Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition

Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537842
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.

Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition

Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262355914
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 353

The Human Use Of Human Beings

Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306803208
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Only a few books stand as landmarks in social and scientific upheaval. Norbert Wiener's classic is one in that small company. Founder of the science of cybernetics—the study of the relationship between computers and the human nervous system—Wiener was widely misunderstood as one who advocated the automation of human life. As this book reveals, his vision was much more complex and interesting. He hoped that machines would release people from relentless and repetitive drudgery in order to achieve more creative pursuits. At the same time he realized the danger of dehumanizing and displacement. His book examines the implications of cybernetics for education, law, language, science, technology, as he anticipates the enormous impact—in effect, a third industrial revolution—that the computer has had on our lives.

Cybernetics Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262730099
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
It appers impossible for anyone seriously interested in our civilization to ignore this book. It is a 'must' book for those in every branch of science . . . in addition, economists, politicians, statesmen, and businessmen cannot afford to overlook cybernetics and its tremendous, even terrifying implications.

Norbert Wiener#A Life in Cybernetics

Author: Norbert Wiener
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262347067
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 527

Book Description
Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography, available for the first time in one volume. Norbert Wiener—A Life in Cybernetics combines for the first time the two volumes of Norbert Wiener's celebrated autobiography. Published at the height of public enthusiasm for cybernetics—when it was taken up by scientists, engineers, science fiction writers, artists, and musicians—Ex-Prodigy (1953) and I Am a Mathematician (1956) received attention from both scholarly and mainstream publications, garnering reviews and publicity in outlets that ranged from the New York Times and New York Post to the Virginia Quarterly Review. Norbert Wiener was a mathematician with extraordinarily broad interests. The son of a Harvard professor of Slavic languages, Wiener was reading Dante and Darwin at seven, graduated from Tufts at fourteen, and received a PhD from Harvard at eighteen. He joined MIT's Department of Mathematics in 1919, where he remained until his death in 1964 at sixty-nine. In Ex-Prodigy, Wiener offers an emotionally raw account of being raised as a child prodigy by an overbearing father. In I Am a Mathematician, Wiener describes his research at MIT and how he established the foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics and the theory of feedback systems. This volume makes available the essence of Wiener's life and thought to a new generation of readers.

Gods and Robots

Author: Adrienne Mayor
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
Traces the story of how ancient cultures envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices and human enhancements, sharing insights into how the mythologies of the past related to and shaped ancient machine innovations.

New Horizons For Second-order Cybernetics

Author: Alexander Riegler
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9813226277
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
In almost 60 articles this book reviews the current state of second-order cybernetics and investigates which new research methods second-order cybernetics can offer to tackle wicked problems in science and in society. The contributions explore its application to both scientific fields (such as mathematics, psychology and consciousness research) and non-scientific ones (such as design theory and theater science). The book uses a pluralistic, multifaceted approach to discuss these applications: Each main article is accompanied by several commentaries and author responses, which together allow the reader to discover further perspectives than in the original article alone. This procedure shows that second-order cybernetics is already on its way to becoming an idea shared by many researchers in a variety of disciplines.

Dark Hero of the Information Age

Author: Flo Conway
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780465013715
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 476

Book Description
Two award-winning journalists reveal the epic story of one of the 20th century's most brilliant figures--the eccentric mathematical genius Norbert Wiener, who founded the revolutionary science of cybernetics and then spent his life warning the world about its dangerous human consequences. photos.

The Allure of Machinic Life

Author: John Johnston
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262101262
Category : Artificial intelligence
Languages : en
Pages : 477

Book Description
An account of the creation of new forms of life and intelligence in cybernetics, artificial life, and artificial intelligence that analyzes both the similarities and the differences among these sciences in actualizing life.The Allure of Machinic Life

Cybernetic Revolutionaries

Author: Eden Medina
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262525968
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
A historical study of Chile's twin experiments with cybernetics and socialism, and what they tell us about the relationship of technology and politics. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities. Technologies, Medina writes, are historical texts; when we read them we are reading history.