Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Book Review (4/34) Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener the Father of Cybernetics

Now that my qualifying exams are finished I can get back to my education. For the first time in three years I am experiencing guilt free reading and it is a wonderful feeling. Of course I still have my dissertation to worry about and I believe that this book is a nice gentle step in the proper direction.

Norbert Wiener was an American Scientist who found the field of Cybernetics, which is basically the study of complex systems and has a lot in common with control theory. My advisor is a control theory guru and suggested this book as a way to get my feet wet so to speak. I've always admired authors like James Gleick and Richard Feynman who can turn complex subject matter into easily readable material and I'm happy to report Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman do the same with their biography on Wiener.

I think above all else, Conway and Siegelman portray Wiener as a tragic hero, a child prodigy turned into one of the most influential and prominent scientists of his day, who was haunted by self-doubt and had personal and political influences which had negative effects on his career (and in turn the course of scientific history and with that human history). In fact, based on the description of his upbringing by his father and the machinations of his wife to isolate him from his colleagues it's amazing what Wiener was able to accomplish. It is a tragedy that a lie created by his wife led to his ending his collaboration with Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and Jerome Lettvin.

Despite these struggles (and the United States focusing on artificial intelligence concepts more than cybernetics) Wiener contributions to science cannot be overstated. Reading through the book it was amazing how many different fields benefited from his research. He was truly interdisciplinary. And beyond his scientific accomplishments and his estrangement from his daughters, he was a truly ethical and moral man who was more concerned with improving the human condition than chasing the almighty dollar. Wiener constantly spurned the defense industries and corporations after seeing the devastating effects of the atomic bomb and realizing the negative impact automation could cause humanity when motivated by sheer greed.

Wiener also had some great insights, even from an early age. Conway and Siegelman wrote that at ten, he wrote of "the impossibility of man's being certain of anything" and disputed "man's presumption in declaring that his knowledge has no limits". This brilliant insight (which I didn't accept until I was 26 and had to be pointed out to me) came to him at 10 years old. Additionally, the statement that "There is something against the grain in the ... wholesale acceptance of any creed, whether in religion, in science, or in politics. The attitude of the scholar is to reserve the right to change his opinion at any time on the basis of evidence produced" is something that I agree with one hundred percent.

I definitely think that Wiener's scientific approach match nicely with the philosophical views of James and Pirsig, and may indeed be the place I need to stick my shovel in the ground and say, "Here is what I think is happening". This book is an excellent introduction to Wiener and I think that I will start with his books Cybernetics and go from there.

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