strength. Abruptly, completely, and permanently he terminated professional relationships that had endured for years when he detected a snub. Yet he could also praise talented teachers who had publicly dismissed the quality of his work and love a father who had harshly berated the son for small mistakes while claiming credit for the son's great successes.

A short stout man, no aspect of his physical appearance suggested athleticism. Yet he loved to wander among the mountains. Indeed, even in the city, he could not think without walking. He explored the wilderness peaks of New Hampshireís White Mountains. On Sunday mornings, he rambled through his suburban Belmont, Massachusetts neighborhood. Often he arose spontaneously during work days to wander about the long maze of hallways at MIT. Always on his walks he sought out people with whom he could share his ideas.

No rank intimidated him nor did he condescend to those who occupied lower stations. Unannounced, he invaded the offices and homes of colleagues. He spoke Chinese to waiters in restaurants and classical Greek to the bewildered local grocer. He kept up with grade school classmates even in late middle age. From farmers he encountered on his rural hikes, he stopped to ask for a glass of milk. His friend Julius Stratton, president of MIT, could not bar Professor Wiener from his office. The secretary could not hold him in the waiting room. Eager to share his ideas, he charged right past the presidentís secretary. His eagerness, enthusiasm, and need for company endeared him to many. Others hid in bathrooms when alerted to his approach. His disregard of convention, the unbounded range of his ideas, and his mix of well-formed ideas with speculation disrupted the work of the day more than they were willing to allow. As well, the forever insecure Professor Wiener wore down some of his colleagues by insisting at every encounter that they reassure him of his own goodness and worth.

On a larger scale too he felt an urge to wander. He spent one year teaching in China and another in India and several semesters in Mexico. Fellowships and visiting appointments took him to Cambridge, Paris, Naples, and Holland. He was open to the whole world.

“We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us only until we begin to decay more quickly than we can reconstitute ourselves. Then we die. If our bodily temperature rises or sinks one degree from its normal level of 98.6⁰ Fahrenheit, we begin to take notice of it, and if it rises or sinks ten degrees, we are all but sure to die. The oxygen and carbon dioxide and salt in our blood, the hormones flowing from our ductless glands, are all regulated by mechanisms which tend to resist any untoward changes in their levels. These mechanisms constitute what is known as homeostasis, and are negative feedback mechanisms of a type that we may find exemplified in mechanical automata.”

“It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day in our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

Two of his students became presidents of MIT. He saw his profession and the institutions he served change profoundly over the course of his career. In many ways, he shaped those changes. American science and mathematics matured in those years. Centers of research moved from Europe to America. His own department, which had previously concerned itself almost exclusively with the training of engineers, acquired a research mission. The federal government began to fund scientific research on a large scale. Universities in turn accepted a responsibility to direct research that might contribute to the strengthening of the nation's defenses.

He helped to professionalize science and to give scientists a public role. Yet he resisted the biggest change to American science when it came in the wake of the Second World War. He had accepted war-related duties during both world wars. Then Americaís development and use of nuclear weapons and a growing competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to deploy increasing numbers of more destructive bombs changed his attitude. He refused to accept funding for his research if it originated in military agencies. He refused to share fruits of his research with people he thought might apply the knowledge to military ends.

“I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood. What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”

The challenge of shooting down an airplane with a gun guided some of his early thinking about automation. A projectile will not hit an airplane if the gunís barrel is pointed directly at the airplane. Nor is it enough that the artilleryman account for the effects of gravity, wind, and aerodynamic drag on the shellís trajectory. Success requires taking aim at a future position of the aircraft rather than its current position. Furthermore, the airplaneís speed relative to the speed of the projectile and the distance between the gun on the ground and the airplane in the air gives the pilot time and space in which to maneuver. A simple linear extrapolation of the targetís current velocity may not accurately predict its future position.

A fire control computer makes predications based upon a knowledge of past events. It learns from observation. It computes bearing, elevation, and the time to fire the gun from inputs that are incomplete and uncertain. Wiener made all of these characteristics essential parts of the kind of automata he envisioned. The capacity to learn, predict, and control in the face of error and confusion makes the machine a useful partner to its human operator.

