Word: wieners
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Once in a great while a scientific book is published that sets bells jangling wildly in a dozen different sciences. Such a book is Cybernetics (John Wiley; $3) by Professor Norbert Wiener of M.I.T. It bristles with difficult mathematics; its text is a curious mixture of charm and opacity. But for those who can penetrate it (and thousands are trying), the book is intensely exciting...
...science, says Dr. Wiener, has suddenly appeared. It deals with control mechanisms, and Dr. Wiener has personally named it "cybernetics" from a Greek word meaning "steersman." It is growing like a parasitic fungus, drawing on techniques already developed by other sciences, from mathematics to psychology...
Artificial Brain. Out of such primitive beginnings has grown what Dr. Wiener considers the most startling (and ominous) development in human evolution. Engines and production machines replace human muscles; control mechanisms replace human brains. Even a thermostat thinks, after a fashion. It acts like a man who decides that the room is too cold and puts more coal in the stove...
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...
Last week, Vienna's police said that he had been arrested by Russian soldiers. Wilhelm Habsburg-Lothringen, would-be King of the Ukraine, was resting quietly in Wiener-Neustadt's Soviet internment camp. The Russians, it appeared, were taking no chances even with ghosts...