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communicate their thoughts to one another. The aim is to present a mosaic of views which will help make sense out of this rapidly emerging field.
I asked the essayists to consider:
(a) The Zen-like poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens, which he insisted was “not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations.” It is an exercise in “perspectivism,” consisting of short, separate sections, each of which mentions blackbirds in some way. The poem is about his own imagination; it concerns what he attends to.
(b) The parable of the blind men and an elephant. Like the elephant, AI is too big a topic for any one perspective, never mind the fact that no two people seem to see things the same way.
What do we want the book to do? Stewart Brand has noted that “revisiting pioneer thinking is perpetually useful. And it gives a long perspective that invites thinking in decades and centuries about the subject. All contemporary discussion, is bound to age badly and immediately without the longer perspective.”
Danny Hillis wants people in AI to realize how they’ve been programmed by Wiener’s book. “You’re executing its road map,” he says, and you just don’t realize it.”
Dan Dennett would like to “let Wiener emerge as the ghost at the banquet. Think of it as a source of unsettling ideas to shake uŒp the established mindset.”
Neil Gershenfeld argues that “stealth remedial education for the people running the “Big Five” would be a great output from the book.”
Freeman Dyson, one of the few people alive who knew Wiener, notes that “The Human Use of Human Beings is one of the best books ever written. Wiener got almost everything right. I will be interested to see what your bunch of wizards will do with it.”

The Evolving AI Narrative

Things have changed—and they remain the same. Now AI is everywhere. We have the Internet. We have our smartphones. The founders of the dominant companies—the companies that hold “the whip that lashes us”—have net worths of $65 billion, $90 billion, $130 billion. High-profile individuals such as Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, Martin Rees, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the late Stephen Hawking have issued dire warnings about AI, resulting in the ascendancy of well-funded institutes tasked with promoting “Nice AI.” But will we, as a species, be able to control a fully realized, unsupervised, self-improving AI? Wiener’s warnings and admonitions in The Human Use of Human Beings are now very real, and they need to be looked at anew by researchers at the forefront of the AI revolution. Here is Dyson again:

Wiener became increasingly disenchanted with the “gadget worshipers” whose corporate selfishness brought “motives to automatization that go beyond a legitimate curiosity and are sinful in themselves.” He knew the danger was not machines becoming more like humans but humans being treated like machines. “The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence,” he warned in God & Golem, Inc., published in

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