Word: wieners
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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...
Most remarkable are the computing machines, Professor Wiener's own specialty. They are growing with fearful speed. They started by solving mathematical equations with flash-of-lightning rapidity. Now they are beginning to act like genuine mechanical brains. Dr. Wiener sees no reason why they can't learn from experience, like monstrous and precocious children racing through grammar school. One such mechanical brain, ripe with stored experience, might run a whole industry, replacing not only mechanics and clerks but many of the executives...
...Professor Wiener were an ordinary scientist, narrowly specialized, he might have devoted the bulk of his book to detailed descriptions of control and calculating mechanisms. But the professor is anything but specialized. Short, round, bearded and kindly, he looks like a Quiz Kid grown into a Santa Claus-and that's about what he is. He was graduated from Tufts at 14 and got his 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...
Nature Was There. As men construct better calculating machines, explains Wiener, and as they explore their own brains, the two seem more & more alike. Man, he thinks, is recreating himself, monstrously magnified, in his own image...
Psychotic Calculators. If calculators are like human brains, do they ever go insane? Indeed they do, says Professor Wiener. Certain forms of insanity in the brain are believed to be caused by circulating memories which have got out of hand. Memory impulses (of worry or fear) go round & round, refusing to be suppressed. They invade other neuron circuits and eventually occupy so much nerve tissue that the brain, absorbed in its worry, can think of nothing else...