AI before AI: The legacy of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics (3/3)

The story of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence almost always features British mathematician Alan Turing and his computing machine. John von Neumann is often presented as the mastermind behind programmable computers. Names from the Dartmouth group – such as John McCarthy or Marvin Minsky – are also sometimes cited as the “inventors” of artificial intelligence. However, another figure is often overlooked or relegated to the category of second-rate pioneers: Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics in the 1940s. ChatGPT, Claude and the like can be regarded as the offspring of his ideas. But whether Wiener, with his moral, political and scientific convictions, would acknowledge the authorship of these modern large language models is uncertain. A young prodigy Wiener was born on November 26, 1894, in Columbia, Missouri, into a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Leo Wiener – a highly strict professor of Slavic languages of Lithuanian origin – would “behave somewhat like Pygmalion and attempt to mould his son in his own image", said Pierre Cassou-Noguès, a philosopher at Paris 8 University and author of a fictionalised account of the mathe...