Page 37 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

A NEW SCIENCE 17

project, which became known as the Boston Arm, was sponsored
by MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard Medical
School, and Liberty Mutual Insurance Company.
When the prototype arm was completed, it was attached to
a volunteer amputee. As Bose recalled in Flo Conway and Jim
Siegelman’s biography of Norbert Wiener:

We attached the arm—I can remember the reaction very clearly—the
man was sitting down and the arm came up and he said, “My god, It’s
chasing me!” But in ten minutes time he was able to wear it beautifully.

Facing the Social Consequences

Although the technological potential of cybernetics was exciting,
during and after World War II, Wiener became increasingly con-
cerned—even depressed—about what he saw as possible negative
consequences of the new science.
Wiener’s greatest concern about cybernetics was how a revolution
in automation might affect society. In a 1946 conference at the New
York Academy of Sciences, Wiener predicted that the computer will
become the “central nervous system in future automatic-control
machines.” He also saw the eventual “coupling of human beings
into a larger communication system.”
But what would this mean for the world’s economic or social life?
Wiener noted that

[Cybernetics] gives the human race a new and most effective col-
lection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical
labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although
unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects
of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of
competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor,
and is essentially slave labor.

Wiener’s remarks foresaw what would half a century later become a
growing unease with the prospects of economic globalism—although
the latter is focused more on the threat of cheap human labor.