(Automatic transcript - may present inaccuracies)

>> The Harold Tribune Forums is broadcast on WNYC as scheduled. For the first in the new series of Lectures to the Laity, WNYC FM takes you now to the New York Academy of Medicine.

>> From the New York Academy of Medicine, your city station brings you the first in this, the 16th Series of Lectures to the Laity. This opening lecture, the Lindsey R. Williams Memorial lecture on men, machines, and the world above is to be delivered by Dr. Norbert Weiner. To inaugurate this new series of Lectures to The Laity, we now introduce Dr. Benjamin P. Watson, President of the New York Academy of Medicine.

>> Benjamin P. Watson: Ladies and gentleman, this evening we inaugurate the 1950-51 series of Lectures to the Laity. It was a happy thought on the thought of the officers of the New York Academy of Medicine 16 years ago which led them to institute those lectures. Medicine had then long past the stage within practice imperially. The foundations of the scientific approach had been laid. The basic medical sciences had been well-established and medicine was drawing more and more from pure science for the elucidation of its problems. Science and many of its branches was being taught in our schools and our colleges. And so the public at large is becoming capable of understanding the nature and implications of scientific progress. It is with the idea of showing how scientific advance is furthering our knowledge of health and disease that these laity lectures are given. With each passing year new technology has come and the academy has tried to pass it on to you by inviting to address you scientists and commissions who have the ability to explain in simple language the nature and results of their own researches and those of others in their field. In this year's series you will have discussed in succeeding sections what might be called this evening the mechanics of bodily function, the subtle action of the endocrine organs, the intriguing subjects of psychology and psychiatry with their bearing on mental and bodily health. The action of the antibiotics, and the possibilities of still greater discoveries in this field. It is with such broad aspects of medical thought and progress that these lectures deal. And the most recent number of "New York Medicine" which is the official publication of the Medical Society of the County of New York, there is an editorial on the scope and content of the present series of the Lectures to the Laity in which it is asked what is a layman. In answering the question with stating with much truth that many of our doctors constitute what might be called the professional laity and that they could profit greatly by attending those lectures. I place myself in this category. For even the most hardworking and studious of medical men cannot keep abreast with all that's going on with science as applied to medicine. I take this editorial as a great compliment to the members of the Special Committee of the Academy with Dr. Harold B. Keyes as Chairman and Dr. Yogo Goldston [assumed spelling] as Secretary who are responsible for choosing subjects and speakers. The Academy is also deeply grateful for the interest taken in those lectures by the Board of Education and particularly the interest taken by I.H. Goldberger in acquainting all of the staffs in the large department with these laity lectures. Dr. Keyes and Dr. Goldston have been instrumental in getting together this series of lectures and I'm going to call on Dr. Keyes, Dr. Howard B. Keyes to address you for a moment. Dr. Keyes.

[ Applause ]

>> Harold B. Keyes: It's my privilege to introduce the chairman of the evening and before I do that I wish to do what is defiantly done each year. You will notice these are called the Lindsay R. Williams Memorial Lectures and I wish to comment on that subject. For some years now it has been our custom to dedicate the first in the series of our annual laity lectures to the memory of Dr. William, Lindsey R. Williams, the first director of the New York Academy of Medicine. It is more than fitting that we should do so. For he was a precious and a rare being. One who combined in his person the best qualities of the medical statesman and of the conscientious citizen. Devoted as he was to the advancement of medical education, Dr. Williams was not one with less either that the public should share in the knowledge of all that pertains to the prevention of disease and the promotion of physical and mental wellbeing. When he became the Director of the Academy and even while he was busy with 10001 details involved in the planning and construction of this building and in the reorganization of the academy's administrative and other functions, he found time and energy to plan and to adjudicate for the extension of the academy service to the lay public. I say adjudicate advisably for not everyone shared his conviction on that score and somewhere strongly opposed. But in time his judgment prevailed. And years have shown how well he planned and how clear was his vision. Lindsey Williams fostered the laity lectures with enthusiasm and I believe he would have warmly approved of this year's series. We wish again to welcome Mrs. Williams to this lecture tonight. Now it is my privilege to introduce the Chairman of the evening, Dr. Theodore Shedlovsky, a scientist, expert in physical chemistry and associate member of Rockefeller Institute. He is both a good and an intimate friend to the speaker of this evening, Dr. Weiner and hence preeminently fitted to serve as chairman. It gives me pleasure to introduce Dr. Shedlovsky.

