Pathfinders; 3; Norbert Weiner

God's number and name is not on this page right now, nothing new yet. You're not on that page because you have enough time. There's this page right here. Okay? Luke, this is your end of the uhh, IBM 7074 computer on the 8th floor of the John Hancock Life Insurance Company in downtown Boston. It's a marvelous machine. The kind of invention Americans find it easy to love. Every day it examines three million insurance policies and keeps thousands of files up today. A routine and painstaking task that used to take hundreds of times longer and even thousands of times longer when it was done by a human being. What's happening at the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company is no isolated incident.

The story is repeated everywhere in this country. Slowly the line that separates what a machine can do from what a man can do is being blurred. And the question arises, what is it that's uniquely human? One answer to that question is found in a book called the Human Use of Human Beans. The man who wrote it used to teach in this classroom at MIT. He was the founder of a new science, a science that recognized and defined certain similarities in the functions of men and machines. But he himself never lost track of the fact that machines and men are not the same. And he saw that there were grave dangers for us unless we could redefine or reestablish the line that separates men from machines. His name was Norbert Weiner. He died on March 18th, 1964. My name is Benjamin Demard, and this is Pathfinders.

Thank you very much. Robert Weiner's activities range widely over all scientific fields. But he was a mathematician first, one of the most respected in the world, an original pioneering researcher of the first rank. The mark of Weiner's breadth was that he managed at the same time to influence both pure and applied mathematics.

And the great mathematicians of the 19th century used to exert that kind of influence. But in our time, Weiner stands almost alone. Genius is a badly overworked word, but for this man, no other word will really do. The rule that genius is more apt to come from conflict and stress than from peace and serenity is born out by the facts of Weiner's early life. He was born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri. In 1897, his father accepted a job teaching languages at Harvard, and Weiner at the age of three was enrolled in the third grade in the Peabody School in Cambridge. After a year, it became obvious that the young Weiner was bored with the drill and repetition of formal schooling. He was withdrawn from the Peabody School, and his father personally took over his education. Leo Weiner was a hard man, educated in the stern German tradition of the 19th century,

subjected his son to the same harsh discipline he'd known. Humiliation, sometimes in public, sometimes in private, was Weiner's lot if he failed to satisfy his father's demands. At the age of eight, Weiner's eyesight began to fail. The doctor told his parents at the board have to give up reading for six months. It was during this period that Weiner became aware of his extraordinary memory. Weiner entered toughs when he was eleven years old, and graduated three years later with a degree in philosophy, but the burden of being a prodigy began to tell on him that he finished college physically and emotionally exhausted. And even so, Weiner had his PhD from Harvard in philosophy at the unprecedented age, in 19. And in the fall of 1919, he became an instructor in the mathematics department of MIT. In 1925, Weiner married one of his father's students, a pretty dark-haired girl named

Margaret Engerman. The first volume of his autobiography bears the following dedication to my wife, under whose gentle tutelage I first knew freedom. Those words express a remarkable intensity of feeling, the frustration of never being able to completely satisfy an over-demanding father, the humiliation and confusion of attending college in short pants, and the pain of discovering that he was an oddity in the eyes of newspaper men, these and other facts of Weiner's early life left scars that could perhaps be said never to have healed. But here in this classroom, and in the larger world of MIT, he found an environment in which his brilliance could really flourish. In 1948, he wrote a book about a new science called Cybernetics.

Two colleagues on the faculty who were associated with this new field, a Dr. Walter Rosenbliffe, professor of communications biophysics, and Dr. Peter Elias, head of the Electrical Engineering Department in afternoon, gentlemen. Suppose I put the hard question to you, Dr. Rosenbliffe, what is Cybernetics? Well, it includes elements of mathematics, of contemporary engineering, and it is all dominated by a desire to understand the functioning of biological and social systems. It's in a sense best expressed in the subtitle of the book that Weiner wrote. It says cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine. This, in simple words, is what dominated the group which had been responsible for trying

out the ideas. If you take one of those terms, take the control. For a layman like myself or a humanist, he mores. What can you do to tell me what control means here? Well, he could be a little philosophically and say, let's go back to the word Cubernetics, which is Greek mint, Steersman, and the philosopher Plato used it in one of his dialogues and didn't mean just the fact that there was a man who steered about. But he referred to the whole art of Steersman's ship, of using information from the environment in order to modify the action that a person is carrying on. It is in this sense that we talk about control. It is perhaps in the sense that this group that Norwood Weiner belonged to in the middle

