“The Good, The Bad, and the Often Hilarious” – Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman
Jim:
It took us four interviews to break him down, and we just got the pieces from the Wiener children, the daughters-
Flo:
Then we keep bringing [him 00:00:07] back to him and saying, “[Jerry 00:00:08], look at this. Listen to this.”
“No, I never [saw 00:00:12].” Finally, finally, finally he says, “You two are really good investigative journalists.” Because we finally [got 00:00:19]. He said, “Look, this is for posterity and the history of science. You must [duga 00:00:23].”
What we were talking about was the split and the breach with his major colleagues in the cybernetic group. McCulloch, Warren McCulloch, Jerry Lettvin and Walter Pitts, and … Who else was there?
Jim:
Oliver Selfridge.
Flo:
Oliver Selfridge.
Jim:
He was [Crosstalk 00:00:40] Wiesner, Wiener [wrote 00:00:41] from all of them-
Flo:
All of them, [Crosstalk 00:00:43]
Jim:
-in early 1952, and that was the end of their collaboration. For me it was so touching to hear [Rudy’s 00:00:50] presentation yesterday, about [Fuzzy 00:00:52] and [Lofty Zeta 00:00:52]. I’m realizing there’s a man, who had disciples, generations of disciples, who are so committed to his work, and so committed to him personally, and loved this man, and take his work forward, but when that breach occurred in early ’52, and Wiener lost his whole inner circle, there were no disciples.
That’s why there was no second generation of Wiener disciples, or 3rd.
Speaker 3:
[inaudible 00:01:16] questions [inaudible 00:01:16]
Jim:
Please.
Speaker 3:
[What 00:01:18] we saw this other thing that they said, “We all love you,” and so on, and Jerry Wiesner was [Crosstalk 00:01:24]
Flo:
Yes, yes.
Jim:
McCulloch signed that.
Flo:
McCulloch was there.
Jim:
They were people who literally hadn’t spoken to Wiener for over a decade.
Flo:
Yes.
Jim:
That’s [Crosstalk 00:01:33] was hard.
Flo:
The thing that was sad is that they really loved this man. They really, truly loved this man, and they wanted to work with him desperately. When this happened, it, oh my gosh, it broke … Walter Pitts, it broke his heart. Wiener was like the father he never had, Walter Pitts.
Jim:
[Crosstalk 00:01:59] said that Pitts descended into a maelstrom of drugs and alcohol. He died a decade later, but he never, he tore up his doctorate he had been working on, which was on three dimensional networks. They were working on a hybrid analog-digital models, which vanished soon after that. Everything went digital.
Flo:
When he tore up that dissertation, three dimensional nets, can you imagine three dimensional nets of the brain, neuro-system, et cetera, et cetera? That would have put us so far ahead.
Jim:
IBM is only now working on three dimensional chips and seeing all the advantages, the shorter travel times and the heat advantages and all these things. Those are, we speculate in the back of the book, what was lost in the split with the McCulloch group. Of course, nobody can say for sure, but we know Wiener missed his boys, and it was about a decade later, a couple of years before he died, that he thought about reconciling with them.
Speaker 3:
Why do you think it happened?
Jim:
We know what happened because his wife Margaret, who we describe in the book, had her own needs in relation to Wiener’s fame, and the demands. Also he was [at 00:03:11] unstable at times, and she worried about him, and that’s quite rightly, but she also really hated McCulloch and the whole group around him.
Flo:
Warren McCulloch and the group that used to gather at Warren McCulloch’s farm, called Old Lyme. We went up to Old Lyme and we sat down with his daughter [Taffy 00:03:32] McCulloch, before she died. That group up there, they were, let’s see, the epitome of Keruac’s On the Road, only they were scientists.
Jim:
They were the beats of cybernetics is what they were.
Flo:
[Crosstalk 00:03:46] beats of science, and they were, the way they lived, their freewheeling, whatever. Margaret Wiener thought they were sending everybody to hell, and she really disliked them for that. Then she also feared them being around Norbert, because, and this is some of what she did, that they were there to take his work. That they were there to take his place in cybernetics, and take over. That was the kind of thing that she, it’s like as one of the friends said, whispering, putting poison in the king’s ear.
Jim:
When McCulloch and his whole group were going to come from Chicago to MIT, a new neuro-physiology lab under Wiesner, they were all coming, and Margaret Wiener was in a panic. We learned only from all the pieces we brought from person to person over the years, we learned that Norbert and Margaret were down in Mexico with Arturo Rosenblueth and his wife. They were having dinner in a very posh Mexican restaurant one evening, and it had happened that day, Wiener had just gotten a letter from MIT press. This is before [Lily 00:05:05] got there, I’m [sure 00:05:06], in ’52, early ’52?
Speaker 3:
She was there.
Flo:
She was there?
Jim:
It was [afacet 00:05:10], is that his name?
Speaker 3:
Yes, [dean facet 00:05:11].
Jim:
Dean [Facet 00:05:12], wrote a letter to Wiener. He had just read the first volume draft biography, and he wrote back to Wiener. He said, “You’re a very prominent person, your work is so important, I would urge you not to publish this,” for something like at least a decade, or wait ’til much later in your career. Because it was so personal, and Wiener, the first draft had a lot of payback in it, mainly in relation to his father and others.
We heard, Arturo was a witness to that dinner, and Wiener was so down, he went into a plummeting depression. At that moment, at that dinner, Jerry Lettvin told us, he heard this directly from Arturo, Margaret whispers into the king’s ear. She tells him, at that moment, that the McCulloch group and all the young boys, Pitts, Lettvin, Selfridge, and everyone in Chicago, had sexually assaulted their daughter, more than once was the way it happened. Wiener, of course, didn’t say a word, went out. The next day he sent a letter to, I think Killian was president at MIT then, and he sent a long letter, it didn’t even mention the [sit 00:06:20] incident. Just called them irresponsible, and that they were trying to steal cybernetics from him.
As it turned out, Margaret Wiener was the person who was drafting and typing his letters for him.
Flo:
Because his cataract at that point, I mean, all along, his eyes were getting worse and worse, and the cataract was so bad. He would dictate his letters and books, but on his correspondence, in Mexico, Margaret did his correspondence.
Jim:
We brought all this information piece by piece. A piece we got from Barbara in Portland, Maine. A piece we got from [Peggy 00:06:55] in Portland, Oregon. The two sisters got as far away from each other as they could, because this whole thing had been so painful. Barbara had been accused of causing this whole breach and-
Speaker 3:
Several times during the meeting, people have asked, his association and working with other professors and things like that. I said, to my knowledge this didn’t happen. Because I knew many of the other [norded 00:07:20] professors, and I never saw any relationship, but I didn’t understand this background as to why happened.
