Norbert Wiener's vision of the "information society"

Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) is unanimously considered the father of Cybernetics, the discipline that studies control and communication in both animals and machines. As a privileged witness of what he called the “second industrial revolution”, he foresaw some of the major challenges that would confront the “information society”, as today’s society is called – a society whose economic and cultural life is heavily dependent on information and communication technologies. As a child prodigy, he was trained as a scientist (he called himself a mathematician, but his fields of research range from control engineering to physics to physiology) as well as a philosopher (at 18 obtaining a Ph.D. in Philosophy under the supervision of Bertrand Russell). This twofold vision and approach allowed him to see the opportunities and threats of the scientific and technological developments that began immediately after World War II. In this paper we will illustrate some of the technological, ethical and political issues, under discussion at present. These were raised by Wiener from the 1940s on, and include the responsibility of the scientist in war, decisions on the exploitation of technological innovations, copyright issues raised by communication technologies, the social control made possible by digital devices, and the inspirational role of research in some critical areas of social development. We will try to obtain some insights into these issues from Wiener’s viewpoint.