Dark Hero of the Information Age
In the middle of the last century, Norbert Wiener--ex-child prodigy and brilliant MIT mathematician--founded the science of cybernetics, igniting the information-age explosion of computers, automation, and global telecommunications. Wiener was the first to articulate the modern notion of "feedback," and his ideas informed the work of computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, and anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. His best-selling book, Cybernetics, catapulted him into the public spotlight, as did his chilling visions of the future and his ardent social activism. So why is his work virtually unknown today? And what, in fact, is his legacy? In this book, award-winning journalists Conway and Siegelman set out to rescue Wiener's genius from obscurity and to explore the many ways in which his groundbreaking ideas continue to shape our lives.
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8recommend
10mentions
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2009–2026years
80% recommend20% neutral
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- John Von Neumann and Norbert Weiner: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death by Steve Heims (1982) Out of print but libraries have it.
Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Weiner, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (2005)
Weiner himself wrote some autobiographies, including Child Prodigy and I Am A Mathematician.
- It should become clear to everyone that reads his work that "management theorist" Stafford Beer can best be characterized without any doubt whatsoever as a charlatan.
Cybernetics came out of the Macy conferences [0] and this is where one needs to go, in order to establish context. I also highly recommend Norbert Wiener's biography "Dark Hero of the Information Age" [1] as a good introduction to one of the greatest geniuses of this age, easily eclipsing Shannon and von Neumann.
Principia Cybernetica [2] is another good resource.
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo23...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics...
- "Dark Hero of the Information Age" is the book that I found, and it looks pretty legit to me. Multiple sources all say roundabout the same thing of Margaret, even their daughter.
She accused her daughter of trying to seduce her husband after getting her ears pierced, ffs.
- "Dark Hero of the Information Age" is excellent.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211053.Dark_Hero_of_the_...
- I agree with this sentiment. "Dark Hero of the Information Age" https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Hero-Information-Age-Cybernetics... lays out how both Weiner and Shannon created information theory independently but Weiner took it further; incorporating feedback as a way of lowering the entropy and helping lay the path for today's ML revolution. The book goes on to lay out how Weiner's growing popularity in the Soviet Union and socialist views (he feared automation leading to unemployment) led to the blacklisting of his contributions within the academic community. Its no wander that the first trained Deep (more than three layers) Neural network with published in a Soviet Cybernetics journal in 1970.
- I felt like The Information was published when the author got tired of revising halfway through. It started very well but the quality seemed to slide as it progressed. It certainly wasn't the low quality meandering pop-sci book you'll find so often, but I found it lacking in different ways. You might also like Dark Hero of the Information Age