Jim:
Tragic, and we brought some piece, first to Jerry Lettvin], in the old [radlehad 00:07:31] building 20.
Speaker 3:
Oh, yeah, building 20.
Jim:
After our third or fourth interview, after he kept saying, “I am not going to talk about it! That’s it! I’ll talk about anything else. I swore 40 years ago, I would never talk about this.” Then we brought him one piece, like a diamond. First thing he did is, he picked up the phone and he called his wife, [Maggie 00:07:48], and said, “Maggie, you won’t believe what Flo and Jim have just told me.” Said, “We’re going to have to get together, you have to hear this,” and he hangs it up. Jerry starts shaking his head and saying, “She made it up. I owe Barbara a huge apology,” because, literally, Wiener never spoke to them again.
In the climate of the 50’s, who’s going to talk about an event like that?
Speaker 3:
[Crosstalk 00:08:10] other than what you did?
Jim:
Never.
Speaker 3:
It would never have come out if you hadn’t [Crosstalk 00:08:15]
Flo:
No, because … I guess, we knew that something was rumbling around below, all the time. We said, there’s nothing more to be said here. There’s nothing more to be learned, if we leave things as they are, because it’s all pro forma. This [is 00:08:38], and if you’re a good journalist you know when you hit that, it’s just all a PR sheet. It’s not real, it’s not for real.
We knew we had to get to the bottom of what all this rumbling was about. We started with the sisters, with the daughters. We went and systematically started asking them very specifically, and also telling them, “We have the ability, we want to hear what you have to say, this is not necessarily for print, if you don’t want it.”
Jim:
Yeah, what Jerry and the other said, they swore they would never talk about this, we said, “[you’re 00:09:20] getting older. We’re talking here about the history of science. We need to know what happened. People need to know the real story, and we brought pieces.” There was another couple, Wiener’s psychiatrist friend that, Morris Chafetz and his wife, who we were very close socially with them for years, in Mexico and back in Boston. We interviewed them back in the Watergate hotel in Washington, where his office was. We brought him the same piece, like this. His jaw dropped, he said, “Marion, do you hear what Flo and Jim are saying?”
Flo:
Because for something like 40 years or more, everything had been shaped, all these people, their minds and everything they thought, and all of it, had been shaped-
Jim:
Marion says, she says, “Yes, I do recall Margaret Wiener did not like McCulloch, and she did have nice things to say about Hitler.” You know …
Speaker 3:
When you think about [inaudible 00:10:16] father, that was a horrible father, and a wife that sounds like a horrible wife, it’s somewhat amazing.
Flo:
He was very strong, and there were times where Margaret would something, and just disregarded the girls. One of the [memal 00:10:37] kitty or something, and it was in a driveway. Margaret just ignored it and everything, and Norbert was the one, went out and said, “The cat!” [inaudible 00:10:49] got the cat.
Jim:
[Nathaniel 00:10:50], that’s why what you said this morning about the Norbert Wiener award, how important it is, and everything you laid out about Wiener’s values, and how he is a role model and a hero, and an inspiration to young professionals, and the next generation of IT people, it’s so important. It’s exactly, he must have been incredibly strong that he was carrying all these burdens inside and out his whole life, and he put this stuff on paper.
He took the stand, and as you said, someone said, he was willing to pay the price professionally for the ethical stance he took. I think it will be great if IEEE takes up the tradition of the Norbert Wiener award. I think that would be outstanding, and bring it much more global recognition.
Flo:
You know-
Speaker 3:
I don’t think the Lily issue, [hisinvolvement 00:11:35] saw any of this. He was more childlike and playful. It didn’t stop him, if you will, from trying to participate.
Jim:
She was there in ’52.
Speaker 3:
Oh, yeah, sure [Crosstalk 00:11:48]
Jim:
Because Benoît Mandelbrot [Crosstalk 00:11:49]
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Jim:
Benoît Mandelbrot, who had come from France to do his post doc with Wiener, was at MIT, came just at that moment, he said Wiener was just in a terrible state. He couldn’t talk, I’d walk in there, we’d talk for a few minutes and he’d say, “I’m sorry, I can’t go on.” He’d walk out of the room. He said they would go to the faculty club for lunch, and the people would avoid Wiener because-
Flo:
They would totally avoid him.
Jim:
It was then that Jerry Wiesner took his young doctoral student Amar Bose, and said, “You’re going to work with Wiener.” As Ken Jacobs said, Bose didn’t want to work with Wiener, he had his own projects which have led him on to glory. He said, “You’re going to work with Wiener,” and he did it, but Wiener had the hardest time just getting motivated after that, for years.
Flo:
When we started, the place you have to start with something like this, it’s one thing getting interviews with somebody like Claude Shannon, and whatever. When it comes start establishing the foundation for doing a very legitimate biography, going in to the girls, the people, it was the oldest daughter and her husband, Barbara and Tobey Raisbeck, who had the estate. Everything that was in that estate was, we had to have permissions to do that.
Then we had to go to the youngest daughter in Portland, Maine, for some of the same things. When we called one, said, “If anybody is going to write anything, I’m going to do it.” Bang! I’m calling and the other one says, I said, I did my doctoral work, and whatever. She goes, “Doctoral work?! You sound like you’re 16 years old! You’re not old enough.” Bang!
Jim:
I wouldn’t even try it. Flo’s the one who can soothe the savage beast on the telephone.
Flo:
That was the beginning, and it was like, okay, get the phone …
Jim:
Now that we-
Flo:
Do it again.
Jim:
As I said, when we were preparing our presentation it was like Groundhog Day. [Greg 00:13:56] said 45 minutes, and we wrote it, it was an hour. We would wake up in the morning, cut two pages, read it, it’s still an hour. Wake up the next morning, cut two more pages, it’s still an hour, but we have some outtakes that we want to share with you.
One of them were some of the anecdotes that we know are original. The lunch story, we’ve heard a million versions of.
Speaker 3:
Sure.
Jim:
Ivan Getting, the founder of GPS, was the young student at the time, who swore to us he was the guy.
Flo:
He was the guy.
Jim:
He also swore that he was playing [tin 00:14:26], Wiener came up [Crosstalk 00:14:27] one day and said, “You play tennis?”
Flo:
Of course, Wiener loved, at MIT, he loved to play tennis. He loved to play. He would engage anybody, “You want to have a game of tennis? You want to have a game of tennis?” Okay, so somebody takes up on it.
Jim:
Ivan Getting. [Crosstalk 00:14:43] took him to the tennis court and he said, “We stood there, and people were gathering around. [Crosstalk 00:14:47]-
Flo:
All the students.
