Today in 1948, Time magazine published “In Man’s Image,” a review of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics.
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… 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…
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 too…
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…
By 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…
…Many times throughout his book Dr. Wiener stops in a cold sweat and looks a few years ahead: "Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb," he says, "it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil . . . The first industrial revolution . . . was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery . . . The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and routine decisions . . . The human being of mediocre attainments or less [will have] nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money to buy."