Page 38 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

18 Modern Robotics

Wiener did not see any way that the new technology could be
undone or its development delayed significantly. As he warned in the
introduction to Cybernetics:

We can only hand [cybernetics] over into the world that exists about
us, and this is the world of Belsen and Hiroshima. We do not even
have the choice of suppressing these new technical developments.
They belong to the age. . . . The best we can do is to see that a large
public understands the trend and the bearing of the present work, and
to confine our personal efforts to those fields . . . most remote from
war and exploitation.

Wiener retired from MIT in 1960. In 1964, he received the
prestigious National Medal of Technology from President Lyndon
Johnson. Wiener died on March 18, 1964, after collapsing suddenly
while visiting Stockholm, Sweden.
By the time Wiener’s productive career was ending, the first
industrial robots were beginning to work on automobile assem-
bly lines. Their more agile cousins would soon be scurrying
along the corridors at MIT and other research institutions.
Norbert Wiener had created a new conceptual framework for
understanding such machines as well as the human brain and
nervous system. He also left as a legacy a warning that the new
machines would challenge people to treat each other as more,
not less, human.

Chronology

1894 Norbert Wiener born November 26 in Columbia, Missouri

1901 Wiener enters elementary school and is placed with much older
students. Dissatisfied, his father starts to educate him at home

1905 Wiener graduates from high school at the age of 11
1906 Wiener is enrolled at Tufts College, where he is hailed as the
youngest university student in the nation’s history