Jim:
-hit the ball to Wiener, it would go right by him.” He was so blind he couldn’t see it. 100 strokes, and 100 strokes that he said, and then Wiener comes up to the net, he says, “Why don’t we exchange rackets?”
Flo:
It’s like, there’s some [inaudible 00:15:03] just go, “Oh.”
Jim:
There’s my favorite Wiener anecdote, that we had to cut, because it’s just too good, but it was too long. Benoît Mandelbrot, his uncle, Szolem Mandelbrot worked with Wiener at the Collège de France in the 30’s and 40’s. In ’47 Benoît was still an undergraduate, Wiener came for a big conference at Collège de France. Benoît was assigned the task of meeting Wiener and taking him around and showing him the sites of Paris.
This is the way he described it to us, “I met him at the Gare de Lyon, he cut a very strange figure. I took him to a fine restaurant and the head waiter saw Wiener and his enormous girth, and was sure he was a very prominent gourmet from America. Everybody was waiting to see what he would order. The waiter came and handed him the menu. He looked at it, he couldn’t read because he was so [miopic 00:15:58], and he closed the menu and said, “I’ll have the vegetables.’
The waiter looked at him and said, “Which vegetables?”
He said, “All the vegetables.”
He told the waiter, “[foreign language 00:16:13] Please, make him a selection of your finest vegetables.” They brought him a plate of vegetables, and he was happy, but they were very upset that he did not order some fancy gourmet meal.”
Remember the one with Bose? Bose, Ken Jacobs told the one about Bose and how Bose, and was working with him on non-linear systems, and that whole book, but they wrote it on the board and he erased as he went. After six months he says, [okay 00:16:43], he writes the last sentence, the last equation on the [Crosstalk 00:16:45]
Flo:
[Crosstalk 00:16:45]
Jim:
“That’s it, Bose, write it up!”
“What do you mean write it up? You erased the whole thing!”
Bose also told us stories about Wiener. He said, “You know, they talked about his [Wiener-weg 00:16:54], walks around MIT.” He said, “They weren’t random.” He would single out somebody in Philosophy, somebody in History of Science, somebody in Physics, somebody in-
Flo:
Chemistry.
Jim:
-the [rat 00:17:05] lab. He talk to them for 15 minutes and get the essence of everything that was going on in their field. That was the way he kept up to date. People who thought that maybe Wiener, that whole issue of whether Wiener declined to give credit to people in some of his papers, and it’s mostly those early works by Nyquist and [Heart 00:17:24] and Gordon Brown, and Hendrik Bode, they wanted him to cite them.
It’s quite likely he never read them. When Bigelow said in 1941, we said, “When did Wiener learn about feedback?” He said, “He learned about it from me, not till 1941.” The instant he heard about it, he saw the significance of it, but it’s likely he never read [Black’s 00:17:44] amplifier and feedback papers and things like that.
Flo:
His eyes were so bad, you know? He either dictated or whatever, but his eyes were so bad most of his life.
Speaker 3:
[When 00:17:55] I remember some problem with France, because MIT was concerned that [there’s 00:18:01] somehow, we had to a copyrights and all, and he was giving material out while he was there, and trying to capture it and say, “You can’t do that.” I remember some difficulty [Crosstalk 00:18:11]
Jim:
We heard two versions of it, which was from the French side and from the MIT president.
Speaker 3:
I only know the MIT side.
Jim:
[Crosstalk 00:18:16] it was a prominent publisher in France named Freymann, who had Hermann & Cie, publishing house at 6 Rue de la Sorbonne. He met Wiener through Szolem Mandelbrot, and he said, “Why don’t you write a book about your ideas? This would be a great thing.” He said they didn’t have a contract, they just shook hands and had a cup of coco at a nearby patisserie. Freymann was sure he’d never hear from Wiener again.
Flo:
The French write up of this, we have some of it in Dark Hero. The French journalist who covered this is hilarious, because what it did, it gave the conversation between Wiener and Freymann-
Jim:
Wiener goes back to the U.S. and he spent that summer in Mexico with Arturo, a grant from the Rockefeller foundation. Meanwhile the FBI is chasing him all over the world, they’re trying to find out if he was engaged in anti-American subversive activities.
Flo:
That was hilarious.
Jim:
He’s down in Mexico for the summer and he writes the manuscript. That’s when the mess up happened with the drafts, but the boys, Selfridge and Walter screwed up, and they sent the wrong version back to Paris. Freymann sends it right to the typesetter, he was shocked, he never thought he would even see anything. When [they 00:19:27] was in preparation, we heard MIT press got very concerned, and a little upset, that the way they tell it is, that their prominent professor was going to publish a major work with another publishing house.
Flo:
In Paris.
Jim:
They agreed to share the publishing, so it published simultaneously in the U.S. and in Paris, only in English. In fact, the first translation of Cybernetics into French was just one month ago.
Flo:
Cybernetics, it just came out. We were so delighted, I mean, thrilled beyond belief, when we heard that the French edition of Dark Hero would be coming out. Who was our publisher? Hermann! The same publisher that originally published Cybernetics. We were just thrilled with that, yeah.
Jim:
Now, I … Oh yes, [Vlad 00:20:15]?
Speaker 4:
Can I ask a question? Because you mentioned, everybody mentioned several times the Macy conference. I don’t think, I and many other people here heard much about that. Can you tell a little bit?
Flo:
Really?
Speaker 4:
Yes.
Jim:
Macy conference, it actually began prior to the Macy conferences, during the war when Wiener and Rosenblueth, and when he teamed up with McCulloch, and they started to make these direct, literal connections between feedback in the technical sense, and physiological and neuro-physiological sense. Rosenblueth and Wiener identified that the hunting behavior of the big anti-aircraft guns on the ships, which would be from feedback problems, they compare that to [purpose 00:20:56] tremor in the nervous system, people with Parkinson’s. They realized it was the same kind of a feedback problem, so they had the first conference-
Flo:
In [fuet 00:21:05]
Jim:
-[Crosstalk 00:21:05] called the teleological society.
Flo:
That was in ’42, and this was before a lot of the participants, like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and [lum 00:21:16] were very much there, very much. They were very, very important in this.
Jim:
John Von Neumann was part of this, Howard Aiken from Harvard, the first computer people. Wiener sent a letter to, it was Killian, I think, was he still president then? Or Killian.
Speaker 3:
Compton may have been.
Jim:
Compton might have been. His secretary said, “Norbert Wiener just came in the office, he was very excited, he is definitely on the crest of a wave. He’s talking about this new society and he’s talking about the conference they’re going to have. They don’t want any of this to be used for profit. They don’t want any corporations to come to this conference.” They did hold this conference in Princeton.
