Norbert Wiener (26 November 1894 – 18 March 1964) was an American mathematician who founded cybernetics as a formal discipline. A child prodigy who earned his PhD from Harvard at eighteen, Wiener made contributions to harmonic analysis, stochastic processes, and information theory before synthesizing his wartime work on anti-aircraft fire control into a general theory of communication and control in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948).
Core ideas
- Feedback and control: the same formal principles — negative feedback, circular causality, error correction — govern the operation of servomechanisms, nervous systems, and social institutions. The steersman adjusting a ship’s rudder and the thermostat adjusting a furnace are instances of the same abstract process.
- Information as the basis of order: Wiener treated information as a fundamental physical quantity, distinct from matter and energy, whose processing, transmission, and degradation (entropy) explain how systems maintain organization.
- The human use of human beings: Wiener was early and vocal about the social implications of automation, arguing in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) that cybernetic machines would transform labor, politics, and social organization — and that without ethical governance, automation would concentrate power and destroy livelihoods.
Notable works
- Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)
- The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (1950)
- Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series (1949)
Related
- Cybernetics — the discipline he founded
- Gregory Bateson — who carried cybernetics into anthropology
- Autopoiesis — a later development of cybernetic ideas
- Anti-work — connects to his concerns about automation and labor