Word: wieners
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Nonetheless, it is the closest that man has ever come to transferring his intellectual powers to machines, and its needs and accomplishments are sure to occasion a lot of debate. In a book written shortly before his death, M.I.T.'s Norbert Wiener, the "father of cybernation," said that "the reprobation attaching in former ages to the sin of sorcery attaches now in many minds to the speculations of modern cybernetics. The future offers us little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help...
...history and almost certainly the youngest student to win admission to a U.S. college in nearly a century. Among other U.S. prodigies: William Rainey Harper, first president of the University of Chicago, who was ten when he entered Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, in 1866. The late Norbert Wiener, mathematician and pioneer of the science of cybernetics, was eleven when he entered Tufts College...
...book is both fascinating and frustrating. Despite his announced intent, Wiener treats religion only secondarily--his concern remains principally with the pragmatic problems of a world in which man must coexist with his mechanical creations. Furthermore, although the book is intended for the general reader, many of Wiener's points are so complex that they cannot be understood, even in principle, by anyone lacking a background in advanced mathematics...
...manner similar to the mathematical text which skips twenty intermediate steps of a proof with a perfunctory "It is obvious from the above that ...," Wiener has a tendency to lcap from idea to idea, ignoring the connections between points. The reader often feels as if he is watching a mountaingoat bound from peak to peak--the display is impressive, but often hard to follow...
...same time, Wiener's discussion is so broad-ranging that nearly anyone who picks up the book will find something to interest him. Wiener's examinations of the problems of machines that can learn and reproduce themselves, of "fail-safe" programs, of ethics in the age of automation, is continuously fascinating--and typically controversial...