Flo:
This was the conference where, just the ideas in everything, I mean it was totally interdisciplinary. It was totally being applied and interconnected into so many areas, into social science-
Jim:
Mostly computer people, who were just beginning their work, and neuro-physiologists like McCulloch and Pitts and Rosenblueth.
Flo:
Margaret Mead said, she was so dumbfounded by what she was hearing. This is for the idea of getting some glue, the conceptual glue that was needed in the social sciences at that time. She was so dumbfounded by what she heard during that ’42 conference. It was just the very beginning, she broke a tooth and she didn’t even know it was broken for days-
Jim:
Until the conference ended.
Flo:
-until the conference was-
Jim:
After that was when they [systametized 00:22:48] these, and under the auspices of the Macy foundation, which from the early 30’s had been funding interdisciplinary conferences, especially biologically based life sciences. They funded the conferences. The first one began in ’46, right after the war.
Flo:
They had decided, they decided after the ’42 conference. It was really Gregory Bateson who said, “Why don’t we all make a pledge to get back together, but let’s do it after the war.” That’s when that was set. They made a pact that they would contact so and so to start to expand the people who came, whether it was from social sciences, or humanities, or a computer, brain science, whatever.
They all made a pact to do that, but that’s when that happened. Then they went off, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were sent off to do intelligence work during the war, into the South Pacific and into Europe, I think.
Jim:
South Pacific [Crosstalk 00:23:50]. All their work was classified during the war and after the war, of course, was when Wiener took his stand, he would not do any more work for the military or any corporation. The Macy foundation funded these conferences, they were totally interdisciplinary and it was ’46, ’47. By the time Wiener wrote Cybernetics in the summer of ’47, they had two or three conferences already. That was really the beginning of this interdisciplinary model that became cybernetics.
Heinz von Foerster just come from Germany. He said, I knew about 50 English words and I walk in and they say, “You’re the secretary.” He kept the minutes, [Crosstalk 00:24:30] Margaret Mead were the ones who were the editors of the journals from the conference.
Flo:
It was von Foerster, and thankfully, this is another example of, we were able to talk to von Foerster. Talk to him about everything in the beginning of these Macy conferences. He was the one who said, when it came to the proceedings, and it made Norbert Wiener cry, he said, “I think we should call it cybernetics.” That’s when it came to be called cybernetics. It was von Foerster-
Jim:
It was Wiener’s word, because he had been searching, and in fact, with his knowledge of language, especially ancient Greek and Latin, he was looking for a word that would imply messenger. The Greek word for messenger is angelos, angel. He said that would not be appropriate at all. Then he found kybernētēs, which means steersman, which commemorated the first ship steering mechanisms on the first sailing ships and steam ships of the 1880’s. Wiener said, this is good, kybernētēs.
In fact, as Ken Jacobs pointed out in the audio tape, Wiener, as late as the late 50’s, was still calling his science, cybernetes. Ken said maybe we should honor the man who coined the term and do it his way.
Flo:
We better start telling cybernetes. [Crosstalk 00:25:51]
Speaker 4:
[Crosstalk 00:25:52] journal with this title, cybernetes.
Jim:
[imbernitis 00:25:55] What Heinz said, they were trying to figure out what do we call these transactions of the teleological society, or all the different terms, and Heinz, “I think we should call it cybernetics.” He said, “I looked over at Wiener and tears were in his eyes. He was so moved he had to get up and leave the room.” That’s how it became [Crosstalk 00:26:15] Macy conferences on cybernetics.
Flo:
Cybernetes.
Jim:
Heinz was one man we caught fairly thanks to Paul Pangaro, he referred us to Heinz. He’s the one who really told us so much that had happened, and [let it 00:26:28] be known that it was this battle going on inside the CIA when the Soviets became interested in cybernetics, and everyone [Crosstalk 00:26:35] went crazy. The CIA got wind of this, and a small group inside the analyst department of the CIA called themselves the cybernetics group. They were studying everything the Soviets were doing, and their point was, America should not fall behind what they were beginning to refer to-
Speaker 3:
It had to be another group, because the CIA didn’t exist then.
Jim:
Oh, yes it did. By the early 60’s, [Crosstalk 00:26:59]
Speaker 3:
Oh, when [Crosstalk 00:26:59] because one of the weird thing was that Lily was invited to join the CIA. She was a Canadian at the time and we all laughed, but there was an official letter requesting that she be seriously considered as.
Jim:
Really?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it must have been [Facet 00:27:17] who recommended her or something.
Flo:
Oh my word! Lily? [inaudible 00:27:21]
Speaker 3:
She’s got that letter somewhere.
Jim:
There was a huge debate, this is what we also tracked down, we used the Freedom of Information Act, which we’d been using for decades in our other investigative work. We asked for all records about cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, we named half the people in the group.
Speaker 3:
How long did it take you to-
Jim:
It took us two years just to get the documents from the CIA.
Speaker 3:
How long did it take you to [inaudible 00:27:45] actually [inaudible 00:27:45]
Flo:
Almost ten years.
Speaker 3:
Ten years.
Jim:
About eight years start to finish, waiting was about four and a half.
Flo:
Then it’s like it started getting some of the surviving figures, but [why 00:27:59] we’re telling you about the CIA and what happened to cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster told us this in our last conversation with him. He said, “Well,” he said, “you know the military, and they hear you say intelligence, and they do not know anything about artificial intelligence, so they hear the word intelligence, so they think, intelligence, deep cover, spies.”
Jim:
All the funding went from cybernetics projects-
Flo:
-to intelligence, because-
Jim:
-to AI.
Flo:
They thought that that was intelligence like covert operatives, like that. Not anything to do with AI.
Speaker 3:
[Crosstalk 00:28:42]
Flo:
Yeah.
Jim:
Really?
Speaker 3:
Yeah.
Jim:
What did he do?
Speaker 3:
Creator of Lisp.
Jim:
Oh, really?
Speaker 3:
Beginnings of artificial intelligence at MIT.
Jim:
In fact we had so many interesting experiences doing the research, because Oliver Selfridge, who was just one of Wiener’s boys, Pitts, Lettvin and Selfridge, the three of them. Oliver Selfridge then went to Lincoln Laboratories after the split, he went to work at Lincoln Laboratories on the Whirlwind computer and all the work there. He wrote the first artificial intelligence program, called Pandemonium. It was Selfridge really who brought John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, all these people together. In a sense, AI is really a descendant of Selfridge, he was the father of AI, and it’s a spin-off of [Scientology 00:29:29]. Who said that? Mandelbrot told us that. He said, “I consider AI a branch of cybernetics.”
