Professor Wiener is a stormy petrel (he looks more like a stormy puffin) of mathematics and adjacent territory. . . . The great new computers, cried Wiener with mingled alarm and triumph, are . . . harbingers of a whole new science of communication and control, which he promptly named “cybernetics.” The newest machines, Wiener pointed out, already have an extraordinary resemblance to the human brain, both in structure and function. So far, they have no senses or “effectors” (arms and legs), but why shouldn’t they have?
