Word: humanities
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...copying the human brain, says Professor Wiener, man is learning how to build better calculating machines. And the more he learns about calculators, the better he understands the brain. The cyberneticists are like explorers pushing into a new country and finding that nature, by constructing the human brain, pioneered there before them...
When combined in tightly cooperating teams, such mechanisms can run a whole manufacturing process, doing the directing as well as the acting, and leaving almost nothing for human operatives to do. Technologically (if not politically), wholly automatic factories are just around the corner. Squads of engineers are excitedly designing mechanisms for them...
...Ph.D. from Harvard at 18. He speaks many languages; he loves detective stories and belongs to Boston's Sherlock Holmes club, "The Speckled Band." A mathematician by trade, he knows almost as much about physiology as he does about mathematics. It was his interest in the human nervous system that led him into the most extraordinary of his researches...
...early calculators contained gears, scales and measuring devices. The best modern ones are built chiefly of electron tubes which give a simple "yes or no" answer when stimulated by electrical impulses. This is roughly what the neurons (nerve cells) do in the human brain...
Some modern calculators "remember" by means of electrical impulses circulating for long periods around closed circuits. One kind of human memory is believed to depend on a similar system: groups of neurons connected in rings. The memory impulses go round & round and are called upon when needed. Some calculators use "scanning" as in television. So does the brain. In place of the beam of electrons which scans a television tube, many physiologists believe, the brain has "alpha waves": electrical surges, ten per second, which question the circulating memories...