When we interviewed Marvin Minsky, he said, “Wiener, cybernetics? All he did was feedback. He didn’t do nothing else.” In the meantime, on his door, is a big poster of Norbert Wiener, and we’re asking him, “Did you read Wiener’s work? Are you familiar with it?” “No, no, no!” Directly in my line of sight, behind Marvin Minsky, over his left shoulder is a bookshelf with two volumes of Wiener’s work.
Flo:
You know, in some of our other work, investigative journalism work that we’ve done, we’re very used to the fact [when 00:30:05] you go in and you really know that people are, they’re either going to try to sue you or they’re going to come after if you’re speaking in public, or whatever, whatever. Oh my god, I lost my train of thought, I’m sorry.
Jim:
Talking about AI, oh right. We interviewed Minsky.
Flo:
Right.
Jim:
We did the whole interview, [I was 00:30:29] high tech people on an 11 dollar Radio Shack cassette recorder. We walk in to see Minsky in the media lab-
Flo:
He [Crosstalk 00:30:39]
Jim:
Minsky pulls out-
Flo:
He records us at the same time.
Jim:
He pulls out a state of the art, at the time, Sony digital recorder. We put our recorder here, he puts his recorder there. We talk for about an hour and a half, and then Flo and I are done. We thank him, we think, “This is just great.” We go out into the courtyard there, say, “Let’s make sure we got everything,” and I say, “Oh my god! My automatic shut off didn’t shut off.” I only got the first 45 minutes, and we lost the last hour.
We went back to where we’re staying at, in [Weston 00:31:09], we sat down and we started-
Flo:
We reconstructed-
Jim:
[Crosstalk 00:31:11] everything.
Flo:
-notes, back to the old [Crosstalk 00:31:13]
Jim:
Then we [Crosstalk 00:31:13] e-mail, he was very cordial, he was wonderful. I said, “You know, our machine screwed up. Can we get a copy of your digital tape? We only got 45 minutes.” He e-mails back, he said, “Mine screwed up, I didn’t get any!”
It was definitely a case of trusting analog.
Flo:
Yeah, that was-
Jim:
I have one more item here of historical interest. We know that Wiener introduced the term feedback into the popular language. He introduced the concept into the public, concept obviously was very old, feedback devices go back to the Greeks. Feedback, the term was used for a couple of decades before.
We want to point out the moment when feedback entered the popular culture in terms of rock music. Some people have written, they believe that it was Jimi Hendrix, but we also tracked that down. The first song to use feedback as a sonic element, as a feature, not a bug, in rock music, anybody know?
Speaker 5:
The Beatles? Yeah, Beatles.
Jim:
Yeah.
Speaker 5:
[inaudible 00:32:18]
Jim:
No, earlier.
Speaker 5:
[inaudible 00:32:21]
Jim:
It was I Feel Fine, written in 1964, the summer of ’64. What happened was, Paul McCartney played that little Höfner violin shaped bass guitar, and he set it down on his Vox AC30 amplifier. It picked up the signal, and John Lennon had an acoustic guitar, a Gibson P130, I think. The acoustic pick up picked up the sound from that. It was an [A 00:32:52], if anybody is interested, 55 cycles per second. John Lennon thought this thing was so great, he said, “We’re going to leave it in.” That’s how the song starts. From there, it’s when Peter Townshend from The Who in My Generation. Then Jimi Hendrix-
Speaker 5:
Was [Crosstalk 00:33:08]
Jim:
Not as an element of the song in the same way.
Flo:
We thought maybe too.
Jim:
Then Jimi Hendrix used it in Foxey Lady, and the most appropriately titled song, Crosstown Traffic. That’s really where feedback came into the culture.
Other things we had, some of our anecdotes are not multiple stories, they’re original source. We traced them back to the original source and a lot of them, nobody else had heard. We learned that in the 20’s and 30’s when Wiener was a younger man, he loved to go to county fairs.
He loved that event at the fairs where you take a sledgehammer and you hit the thing and it drives the weight up. If you ring the bell, you get a cigar. He loved that, and they said he did it every time. He never failed, every time.
Flo:
He was [inaudible 00:33:54]. I think, there’s another one, during the war. Of course, Norbert Wiener was never asked to be a part of the Manhattan project. One, because they knew he would not keep a secret, he didn’t believe in secrets. Never the less, they gave him some classified papers having to do with the Manhattan project, for him to look at and whatever.
Here’s exactly why they didn’t put him on the Manhattan project. He takes them, he’s on the road, he spends the night and they find these papers rolled up in the bed sheets.
Jim:
[They 00:35:00] lost them completely.
Flo:
He totally left them in the bed sheets, all rolled up in the bed sheets.
Jim:
Wiener, Lettvin and Pitts were down in New York then. Pitts was doing the work on the chemical aspects of the Manhattan project at Columbia, with the team at Columbia. Wiener came down to visit the two of them. He stayed with them, and Jerry said, “And he snored so loudly,” he had sleep apnea because of his weight, that Walter and Jerry were sleeping [on 00:35:04] the one room, and Wiener was in the bedroom. He’d be snoring so loudly he’d keep them awake, and then he’d go utterly silent. They would go, “Uh-oh! Has he died? What’s happening? Is he dead?” Then he would start snoring again.
Flo:
They never got any sleep, they were so exhausted every time Wiener came to see them, because that would happen. He would be snoring and then they’d go, “My god, something’s happened to him!” Then he’d start again. Then they’d [inaudible 00:35:27] they could go to sleep. They were up for all the days he was there, they were up.
Jim:
On another trip, later in the war, he’s staying with Julian Bigelow, who was with the mathematical research group that [succeeded 00:35:38] [D2 00:35:39]. Bigelow and I guess his wife were there, Wiener saying with them, and they’d given him a private room. He goes in there and [these 00:35:46] Bigelows had a cat. He was in there in one of the drawers in the desk and Wiener shuts the cat in the drawer and goes to sleep.
Flo:
The next morning-
Jim:
The next morning he comes down, [isa 00:35:57], “How did you sleep?”
He said, “I slept great, but there was a cat outside my window howling all night.”
Flo:
Wiener, Wiener.
Speaker 5:
I have a short story [Crosstalk 00:36:09] about the CIA. Because, not about the CIA, of course, about how scientist, even more recently, smartly used this cold war collaboration. I had a colleague, who was a director of [admistr 00:36:22] of applied astronomy. He wanted to get some funding for radio telescopes.
