'Norbert Wiener' tag archive

The world of the future will … not [be] a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. — Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. The word ‘robot’ entered the English language just over a hundred years ago, on 9 October 1922. It arrived with a Broadway production […]

Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 256pp., £90.00 hb., £28.99 pb., , In recent years noise seems to have become an interdisciplinary concept par excellence, apt to capture important dynamics at work whether in technological, scientific, social or aesthetic domains. But when economists, biologists, psychologists, and musicians speak of noise, are they […]

REVIEWS Isidor Feinstein Stone, The Trial of Socrates, London, Cape, 1988, xi + 282pp, £12.95 hb, ISBN 022402591-0 Near the end of his life 1. F. Stone turned away from the hidden history of US politics to look at an older story, the trial of Socrates. Always a defender of democracy and freedom of speech, […]

The machines in the shop roar so wildly that often I forget in the roar that I am; I am lost in the terrible tumult, my ego disappears, I am a machine. I work, and work, and work with- out end; I am busy, and busy, and busy at all time. For what? and for […]