Since I’m teaching them this semester, I recently reviewed Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and Norbert Wiener’s “Men, Machines, and the World About,” and it seems to me as if these articles, 1950 and 1954 respectively, represent the beginning of a paradigm shift not only in the way we think about technology, but in the ways we think about ourselves. Turing’s essay, while about as dry as yesterday’s biscuits, implicitly compares human interaction and biology to his universal machines, while Wiener suggests that we need to understand our technology before we use it to blindly end our days on the planet. After World War II, these men see the need of defining the human to avoid the machinery of the human program.
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