Of course radio telescopes are useful to see the enemy missiles coming earlier. He goes to the [ministry 00:36:38] [inaudible 00:36:38] the project, he went to the Russian Soviet department of defense. [Asden 00:36:42], “Well, here is the project.” They say, “It’s very great. We already have all our budget assigned for ten years ahead, but since you believe that this is important for defense, from now on, nothing shall be published openly, everything should be classified.”
Okay, bad news, but then there is an international conference in Soviet Union. Some American [and 00:37:06] Canadian astrophysicist come here and he tells them, “Look, don’t tell anybody, it’s a secret, but you remember what happened before the Manhattan project, when suddenly all the papers on nuclear physics stopped being published because they were classified? From now on you will not hear anything from us about radio telescopes, you guess why.”
They go the U.S. department of defense and tell them the news. The U.S. department of defense organizes a workshop about the situation, and whether we should also start building a series of telescopes, since clearly the Soviet Union is planning to start a series of telescopes. The conclusion was, we already have our budget, we don’t have enough money. However, it’s America, it’s not Soviet Union, so they had proceedings of this conference, of this workshop, published in small number of copies, distributed to people, and one of them smuggled a copy back to [Andrey 00:38:01]. Andrey brings to the department of defense, now he says, “Look, while you are hesitating they already have a workshop.”
After the pressure from both sides, eventually, they got funding for the telescopes.
Jim:
They did, because of that!
Speaker 5:
People played this game.
Flo:
Oh they did, they really did.
Jim:
It was tough inside the CIA, what we learned from these Freedom of Information Act documents, there were like two teams. One team, the cybernetics group and the life sciences division, thought that there was a cybernetics gap opening up with the Soviet Union, and that U.S. should fund this research and really stay on top of this. [A 00:38:40] Soviet applications [work 00:38:41] in Biology, Economics, Government, all the different systems, and U.S. was just thinking hardware, military.
There was a showdown. As it happened it was the night of the Cuban missile crisis. The head of the CIA cybernetics group had finally arranged a meeting with, what was called the [hilt 00:39:01]? What was the-
Flo:
Hickory Hill.
Jim:
Hickory Hill group, which [Crosstalk 00:39:04] of meetings just among Kennedy’s cabinet members. Robert Kennedy, attorney general, Robert McNamara, defense secretary. It was that night, October 20th, 21st, 1962, and John Ford, who was the head of this group, went to make his case, present it, and he’s describing this to all the members, of the cybernetics gap and why we need to support this research. There’s a knock on the door at the, I think it was the McNamara house. In came the courier with the photographs, verifying that the Soviets were shipping missiles and established them in Cuba.
The whole project was delayed, but about a year later they revived this whole project under Jerry Wiesner. They set up a complete group to really evaluate the threat of Soviet cybernetics and what the U.S. should be doing, but by that time, all the things were beginning to shift to AI.
As Minsky told us, “We sent our people down to head ARPA, but then became DARPA, the Advanced Research Project Agency of Pentagon. They would call, “We need a new director,” we’d send one of our guys down. We had more money than we knew what to do with.”
Heinz von Foerster told us, they [stopped 00:40:14] funding cybernetic laboratories and all of the research [inaudible 00:40:18] dried up, because they were calling it red cybernetics, because the Soviets had embraced it. That had a lot to do with a decline of cybernetics.
That combined with the demise of Wiener’s whole inner circle and the lack of any disciples to take that forward, you know, [Coon 00:40:35] and everyone else, you can’t sustain a scientific revolution without that infrastructure.
Flo:
Of course, as Wiener [tes 00:40:46] demonstrated so often in his life, his [Wienerwegs 00:40:50], communicating with people, and talking about ideas and everything, that was central. He was a consummate communicator like that, [gerilis 00:41:01], always. Without that, without that, with his central group, that was just a death nail for him and for the liveliness and the fertility of ideas and the growth and development of it. It really just [sho 00:41:25], cut it down.
Speaker 5:
[inaudible 00:41:26] Wiesner came to the Soviet Union, I think even several times. He very actively talked with top scientists, because he said, “Tell me, because I have the ear of the president. I am the scientific advisor, he respects me. If you think there needs to be more collaboration, more anything.”
In Soviet Union, of course, we trusted Americans. It was maybe a mistrust, but the idea was, our own bosses, kind of who knows them? But Americans should know better.
Jim:
I know that was a big concern, and at the first [IFACT 00:42:07] conference on automatic control, when was that? ’62? ’63? That was when I think the Soviet’s premiered their bionic hand that they had done, a bionic hand. They showed this up in front of a, opened a curtain apparently, showed this first automated prosthesis, and all the doctors came back to the U.S., and they’re saying, “Oh my god, the Soviets are so far ahead in this are, of automated prosthesis-
Flo:
Then when they asked them-
Jim:
[Crosstalk 00:42:36] what are we going to do? How are we going to do this?” As it turned out, as they learned, at the [inaudible 00:42:41] the man who had given the idea ten years earlier to the medical community in the U.S., who haven’t picked it up, was sitting in a hospital bed in Mass General with a broken hip.
Speaker 6:
Yeah, I was going to say [Crosstalk 00:42:50]
Flo:
That’s where-
Jim:
That’s when they organized the project that became the [Crosstalk 00:42:54].
Flo:
Bose, [Amar 00:42:56] Bose was part of that.
Jim:
Here’s another story, this one didn’t make it. Okay, one second. This one, Wiener had a mixed relationship his whole life with his Judaism, because his parents were rising professionals at Harvard in the turn of the century Boston, were very aware of the anti-semitism that was pervasive at Harvard and among Boston society, so they never any of their children they were Jewish. Wiener finds out only by accident when he’s 15 years old, and it just shocked him, saying, [inaudible 00:43:29] “My god! There’s something so awful about these people that my own parents wouldn’t tell me, what does that make me?” He had a mixed response his whole life.
He also wasn’t a religious man, because he said as a scientist, I can’t accept anything that doesn’t provide some proof. Then when he went to get his first professional job, Harvard wouldn’t hire him. They had quotas for Jews, and there was still anti-semitism there.
Flo:
Excuse me, but also, the other part that really, it went into him when he discovered that he was Jewish, and that his mother and father never told him, and they had been living as gentiles in Boston, was because he had heard his own mother, she was Bertha Kahn, she was also Jewish, but he had heard her make terrible anti-semitic remarks against some Leo’s relatives, who have come over from Europe. From [Bialistuk 00:44:28] was it?
He had heard the really hateful comments that his mother had made, so he was saying, “My whole identity,” it’s like, when those who are like me, and who are part of me, and I’ve heard all these terrible things about them, that means it must be part of me too. Those terrible things must be part of me too.
