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TECH PROPHECY AND THE UNDERAPPRECIATED CAUSAL POWER OF
IDEAS
Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker, a Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at
Harvard University, is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual
cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He is the author of eleven books,
including The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and, most recently,
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Artificial intelligence is an existence proof of one of the great ideas in human history:
that the abstract realm of knowledge, reason, and purpose does not consist of an élan vital
or immaterial soul or miraculous powers of neural tissue. Rather, it can be linked to the
physical realm of animals and machines via the concepts of information, computation,
and control. Knowledge can be explained as patterns in matter or energy that stand in
systematic relations with states of the world, with mathematical and logical truths, and
with one another. Reasoning can be explained as transformations of that knowledge by
physical operations that are designed to preserve those relations. Purpose can be
explained as the control of operations to effect changes in the world, guided by
discrepancies between its current state and a goal state. Naturally evolved brains are just
the most familiar systems that achieve intelligence through information, computation, and
control. Humanly designed systems that achieve intelligence vindicate the notion that
information processing is sufficient to explain it—the notion that the late Jerry Fodor
dubbed the computational theory of mind.
The touchstone for this volume, Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human
Beings, celebrated this intellectual accomplishment, of which Wiener himself was a
foundational contributor. A potted history of the mid-20th-century revolution that gave
the world the computational theory of mind might credit Claude Shannon and Warren
Weaver for explaining knowledge and communication in terms of information. It might
credit Alan Turing and John von Neumann for explaining intelligence and reasoning in
terms of computation. And it ought to give Wiener credit for explaining the hitherto
mysterious world of purposes, goals, and teleology in terms of the technical concepts of
feedback, control, and cybernetics (in its original sense of “governing” the operation of a
goal-directed system). “It is my thesis,” he announced, “that the physical functioning of
the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are
precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback”—the
staving off of life-sapping entropy being the ultimate goal of human beings.
Wiener applied the ideas of cybernetics to a third system: society. The laws,
norms, customs, media, forums, and institutions of a complex community could be
considered channels of information propagation and feedback that allow a society to ward
off disorder and pursue certain goals. This is a thread that runs through the book and
which Wiener himself may have seen as its principal contribution. In his explanation of
feedback, he wrote, “This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in
particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just
as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic
responses of society itself.”

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