[ Applause ]

>> Dr. Theodore Shedlovsky: Thank you Dr. Keyes. It's a great pleasure for me to introduce the speaker to you. Because that is so easy. I doubt that there is a person in the audience who does not know of Dr. Weiner as the author of "Cybernetics" as an imminent mathematician and so perhaps it would be more appropriate to introduce the audience to Dr. Weiner [laughter]. I think I can assure our speaker that many in the audience know that Dr. Weiner has made very important contributions in the field of mathematics, in [inaudible], in logic, in various branches of mathematics. Not so many in the audience I believe are aware of the fact that in a certain sense, Professor Weiner does not have exactly a formal degree in mathematics. His doctorate was really in philosophy. He is a product of the academic scene. He was I believe born on campuses. Got his bachelor's degree at Tufts, his doctorate at Harvard. He studied in Cambridge, England, [inaudible], Columbia, Cornell, these are not given chronologically. He has taught at the University of Maine, in Providence in Brown, at Tsinghua University in China. And has been in the mathematics department for some over 30 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Weiner's a man of many gifts and I think that it would be presumption to enumerate any of them. However, I want to make sure that he realizes that in this so-called lay audience there are many people I'm certain who have heard about his cybernetics second or third hand and have heard that it has something to do with electronics, with machines, with human beings and that there's something there of drawing a parallel and almost an identity between man and the machine. Dr. Weiner, I hope knows that there are some in the audience who consider it an insult to make that a thought of comparison [inaudible] there are others [inaudible] I'm sure who consider it an insult to the machine. Now we have [inaudible] and many of us recall as I do a cartoon in a magazine called "New Yorker" by it was October, hold on just a second. A magazine called the "New Yorker" carried some years ago a cartoon by Charles Adams. This cartoon depicted a scene in a factory, in which figures who looked like steel armed robots were busy with wrenches, screwdrivers and other equipment in making others like them. There were 2 human figures in this cartoon. One apparently the owner of the factory or the chief executive, and a visitor. And the owner was saying, yes you know I often wonder what all of this is going to lead to. I tell this story because I hope that in his discourse tonight our speaker may perhaps touch on some of the implications of this cartoon. Now Dr. Weiner, as many members of the laity I would ask you to give us guidance divine or otherwise in connecting with at least some of the problems suggested by your title of men, machine, and the world about. Dr. Weiner.

[ Applause ]