Jim:
[inaudible 00:45:00] Wiener developed really was his own personal philosophy that he called, his universal humanism. Because he was so aware, as he said in his autobiography, of the prejudices of the Boston [bramans 00:45:12] against the Jews, and of different people around the world, and [mia 00:45:15] his love for Asians and for Indians especially, because he knew that he would not discriminate against any person.
Anyway, Jerry Lettvin told us a story, he said, “This is Wiener’s revenge on Harvard.”
Flo:
Oh yes.
Jim:
Lettvin told us that of course in the 20’s and through the 30’s Harvard had strict quotas on Jews at the University. Then after the war, when it became clear that mathematics was going to be an essential discipline of post-war science and technology, Harvard focused on building up his math department. They asked Wiener to recommend the best mathematicians coming over from Europe.
Wiener with great care picked up those with the longest beards, and the side [Crosstalk 00:46:00]
Flo:
[Crosstalk 00:45:58]
Jim:
Lettvin said, “These were the ones he sent to Harvard, and Harvard reluctantly said no to every one of them.” It took them six months to catch on what Wiener was doing, but by this time they were openings all over the U.S., and that was Wiener’s revenge on Harvard, and he delighted in telling the story.
Flo:
Yeah, he did.
Jim:
Questions?
Speaker 7:
[inaudible 00:46:20] we actually use those models for the [inaudible 00:46:32] big models for planning [inaudible 00:46:34] gather data on [inaudible 00:46:35] you have anything that you can relate to this visit in India?
Flo:
His visit in India?
Speaker 7:
Yes.
Jim:
He visited India two times.
Speaker 7:
Two times, yes.
Jim:
Right after independence Nehru invited Wiener to come, to advise the government on the best paths for India’s future. Wiener went over there in ’52 for several months. He spoke in ten different universities, and then in [Delhi 00:47:02] with the government. He said India should not follow the path of industrialization, that England [Crosstalk 00:47:09]
Flo:
[Crosstalk 00:47:09]
Jim:
-and it will just turn into another squalor, like the black satanic mills of the midlands in England. He said, India should develop a new class of technical professionals. The non-commissioned officers of science and technology. That was around the time that ISI’s, the IIT’s, the Indian Institutes of Technology-
Speaker 7:
[inaudible 00:47:30]
Jim:
He went to ISI, the Indian Statistical Institute, and then spent a year with [Mahala novis 00:47:38] there. [Greg’s 00:47:40] paper is great on that, but he did advise them. The IIT’s very much were inspired, Nehru expanded the whole network of IITs because of Wiener’s advice and guidance on that. Now, every time I have a breakdown on my computer, and I have to call technical support somewhere, I always say, “Where are you?”
“I’m in [hideroware 00:48:01].”
I said, “Oh, we just wrote a book about the man who brought technology to India.”
He says, “Oh, really? Who was that? Because I’m going to have to get your book.”
Speaker 8:
Always selling books.
Flo:
Yeah.
Speaker 8:
I had [inaudible 00:48:13] question [inaudible 00:48:15] about the [inaudible 00:48:16] sleep apnea [inaudible 00:48:24]
Flo:
There was, yes, there was some research that we did on that. Of course any of the people who would have been dealing with him were no longer … We tried to reach, we tried to look for the daughter of one of those people, but we didn’t … I think that the sleep apnea was definitely a problem.
Speaker 8:
[inaudible 00:48:56] leads to strokes and [inaudible 00:48:57]
Flo:
Yeah, but … I can’t remember how …
Jim:
In Wiener’s case, when he fell down those stairs at MIT, and we were told it was coming from building two into building ten, short stairway, fell down [to 00:49:10] those great bifocals of his steered him wrong. He was convalescing for a very long time, and as soon as he was back on his feet again, he had an appointment to be in Europe, in Holland and then in Sweden.
After this long convalescence, he then had those long airplane flights. With his weight, with his enormous girth, he had just had lunch at the royal academy in Stockholm, and was going over to the technological society there, to see their new communications laboratory. He’s walking up these long steps and that’s when he just collapsed.
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, which is often something that can follow a broken hip or a long convalescent period. The apnea didn’t appear to take him down.
Flo:
No, I mean, for as much concern, I think it gave all of his colleagues more concern-
Jim:
The question we had for his daughters and those of his colleagues we spoke with. This began way back in our research in the mid 70’s. One of our first research tours for another book. We were out at UCLA, interviewing John Lyman, who was a bio-engineer.
He said Wiener came to UCLA the last three summers of his life, to teach his courses. He stayed with Lyman, and they talked all the time. Wiener talked about his manic depression. At the time the only drug available for that was Lithium, and it had all of it’s own side effects.
They talked a lot about whether Wiener would have benefited for that, or as all his colleagues [inaudible 00:50:42] would this have stunted his genius and his productivity? In the end he never took any medication for it.
Probably the world is better off, Wiener was not so much.
Flo:
It was very interesting. Here we were, researching another entire book, just completely different subject, and we happened just mentioned something about Wiener, and John Lyman just dived right in there. What was really interesting is, in their conversations, that when Wiener would talk to him about these emotional swings and this manic depression and all that, it’s where in, [what 00:51:23] he talks about messages in the blood in cybernetics. It’s like, Wiener had a complete understanding of what the organic processes were, what the organic problem really was for him. He talked about that with Lyman, in relation to what you could call an organic communication problem in relation to messages in-
Jim:
In chapter six of Cybernetics, called Cybernetics and Psychopathology, he talks about what he called the distinction between the organic disorders, mental disorders and functional mental disorders, which he described as secondary disturbances of traffic in the brain. He postulated that these neuro-hormones, as they were considered at the time, were the messages that were carrying messages through the blood stream into the brain, back through the body. He was essentially postulating what now we call neuro-transmitters.
Flo:
He felt that there was something about that, that could explain his emotional [cycle 00:52:37]-
Jim:
It’s after four, a couple more questions. You had a question about … ?
Speaker 9:
[inaudible 00:52:42] that kind of situation would change with time? 50 years after [inaudible 00:52:50] has changed their perception of [inaudible 00:52:58]
Jim:
You’re asking about his legacy now and going forward?
Flo:
His legacy, and how people see him? Okay. You want me to go first?
Jim:
[Crosstalk 00:53:12]
Flo:
I think that when you’re asking that question you must ask that question about other countries, and then ask that question again about the United States. In the United States it is the one place we found, where nobody knows who Norbert Wiener is. They have no clue about anything to do with the foundation, and the worst place of all, Silicon Valley. They know about IPOs, they know about marketing, they know about this, that and the other, but they don’t know, and they don’t care to know anything about the pioneers and the foundation of their fields.
