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superintelligence.

Whither Wiener
Wiener noted that exponential technological progress is a relatively modern phenomenon and not all of it is good. He regarded atomic weapons and the development of missiles with nuclear warheads as a recipe for the suicide of the human species. He compared the headlong exploitation of the planet’s resources with the Mad Tea Party of Alice in Wonderland: Having laid waste to one local environment, we make progress simply by moving on to lay waste to the next. Wiener’s optimism about the development of computers and neuro-mechanical systems was tempered by his pessimism about their exploitation by authoritarian governments, such as the Soviet Union, and the tendency for democracies, such as the United States, to become more authoritarian themselves in confronting the threat of authoritarianism.

What would Wiener think of the current human use of human beings? He would be amazed by the power of computers and the Internet. He would be happy that the early neural nets in which he played a role have spawned powerful deep-learning systems that exhibit the perceptual ability he demanded of them—although he might not be impressed that one of the most prominent examples of such computerized Gestalt is the ability to recognize photos of kittens on the World Wide Web. Rather than regarding machine intelligence as a threat, I suspect he would regard it as a phenomenon in its own right, different from and co-evolving with our own human intelligence.

Unsurprised by global warming—the Mad Tea Party of our era—Wiener would applaud the exponential improvement in alternative-energy technologies and would apply his cybernetic expertise to developing the intricate set of feedback loops needed to incorporate such technologies into the coming smart electrical grid. Nonetheless, recognizing that the solution to the problem of climate change is at least as much political as it is technological, he would undoubtedly be pessimistic about our chances of solving this civilization-threatening problem in time. Wiener hated hucksters—political hucksters most of all—but he acknowledged that hucksters would always be with us.

It’s easy to forget just how scary Wiener’s world was. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a full-out arms race, building hydrogen bombs mounted on nuclear warheads carried by intercontinental ballistic missiles guided by navigation systems to which Wiener himself—to his dismay—had contributed. I was four years old when Wiener died. In 1964, my nursery school class was practicing duck-and-cover under our desks to prepare for a nuclear attack. Given the human use of human beings in his own day, if he could see our current state, Wiener’s first response would be to be relieved that we are still alive.

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