Flo Conway - Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics

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Praise for Dark Hero of the Information Age

The information age was launched in 1948 with a brilliant book called Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, a pioneer in computers and communications. This fascinating biography of Wiener captures his brilliance and his dark side, and it shows how his new way of thinking made him one of the most influential innovators of our times. Its a truly exciting tale.

WALTER ISAACSON, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Dark Hero of the Information Age is superb. Norbert Wiener, who was my mentor for a decade, was a brilliant and complex man, and the authors relate Wieners ideas in illuminating detail. It is certainly a thrilling bookand the story is still continuing today.

OLIVER SELFRIDGE, MIT Media Lab, pioneer of Artificial Intelligence

Dark Hero of the Information Age is doubly fascinating for the drama of Wieners erratic personal odyssey and the way in which each episode expands our understanding of the benefits and perils of contemporary technology. Conway and Siegelman weave a fascinating story for anyone who wants to understand where we are now and how we got there, yet I believe the experts too will find themselves surprised into a new thoughtfulness.

MARY CATHERINE BATESON, author of Willing to Learn: Passages of Personal Discovery

This exciting book offers a timely correction to the misapprehensions and neglect surrounding Norbert Wieners deeply felt concerns for the social and human consequences of automation and cybernetics.

STUART BENNETT, Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Sheffield

Norbert Wiener was a great thinker and a tortured person. His work was an inspiration to me, as it was to many, but his personal history was only known through the filter of watered down anecdotes. I read Dark Hero of the Information Age with great interest and emotion; it is a revelation of the man behind the mind.

BENOIT MANDELBROT, author of The Misbehavior of Markets

Perhaps most importantly, Conway and Siegelman chronicle Wieners own awakening to the implications of the science he was pioneering and to the dangers they posed to his future and to ours.

Publishers Weekly

A compelling and lucid account of Wieners prodigy and prophecy.... Conway and Siegelman capture Wieners frailties and his genius with clear, engaging prose that explains the man and his work without grinding to a dull reductionism or bogging in difficult details. As it marshals the scenes of this storied life... Dark Hero... forms its own beguiling equation: a series of dark moments and flashing brilliance that sums roundly at Wieners lifelong concern, the human use of human beings. It is a tremendous achievement in itselfand a wonderful portrait of a man as necessary to our new century as he was to our last.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

In this compelling biography... the authors limn the development of the brilliant mind that created the basic framework for a... science of communication.... At a time when information technology is delivering new powers to government security agencies and new clients to unemployment offices, readers will read this life story with great interest.

Booklist

[Dark Hero] reads more like a novel than a conventional biography....The authors... have succeeded in bringing Wiener to life as a great figure in the world of science as well as a tragic hero in a domestic drama. They show him as he was, a mixture of Galileo and Othello.... We still have much to learn from Wieners vision.

FREEMAN J. DYSON, New York Review of Books

Highly informative and lyrically written, Dark Hero is a monumental achievement, sure to engage those curious about our ages scientific wellsprings. Readers will walk away with a deeper understanding of the science behind the tech revolution and events prompting it. Theyll learn how science can be politicized, and what that means for research. Theyll learn of Wieners emotional struggles despite gigantic mental gifts. Prodigy is wondrous. But what price must natures fabulous monsters pay for such gifts? Dark Hero holds some gripping answers.

Albuquerque Journal

If you are looking for the flesh-and-blood Wiener, you will find it here.... What emerged from [the authors] labors is Wiener as a prodigious brain andyeseccentric, but also Wiener the rebel, the quarry of the McCarthy witch hunters, the humanitarian... the seer, the prophet.

SIAM News (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics)

An extremely comprehensive and significant biography [written] in an admirably readable but authoritative style.... This is certainly an outstanding work.

DR. ALEX ANDREW, Director General, World Organisation of Systems & Cybernetics Kybernetes

Interesting history... well worth reading. Conway and Siegelman have dug up a lot of interesting material on the early days of cybernetics, and they certainly capture the enthusiasm of the early years of our information age. They also uncover many facts about Wieners life that were not commonly known.

Notices of the American Mathematical Society

Hopefully, with this well-written and important biography... Wiener will no longer be a forgotten hero of the information age.

ETC.: A Review of General Semantics

A well-written, well-researched portrait of the personal and professional life of an often-forgotten, but central, player in the politics and ideas of twentieth-century science, technology, and engineering.... The authors... do an excellent job of conveying in nontechnical terms Wieners contributions [and they] convincingly account for [cybernetics] disappearance in... the larger political context....

College and Research Libraries

Fascinating.... What engaged me virtually from the first sentence... was the poignant, beautifully told story.... The poetry and prose flow together seamlessly.

Cleveland Jewish News

A brilliant biography.... [Wieners] rebellion was something that Einstein would approve of.

The Hindu Business Line

ALSO BY FLO CONWAY & JIM SIEGELMAN

SNAPPING

HOLY TERROR

FOR OUR FATHERS
ROBERT PATRICK CONWAY, SR.
AND
LEONARD P. SIEGELMAN

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past....
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose

T. S. Eliot
Burnt Norton

PROLOGUE

TIME PAST, TIME PRESENT

HE IS THE FATHER OF THE INFORMATION AGE. His work has shaped the lives of billions of people. His discoveries have transformed the worlds economies and cultures.

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