30s at the Harvard Medical School, which was concerned with so much of the self-regulatory activity of the human body. Walter Cannon and Arturo Rosenbluth, the people who asked the kind of questions, how is it that hunger, thirst, and sleep, and the respiration are being controlled by a nervous system, which obviously gets information from inside the human body and also from the outside. This is over a bunch of clocks. Well, it runs by physiological clocks and not necessarily by physical clocks. But in some sense, it provides us with a most sensitive way of controlling motor activity or controlling other activities on the basis of the information that comes to it minute by minute, second by second. It is in this sense that Norwood Weiner, who had started out as a philosopher and who had

been fleetingly a graduate student in Zoology at Harvard, came back to these early interests of his and says, now, let me try to understand the logical operations that are similar in the animal and the most complex machine we can build today. I see. I think I can follow that. What kinds of people were most influenced by cybernetics, Dr. Elias? Let's say, what kinds of discipline, perhaps, one means by that question? Well, the earliest group before cybernetics was even coined as a word, were the physiologists. During the war, there were many engineers who worked on problems of communications and control, developing automatic gun direction so that a man, citing through a telescope, could direct a large piece of machinery located somewhere else. And Weiner made a major contribution to the theory of control during the war. And cybernetics was actually the fusion of the earlier interest with biological scientists

and his contribution to engineering. It brought in quickly people in psychology, in the study of languages and speech, in the study of society, historians, who were the historian and interest himself. Historians were interested in the same kind of question, looking at society as a whole, as a complex organism, with many channels of communication, with many adjusting and regulatory mechanisms. He was interested in studying influences of communication channels on the evolution of society. Well, the point perhaps that Dr. Lyas raised here was this question of the gun pointer. You see, in some sense, the people at the end of World War II had a phrase saying machines can fight alone. And this phrase, in some sense, indicated that a new kind of coupling, a new kind of interaction between machines and people had to take place.

It was not any more the flexing of the machine's muscle, along that was important. But it was the communication that had to flow between man and machine in order to make the machine really a servant of man to carry out those purposes for which the larger system, including both man and machine, was presumably a program to use this phrase out of contemporary computer engineering. I see, when we talk about the influence of the war period, or rather the use, perhaps, that's a way to put it, the use of certain of these ideas and war equipment, seemed to me that we move really to the question of the ethical implications, or the moral implications even of Wiener's work. And certainly he wasn't oblivious to those implications himself, isn't that right? In no way, in the end of the preface, the first edition of Sabanetics, he says something to the effect that here's a new technology.

This new technology can be used for good and evil in a world in which much is not for human use as a human purpose. So he said, as far as I myself am concerned, I shall rather concern myself with physiology and psychology, then to use one of his colorful phrases, then to work in a computerized steel dungeon. Yes. To speak, to say that you'd work in those fields really is a way of saying that you could teach Sabanetics practically through any existing discipline. Is that right, Dr. Elias? It's what has happened in this country. There was a group here in the research laboratory of electronics where we now are of people from all over the world, and all over this country, and for many academic disciplines, you came to work during the late 40s, early in mid-50s, became interested in these techniques, but translated them to their own fields. The psychologists learned the mathematics they needed, learned the electronic instrumentation they needed, and went back to become psychologists with new tools.

And this by and large has been the history of Sabanetics in this country. I know Wiener was concerned all his life about the philosophical and ethical implications of Sabanetics. Could you say something about that, Dr. Elias, or Dr. Rosenblad? Well, one of the most remarkable things to me about Sabanetics is a book is the fact that in 1948, when it came out, the first digital computers were available, but they were very crude devices and very limited devices. And Wiener saw his way through at that early stage to the stage which people are just beginning to see an evidence now of machines which could perform very complicated tasks and which would raise fundamental questions about what is there left for a man to do. Tomorrow questions, these are essentially, aren't they? Well, tomorrow in the sense that since a machine can now do many things that previously we thought only men could do, there needs to be a new redefinition as to how can men define his own uniqueness in such a way that he can take advantage of these machines as much as of all the machines

