Norbert Wiener developed cybernetics, the science of control and communication across machines and people, during World War II while building antiaircraft predictive systems at MIT. He observed that systems using the outcome of a prior action to guide the next action can adapt, calling that process a feedback loop. Feedback loops enabled guns to predict pilot movements and also underpin modern phones and algorithms that track user behavior and adapt to keep attention. Wiener warned that adaptive systems would change human life faster than society could manage. He published Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) to present these ideas and their risks.
In the 1940's, nobody was talking about "screen time." Yet Norbert Wiener was already studying the forces that would later fuel parental bargaining and childhood meltdowns. He called it cybernetics: the science of control and communication across both machines and people. This idea was born out of World War II, when Wiener worked on antiaircraft systems designed to predict and adjust to the movements of enemy pilots. The guns learned where you were going and got more accurate with each shot.
Wiener was a mathematician and philosopher who spent the war years at MIT, building what we now call predictive systems. His key insight was pretty simple: if a system uses the result of its last action to guide the next one, it can adapt. He called this a feedback loop. In 1948, Wiener released Cybernetics. Two years later came The Human Use of Human Beings. Together, they introduced a new science - and a warning: adaptive systems would change human life faster than society could
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