The fire control computer must directly control the physical mechanisms of the gun. The problem demands a fast solution. It allows no time for a human operator to receive, interpret, and act upon the computer's directions.

The word cybernetics means ‘steersman.’ It therefore implies both control and direction.

Wiener understood the advantages of encoding information in digital rather than analog form, computing with binary rather than decimal arithmetic, and equipping the computer with a means to store discrete, replaceable data and instructions. These pragmatic details however did not in his mind establish the computer's nature.

He chose not to focus on formal models that emphasize rules for manipulating symbols. He remained fixed in a continuous domain. The necessity of compromise in every engineering design did not narrow his conceptions of what computing machines might become.

He entered mathematics through logic and wound up in analysis. A later generation of computer scientists would follow the road in the opposite direction, beginning near analysis and working their ways out toward logic. Edsger Dijkstra and Donald Knuth stand out among those who, in a generation that followed Wiener's, studied physics first before focusing upon discrete mathematics.

“Thus chance has been admitted, not merely as a mathematical tool for physics, but as part of its warp and weft.”

“Gibbs' introduction of probability into physics occurred well before there was an adequate theory of the sort of probability he needed. But for all of these gaps it is, I am convinced, Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics.”

“This book is devoted to the impact of the Gibbsian point of view on modern life, both through the substantive changes it has made in working science, and through the changes it has made indirectly in our attitude to life in general.”

The development of quantum mechanics in the first decades of the twentieth century led to the invention of semiconductor devices that made possible computers in mid-century. But it was Willard Gibb's efforts to explain the gross properties of matter in terms of random motions of constituent particles that provided a foundation not only for atomic theory but also for information theory.

Entropy is the most important fact of the universe. Its increase is the greatest challenge. Information is its opposite. Computation and communication can produce islands of order in a chaotic universe.

At a 1952 conference, Wiener's assistant Julian Bigelow insisted that no one could know what kind of mathematics would prove most useful in the study of cybernetics. Wiener concerned himself with the probable utility of computers and principles for the responsible use of computers. He concerned himself much less with details of engineering design. He did not see a need to limit the study to one formal model of computing. He emphasized instead the most general transformations of signals in machines that connected to the physical world. Feedback, self-regulation, and a capacity to learn characterized the models that most interested him.

“Information is more a matter of process than of storage. That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on itthe country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it. In other words, no amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing. There is no Maginot Line of the brain.”

He predicted the mass production of affordable computers for use in businesses of all sizes. He marveled at the reliability and low cost of vacuum tubes, but in all of his optimism could not foresee how far and quickly industry would reduce the cost and size of computers, nor could he know how ubiquitous computers would become.

Communication is the most important thing computers do. So says Robert Metcalf, who invented the Ethernet data communications protocol and founded the 3Comm corporation. But Norbert Wiener said it first and best. Of course, very few people use the extraordinary computational power they can now afford to simulate the diffusion of neutrons and only a few more try to break enemy codes. The great competition within the computer industry today is to provide consumers with better means to connect to information resources.

Norbert Wiener recognized the great temptation to transfer to others, even to machines, responsibility. He recognized the moral hazard of that temptation. The number of choices available to each of us will grow as time passes. In the future, the danger will come from multiple directions. Progress will force upon the human race a need to make more decisions, and to make them more wisely.

‘Every tool has a genealogy,’ he said, reminding us that in the study of the past we may hope to find some increased understanding of the essential nature of computers from which we might derive guidelines for their safe, ethical, and effective use.

“I have chosen for the work of my later years the study of communication and communication apparatus. This is a subject with linguistic and philological sides which I have learned from my father, with engineering techniques to which I received my apprenticeship in the General Electric laboratories and at the computing table at Aberdeen Proving Ground, with mathematical techniques stemming from my days at Cambridge and Göttingen, and with the compelling need for a competent vehicle of literary expression which has proceeded from my work on the Encyclopedia and the Boston Herald. My routine task of assisting a Japanese professor has borne fruit in my teaching in the Orient and my contact with Oriental scholars. Even my exile at the University of Maine, which was a chastisement for me, has proved in the long run to be a salutary chastisement and a true discipline for a man who was to make his living as a teacher and who had the necessity of making his mistakes early when they were of no great seriousness.”