Jim:
Maybe that’s our special focus because of being his biographers, but our speculation is that Wiener talked about ethics and social responsibility. In a place as frenzied as Silicon Valley, with the madness of development there, that seems to be the last thing on people’s minds.
When we traveled to Europe we were at conferences for the EU, and international conferences on ethics and technology, automation, robotics. We got there with our little Power Point, we said, “We [would 00:54:32] tell them about Norbert Wiener,” but everybody in Europe had a Power Point with a quote from Norbert Wiener.
Flo:
It started, every Power Point started with Norbert Wiener. We looked at each other and we’re going, “We’re in the wrong country.”
Jim:
Talking with some of the people here from [Tata 00:54:45] consultancy, the awareness of Wiener in India, it seems there a much higher level of awareness and recognition, and even an understanding that he played a role in India’s technological development.
Flo:
I do think, one of the things that I feel after being here, and I’ll test it as we go out in our fieldwork and everything, but I really do feel that as the problems that we are facing now become more and more, and the young people are facing unemployment situations, they are facing environmental problems, for their developing their lives, I think as we go, we are going to find more and more people, I think, listening and being aware. I’m hoping that young people will come forward, will find this work, and will take it forward, because I think it’s in his concerns. As I’ve always felt, when I found Norbert Wiener, when I started my Master’s work and then into my Doctor work, as far as I could see, he is the only one who has really cared enough. Who saw, who had the vision and the kind of mind he had, who saw what it was that we were doing, what we were creating, but he also saw what we were going to be facing. He cared enough to leave some guidance and tools for us.
I think that perhaps as we go forward, these things that have been so important here, and what I’ve heard here, I don’t ever want to leave. Because I won’t hear these things anywhere else.
Jim:
I have to say, when were invited to speak for the IEEE, we’ve been working with Greg to help him design the conference for several years, and with [Arthur 00:56:48] and the Boston team here, and the technical committee. We were not sure whether we would have any role to play, or whether we would even be welcome. When we were invited here [we 00:56:59] thinking, “What do I have to say to engineers?”
I had a nightmare one night that, you know Michael Jackson’s Thriller? The video? That all these engineers were walking toward me, going, “Norbert, Norbert.” Really, I’m not lying, so we had some trepedation. Then we were doing our work, and as I was saying last night, [irtures 00:57:19] that the IEEE’s motto, technology, advancing humanity and, in almost verbatim Wiener’s ethical rule and mission statement, the vision statement.
Speaker 10:
IEEE’s [inaudible 00:57:32] and part of that is the public imperative, and IEEE takes it seriously.
Jim:
I’m learning that here at this conference. I do think that Nathaniel, if IEEE, and if the Society for the Social Implications of Technology within IEEE takes up the Norbert Wiener award, and begins to develop it, expand it on a global scale, then exactly what you said. As a role model for young professionals and IT people, I think this organization will take Wiener’s reputation forward in a way that hasn’t happened.
We’ve tried to crack the darkness around Wiener and the shadows, so that people can learn the real story, better and worse, about Wiener. What’s being preserved and what that award articulates is the best of Wiener.
Speaker 11:
I was going to ask you [inaudible 00:58:20], but since you brought it up, I was hoping that if this does get off the ground, then perhaps you should [inaudible 00:58:26] a much shorter story of Norbert Wiener, perhaps a couple of pages [inaudible 00:58:32] As you said, there are a lot of people in America, especially [inaudible 00:58:38]
Flo:
Yes.
Jim:
We’d be happy to put something together.
Flo:
Absolutely. I just want to say one thing about Norbert’s time in India. My favorite part of Dark Hero, there are lots of favorite parts, but one part I love so much is the part about what Norbert saw in the [Sinyasas 00:58:57] in India, and what he took into himself. The philosophy, everything that he took, in Dark Hero, I love that part of it.
That’s when he came back and where he then found a swami at the MIT chapel. He used to go see him every single week, used to visit him every single week. He believed when the swami gave a lecture about reincarnation, Norbert came up and said, “Swami, I believe this is true. I feel this. I feel that whatever is in my storehouse, it has been there before.” Anyway, they had a great relationship, and nobody believed it, and we found the swami.
Jim:
In fact, Amar Bose =, when we took this information to Bose, who was with Wiener almost every day, he was in the country for the last ten years of his life. We said, “Do you know that Wiener saw swami [safarkanande 00:59:56] at the Hindu chapel? He’s now with the society in Boston.”
He said, “No.” He said, “Swami married me and me wife. I never knew this. I was with Wiener every day, he never told me this.” [I 01:00:09] said, “I bet he would have been embarrassed for anyone to know that he would be thinking about things like reincarnation, or something on a plane that was not strictly technical and mathematical.”
Flo’s right, when Wiener was in [Chena 01:00:23] on his first trip, he saw the [sanyasans 01:00:26] who, who in the last stage of their life, is part of their ethic, that they will just travel the world in poverty, to do good works, to spread [Crosstalk 01:00:36]
Flo:
It’s the wisdom, it’s the wisdom that they have at that point, that they take-
Jim:
I think Wiener probably lived his whole life like that. That’s when we said, he came back and the philosopher in him rose up and that’s when he began to speak and write his most powerful and articulate works about the ethics and the future of technology.
Flo:
We are past our time and-
Jim:
[Crosstalk 01:01:00] one thing, I don’t think this is going to work even, but I’ll try it.
Flo:
Wiener, oh yes.
Jim:
The one other story we left out, all of Wiener’s knowledge of languages, when he would converse with the grocers in Italian and articulate in Latin and Chinese and [Crosstalk 01:01:15]
Flo:
This was a visit by a dignitary from one nation-
Jim:
It was a Greek dignitary, who comes in, [he would 01:01:24] Wiener meets him at the MIT faculty club. He immediately breaks into a [cop 01:01:28] a verse of the Greek national anthem in Greek. He was very impressed. We thought that would be a good note to end our session on, because the word cybernetics comes from the Greek.
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to play this.
Flo:
We’ve been living in Greece for about the last ten years.
Jim:
I don’t know if this will play. Where’s the volume? Where’s the volume? [Crosstalk 01:01:54] volume here.
Flo:
We hadn’t planned it. We’re taking a little break after we finished Dark Hero. When we decided to go, then we got there, and then all of a sudden the … Okay.
Jim:
We’re playing the Greek national anthem in honor or cybernetics and Norbert Wiener.
Flo:
Cybernetics and Norbert.
Jim:
[Crosstalk 01:02:12] close our program today.
Flo:
Thank you everybody for coming.
Jim:
Thank you.