The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence: How Norbert Wiener Developed the Concept of Cybernetics

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of our lives, influencing everything from our online shopping habits to our healthcare diagnoses. However, as AI continues to evolve and become more sophisticated, it raises profound ethical concerns. These concerns revolve around the potential for AI systems to embed biases, contribute to climate degradation, threaten human rights, and more.

Norbert Wiener and the Birth of Cybernetics

Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician born on November 26, 1894, is often credited as the father of cybernetics. He defined cybernetics as “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine”. This concept laid the foundation for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, which studies the control of information flow in systems with feedback loops. These systems could be biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social.

Wiener’s work on cybernetics began during World War II when he worked on the problem of aiming gunfire at a moving target. The ideas that evolved from this work led to his co-discovery, along with Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, of the theory on the prediction of stationary time series.