that gave him power and energy and gave him the ability to move around. Is it fair to summarize it, if you say that this thinker was in no sense oblivious to the social consequences of his thought, is that a fair statement? Yes, I think that the companion book to this one, the human use of human beings, was perhaps the phrase that characterizes this facet of his personality the best. Thank you very much. The new science of cybernetics had a profound effect on MIT and the world. Dr. James Killian, former president of MIT and currently chairman of the corporation, was in a good position to evaluate this effect and the man who caused it. Dr. Killian, you were a student of Norbert Wieners, and you knew him later as an administrator. What kind of man was he? That may recall a few vignettes that might throw some light on this extraordinary human being. Back in around 1930, there was a detective story writer in this country called SS Bandai,

and that wasn't his real name, but he published a detective story that had a mathematician as a central character, and Dr. Wiener became very much interested because of the scholarly content of these books, and he came around to the technology review and offered to review this detective story, and tried to forecast how it was coming out because it had been published on the installment plan. So he wrote a beautiful and lucid review of praising the mathematics of SS Bandai, which he felt to be very good incidentally, and then wrote this review forecasting the end of the story. His forecast was wrong, and then he wrote a very right conclusion to this, explaining why he had been wrong, but still thinking that the book was quite becoming. Well, this was an example of some of his extracurricular interest. Another kind of vignette that I would recall was that Dr. Wiener used to walk around the holes of the Institute, sometimes looking up at the ceiling. He would spot a student in the corridor, obviously, was from a foreign country. He would be inclined to stop the student, talk with him, find out what country he was from,

talk to him in his own language. You know Dr. Wiener, perhaps had a command of more than a dozen languages, and he delighted in making contact with these students. He also delighted in getting a group to play chess with him, or to sit down and have a general bull session. He was very approachable and very accessible to these students. I gather the students who are appreciative of this dimension of the man. Is that correct, sir? They responded to him with great affection, but perhaps more fundamental with an enormous admiration for the power of his intellect. And I think there's no one that I have seen who had a greater impact on students than he did, even though you would not normally think that a man operating at the intellectual level he did would have the human relationships, which he apparently was able to have with these students. They really loved him, and they respected him enormously. I remember that one of the students writing in a bit your area, Dr. Wiener, said that he was a genius, but a human genius.

And I think they felt that they sensed it, and that's a real attribute. Dr. Kilian, when you try to express to yourself the kind of influence, the kind of impact that Wiener had, not simply here at MIT, not simply on faculty and students, but in the world generally, how do you see that? I would first of all emphasize that Wiener was lived in the world Commonwealth of Science. He broke across all borders, all national lines, while he was loyal and dedicated to American over the less, intellectually he lived anywhere that there was intellectual interest and work going on that was in his domain. And so we found, Dr. Wiener in India or in China or in Japan or in Europe, we found him working with people in those fields. He had a nexus of relationships and activities and maybe in kind of a United Nations and field of mathematics, science and engineering generally. And always presumably with a concern for the implications, the social consequences of

what he was doing. Is that correct? Very deeply. Not only was he making creative contributions to his chosen fields of philosophy, mathematics, engineering, related activities, but he had a very deep conviction that scientists had an obligation to make clear the importance and social implications of the work that they were doing. So he set up quite deliberately and systematically and with great powers of articulation and expression to carry to the people the meaning of cybernetics, the meaning of information theory, the meaning of automation. Thank you very much, sir. The implications of cybernetics for our society will be fully realized for many years to come. But already automation, machines that can do the work of human beings has seriously affected our economy and all our lives. Robert E. Slater, senior vice president and charge of insurance operations at the John

Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, is well acquainted with the special problems that automation composed for business. Mr. Slater, what does it mean to say that the machines in this room are better or more efficient than human beings? Well, as I look at it, machines are used primarily to do the monotonous work, large volumes of monotonous work that individuals do not care to do. Constantly we would say that in this area the machines are more capable than humans. They say that the human being doing boring work might need some peculiar kind of frustration and face-to-face with it. That is correct. The machines do the monotonous work, leaving the more challenging work for the individuals to do. Could you give me an example of where a worker was previously doing something that was less challenging, is now doing something that has more bite and edge to it? Well, we could give you many, many examples in our operation, but let's take for example

an underwriter who would be required to pass on routine applications, people who are in good health. Today, the machines are doing that kind of work, leaving the more challenging risks to be analyzed by the individual. How many people would it take roughly speaking to do the work with these computers and how doing here? Well, that would be a theoretical question to some extent because it is questionable whether or not the John Hancock would be doing the many things that it's doing if it did not have the computers, and also it is questionable whether or not a qualified personnel would be available. However, taking those factors into consideration, I would say that it would take another 10 to 15,000 people in addition to the 5,500 we presently have. Mr. Slater implicit in what you were saying about John Hancock not doing the kinds of things it's now doing if it weren't for the fact that computers are available, implicit

in that is the notion that these machines did not make an unemployment problem when they were instituted here. Have I got that right? Well, that is true, and this is because of the many factors. One of the principal factors is that in the life insurance business, the carcalforce is primarily female health who worked for a few years and then passed on to other occupation such as marriage and motherhood, and we also planned to make sure that any job that was available was filled by a John Hancock person rather than going outside. To a degree, you could say then that the office automation is an easier kind of problem than factory automation because a lot of the people who might conceibly lose their jobs and consequences of computers and offices are people who own the jobs are not absolutely essential to begin with, they're not thinking that long enough. That is correct.

I think office automation is an entirely different problem than factory automation. Mr. Slater, when you're on thinking about automation computers, how do you address the problem of the shorter work week? Do you foresee the coming of a shorter work week as a consequence of the computer? Well, the present work week, as you know, has been an effect since the 1930s. I believe the introduction of computers at the time they were introduced has eliminated a lot of overtime and prevented the work from expanding. I can see in the future, maybe not in the foreseeable future, that if the work week is again shortened, that computers will play a major part in permitting that shortening of the work week. If I've got it right, it'd be fair to say that here at John Hentark, a very peculiar and local unique situation, at least in support of an office automation situation, but certainly in this situation, the computer automation generally has been a blessing.

Very definitely, we would not be able to supply the insuring needs of the public if we did not have computer operations, and it has been a blessing of two offices in general, not just for John Hentark. Thank you very much, Mr. Slater. Well, you're a tiny welcome. The automation story at John Hentark is an encouraging one, but by no stretch of the imagination can it be called representative. For every contented vice president, like Mr. Slater, there are at least ten harassed executives who are faced with automation problems that can't be solved that easily. The plain fact is that automation is bound to lead to the large scale unemployment, or a four-day week. These are the predictable fruits of the long American love affair with gadgets. One more sign of what can happen when a nation falls into the habit of saluting every new machine, every technological advance, as a blessing. The path that Norbert Wiener opened up to us leads straight back to ourselves and MIT.

He showed people how to build bigger and better machines, but more important, he showed people that before building those machines, they must worry about the situations that the machines would create. He was concerned with a problem of leisure time and lack of jobs, but of equal significance to him was the question of unemployment of mine. Was his hope that machines would provide building blocks for the second industrial revolution, and that men at last would be able to stretch their minds, fulfill their destinies as thinking human beings. He wanted us to plan ahead to think, not to abdicate our responsibilities, not to let machines do our ethical thinking for us. We must still make our own decisions, we must decide who we love, we want to employ, and whether or not we want to go to war.

We must, in the old phrase, be masters of our own faith. Shortly before his death, Wiener spoke these words in a public gathering. Man or a machine, are the machines going to put people out of business, or are people so superior to the machines that the machines can then look at trouble? I think this is an entirely false putting of the question. Machine has certain things, which are superior to what we can do, and certain things which are in fail. I don't say there is any absolutely sharp line, but I do say that in general, the machine can be made quicker in its action than, man, it can be made more precise in the sense of repeating its act of exactly more of the man. On the other hand, it is firing failure to man and handing ideas which are still big. If you ask the wrong question from a learning machine, you can count and get it wrong also.

If we are making you a machine for the machine's sake, you might as well advocate it once. E.T., the National Educational Television Network.

E.T., the National Educational Television Network. E.T., the National Educational Television Network.