Norbert Wiener, pioneer of cybernetics and technology ethics, gives a prophetic warning about technology and ethics.
Simone de Beauvoir, in the middle 20th century, wrote: \”Intelligence implies goodwill.\” As we’ve entered a new age of technology that is not always in line with our values and has risen to our consciousness, the question of goodwill seems to have faded from the discussion around artificial intelligence.
Norbert Wiener, a visionary mathematician and philosopher who pioneered the field of cybernetics and the Internet, addressed these questions in 1954 in The Human Use of Human Beings. His ideas influenced digital pioneers that shaped the present-day technological world. They have been recently rediscovered by new thinkers looking to bring back the moral dimension in the discussion about artificial intelligence and technology’s future.
After a decade of The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener developed these ideas through a series of Yale lectures and a philosophy workshop at Royaumont Abbey, near Paris, that he reworked to create the prophetic short book God & Golem, Inc. In the last year of his lifetime, MIT Press published the book, which won him the National Book Award posthumously in the newly created category of Science, Philosophy, and Religion.
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