Strong Men and Strong Machines

Norbert Wiener with his cybernetic insect “Palomilla.”

“The machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do.”
—Norbert Wiener

1.

In his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener, the pioneering information theorist, tells the story of an early misreading of scientific evidence. After the invention of the microscope at the start of the seventeenth century, natural philosophers rushed to examine all kinds of substances with the new device. But one obvious...