Are we living out Norbert Wiener's worst nightmares? Wiener, the inventor of cybernetics, is often thought of as the expansive (and partially jealous) counterpart to Claude Shannon, the reclusive, meticulous goldsmith of the mathematics behind communication theory. Indeed, although both men were the primary architects of information theory (which, among other things, allows you to reliably read these words on your screen), Wiener was far more willing to appear in public —and to publicly express his misgivings about the ways in which communications (and science in general) were being used within a human society. When he says in 1950 "The idol is the gadget and I know very great engineers who never think further than the construction of the gadget and never think of the question of the integration between the gadget and human beings in society," is he taking a stab at the insular Claude Shannon?

Two broadcasts on WNYC from the New York Academy of Medicine are classic Wiener. Ever aware (not to say fond) of connections between apparently-disparate realms, his 1953 "lecture to the laity" expounds on causality in Newtonian physics, operational analysis, quantum mechanics, and homeostatic disruptions as a possible cause of cancer (all of this, of course, while repeatedly going off-mic —something he was famous for).

His earlier 1950 lecture is perchance an even more expansive and virtuosic gem, building a grand arc from the minutiae of anti-aircraft ballistics to automatic safety systems and to gadget worshiping. The final, grand message —that machines are really powerful, that they must be understood, and that human power should be used for "an end to which we can give a justifiable human value" is then brilliantly connected (spoiler alert!) back down to the earthy medieval notion of the wish-granting talisman, the monkey's paw.

In the lecture Wiener also references an image from a New Yorker cartoon which shows a factory in which an assembly line of robots is building the same robots, while the two lone humans wonder what it is all about. In our cybernetic era of self-reflective echo chambers, where information begets more information with no apparent purpose or control mechanisms —not to mention gadget worshiping—, Norbert Wiener may well be turning in his grave. We can't say he did not warn us. He may have been off-mic, but he was seldom off-target.