Norbert Wiener Saw This Coming

Who? One of the fathers of AI spoke to us from the 1940s and 50s

I’m in the midst of finishing a new manuscript (book) about AI and UAP. It will be published in late 2025 (let’s hope). I’ve been immersed in the history of AI. This has been very interesting. This is one of a series of short essays in which I describe what I’ve learned. This one is about the genius, Norbert Wiener.

Wiener was a mathematician, philosopher, and prophetic voice, who worked and published mainly in the 1940s through the early 1960s. Long before Silicon Valley made “AI” a household term, Norbert Wiener was already warning us about the future we now inhabit. In the 1940s, Wiener—the founder of cybernetics—created mechanized feedback loops that became the architecture of proto-AI. Because his work was so effective and revolutionary, it was militarized. When he caught a glimpse of how this new technology was/could be weaponized, he was horrified. In looking through his bibliography I noted that he wrote about engineering and aviation, and then after the weaponization of his research, he began to write about morality and ethics. That was a big change. I had to learn more…

Why He Walked Away from the Military

Wiener’s warnings carry weight because he was one of the architects of the computational age, but, like many of the most successful architects of AI, he had a background in the humanities. He was a philosopher, too, having earned a philosophy degree from Harvard at age 18. (!!) Incidentally, he was homeschooled. His pioneering work in mathematics and feedback systems helped shape early radar, ballistics, and information theory. But after seeing his research used to advance military technologies—especially following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—Wiener made a public break with military science and went back to his humanities roots.

In 1947, he refused military contracts and called on other scientists to do the same. He believed that knowledge used without ethical restraint would lead not to human flourishing, but to dehumanization and destruction.

The Human Use of Human Beings

Around 1950 Wiener wrote, The Human Use of Human Beings. This was a shift in his writing, as he had been writing for technical audiences, and now he wanted to reach the general public. He warned that automation without ethical responsibility would not liberate humanity, but trap it:

"The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves."

Wiener foresaw that the real danger was not technological unemployment, but the reduction of human beings to replaceable parts in larger systems—whether corporate, governmental, or military.

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."

Cybernetics and the Spiritual Question

Wiener did not frame these as purely technical or social challenges. In his later work, God & Golem, Inc. (1964), he addressed the spiritual dimension of human-machine creation. Comparing technological creation to religious mythologies of divine creation, Wiener pointed out that our attempts to build self-replicating, intelligent systems carry spiritual and ethical stakes:

"The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness."

For Wiener, the belief that technology alone would save us was not strength—it was surrender. What was needed was human courage to face the limits and responsibilities of our own creations.

What He Saw Coming—And What We Face Now

Wiener’s foresight is relevant to us, today. We live in a world of algorithmic surveillance, oxytocin hits initiated by engagement with intimate AI agents and even ChatGPT, and AI-generated content that is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere. My friend Mark Stahlman, the godson of Wiener, describes it as a parasite. Ironically, Wiener was not a doomer (nor is Mark) but believed in the almost salvific capacities of AI. But the danger is real.

Although Wiener would not have used this term, it appears that what he called for is referred to in Buddhism as “right relationship.” Buddhists are encouraged to maintain right relationships with everything, not just other people, but their livelihoods and their creations. It is not up to the machines, it is up to the humans to establish a “right relationship” with this new, young technology.

Wiener’s call to place ethics and human dignity at the center of technological development, made almost 80 years ago, seems like the right thing to do. Some tech creators will do it. Some will not. But we (the users) also have an important role. Once we cede our critical thinking (as opposed to rote thinking) to machines, and allow the most vulnerable among us to establish chemical romances with them (with accompanying oxytocin bonding), we might face some consequences for our ignorance. We’re about to see what happens next regarding this situation.