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Norbert Wiener

1894–1964 · American

Founded the study of control and communication in animals and machines.

Contribution: Named and founded cybernetics — the study of control and communication in animals and machines.
Put feedback loops at the center: sense → compare → correct → sense again.
Warned early that powerful automation would reshape work, war, and society.
Key observations: A thermostat and a nervous system share a pattern: they steer by measuring error.
Communication without control, or control without sensing, fails in living and engineered systems alike.
Ethics belongs beside engineering when machines amplify human action.
Conclusions: Modern AI training (adjust weights when you are wrong) is a feedback story Wiener would recognize.
Ask of any AI system: what does it sense, what does it compare to, and who sets the target?
Technical power without social foresight was already a cybernetics warning.

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