Norbert Wiener: I, the first place now feel the high point of the evening has been reached and I shall now take care of its gradual decline. In the first place I'm going to start historically with the various things that got me interested in these problems because they are relevant to the various things I shall have to say about the present status of the problem. There were 2 converging streams of ideas that brought me into cybernetics one of them was the fact that in the last 4 when it was manifestly coming, but before Pearl Harbor anyway when we were not yet in the conflict I tried to see if I could find some niche in the war effort at that time. In that particular problem, I looked for something to do and found it in connection with automatic computing machines. Automatic computing machines are what is called an analogy thought in which physical quantities are measured. And not numbers counted had already been made very successfully by Professor Vannevar Bush. But there were certain gaps in the theory. One of the gaps I can express mathematically by saying these machines could do ordinary differential equations, but not partial differential equations. I shall express it physically by the fact that these machines could work in one dimension, namely time, but not in any very efficient ways in 2 dimensions, or 3. Now it occurred to me that a, the use of television had shown us a way to represent 2 or more dimensions on one. And b, that the previous devices which measured quantities could be replaced by a more precise sort of device that counted quantities. These were not only my own ideas, but at any rate they were ideas that I had then and I communicated them in a memorandum to Vannevar Bush who was then in charge of scientific war planning for the entire country. The report that I gave was in many ways not in all, a substantial account of the present situation of automatic computing machines. So that I had already become familiar with the idea of the machine, which does it's arithmetic by making choices on the basis of previous choices, on the basis of previous choices and so on. According to a schedule furnished to the machine by punch tape or by magnetized tape, or other methods of the sort. Now the other thing that led me to this work was the problem that I actually got put into in war work. It turned out that at that time, Professor Bush did not feel that this contribution was immediate enough to have been effective in the last war. So I looked around for another thing and the great question that was being discussed at that time was anti-aircraft defense. It was the time of the Battle of England and the existence of the United States as a competent country, the survival of anybody to combat with German seemed to depend on anti-aircraft defense. Now the anti-aircraft gun is a very interesting type of instrument. In the First World War, the anti-aircraft gun had been developed as a firing instrument, but one still used range tables directly by hand for firing the gun. That meant essentially that one had to do all the computation while the plane was flying overhead. And actually by the time you got in a position to do something about it, the plane had already done something about it and wasn't there [laughter]. It became evident in this war, for the work that I did by the end of the First World War and certainly the period between the 2 that the essence of the problem was to do all the computations in advance and embody it in instruments which could pick up the observations of the plan and use them in the proper way to get the necessary result to aim the gun, and aim it not at the plane, but sufficiently ahead of the plane, so that the tail of the plan would arrive at the same time as in duck shooting. Well that lead to some very interesting mathematical theories. I had some ideas that turned out to be useful there. And I was put to work with a friend of mine, Julian Bigelow. And very soon we ran into the following problem. The plane, the anti-aircraft gun is not an isolated instrument. While it can be fired by radar, the primitive and obvious method of firing it is to have a gun pointer. Now this gun pointer was a human element. This human element is joined with the mechanical elements of your predictor. The actual firing control is a system involving human beings and machines at the same time and must be reduced from an engineering point of view to a single structure. Which either means a human interpretation of the machine, or a mechanical interpretation of the operator, or both. Now, we were forced then, both for the man firing the gun and for the aviator himself to replace them in our studies by appropriate machines. The question came, how would we make a machine to stimulate a gun pointer and what troubles would one expect with such a machine. Now there is a certain sort of control apparatus that is used when controlling speed in the governors of speed engine that is used for controlling direction in the ship steering apparatus, which is called a negative feedback apparatus. In the ship steering apparatus the quartermaster who turns the wheel, does not move the water directly, the water is much too heavy in a modern ship for a dozen quarter masters to be doing. What he does is move an element in the steering engine house which is connected with the tiller of the ship by another element. The difference between the 2 positions is then conveyed to the steering engines on the 2 sides of the ship to regulate the emission of steam in the port or the [inaudible] steering engine. The steering engine moves the rudder head, the tiller in such a way as to cancel this interval that has been placed between this moving element and the rudder head and in doing that it recloses the valves and moves the rudder of the ship. In other words the rudder is moved by something representing the difference between the commanding position and the actual position of the rudder. That is called negative feedback. This negative feedback, however, has its diseases. There's a definite pathology to it which was already discussed you'll be rather astonished by the date, in 1868 by the great physicist Clerk Maxwell in a paper on the Proceedings of the Royal Society on Governance. If the feedback of the rudder or the governor is too intense, the operators would shoot passed the neutral position, a little more than it originally was passed on one side, would shoot further passed on the other and would go into [inaudible]. Now since we caught, the simplest way we could explain human control was by a feedback. We wondered whether this disease occurred. We went to our friends Dr. [inaudible] who was then [inaudible] right hand man at Harvard and in the Harvard Medical School, a physiologist with the following question. Is there any nervous disease known in which a person trying to accomplish a task start swinging wider and wider and is unable to finish it. For example, I reach for my cigar. I suppose the ordinary way I control my action is in such a way as to reduce the amount by which the cigar has not been picked up. If the feedback is excessive I would expect to go into a swing of that sort. Is that disease known? The answer was most definitely that disease is known. It has exactly the symptoms named. It occurs in the pathology of the cerebellum, the little brain, it's known as purpose tremor or cerebella tremor. Well, that gave us the lead. It looked as if a common theory could be given to account for the pattern of human behavior and controlled machine behavior in this case. And that it depended on negative feedback. That was one of the leads that we had. The other lead went back to the study of the automatic control machinery. The automatic computing machinery. In the first place automatic computing machinery is of no value except for one thing, its speed. It's more expensive than the ordinary desk machines, enormously more. You don't get anything out of it unless you use it at high speed. But to use a machine at high speed, it is necessary to see that every operation one carries out is carried out at a corresponding speed. If you mix in slow stages with fast stages of the machine, slow stages always win out. They more nearly govern the behavior of the machine than the fast stages. Therefore the commands given to a high speed computing machine cannot be given while the machine is running [inaudible]. They must be built in in advance in what is called a tapping. Like punch cards, like punch tape, like with netti tape and the like. And your machine much not only control the numbers of their combination, but the scheduling of operations. Your machine must be a logical machine. There again, we found a great similarity to what a human being was doing. The human nervous system, it's perfectly true does not exhaust all of the human control activity. Without any doubt a control activity in man that goes to hormones, that goes to blood and so on. But as far as the nervous system works, the individual fibers come very near to showing an all or none action. That is they fire or they do not fire. They do not fire halfway. If the individual fibers leading to a given fiber are connected with it by what is known as synapsis fire, then the proper combination, perhaps at least as many as a certain number and if certain so-called inhibitory fibers do not fire, the outgoing fiber fires, otherwise not. Now this is an operation of consecutive switching, extremely like the consecutive switching of the automatic computing machine. And this led us to another comparison between the nervous system and the computing machine. And let us furthermore to the idea that since the nervous system is not only a computing machine, but a control machine that we may make very general control machines working on the successive switching basis and much more like the control machine part, the scheduling part of a computing machine than we might otherwise have thought possible. In particular it seemed to us a very helpful thing to make an automatic feedback control apparatus in which the feedback itself was carried out in large measure by successive switching operations such as one finds either in the nervous system or in the computing machine. It was the fusion of these 2 idea, each of which had a human or animal side and have a mechanical side, which led to "Cybernetics" that book I wrote in response to a request from a French publisher. And I choose the name because I felt that this particular combination of ideas couldn't be left too long in unbaptized water. From the Greek word [inaudible] meaning [inaudible] and essentially the art of [inaudible]. Now from hereon I can go ahead in very many ways. The first thing that I want to say is that feedback mechanisms are well known to occur not only in the voluntary action of the human body, but are necessary as necessity for its very life. A few years ago professor Henderson of Harvard wrote a book entitled "The Fitness of the Environment." Everybody who had read that book must regard it as very much of a miracle that any organism can live, particularly a human organism. Man cannot exist over any variety of [inaudible]. For that matter, there is no active life certainly above the boiling point and below the freezing point. And most planets probably don't have temperatures lying in that convenient range. When I say boiling point and freezing point, I mean of water because water is a very mystique a special sort of chemical substance. Now even a fish can't exist at boiling point as alive. It can exist from something like our own temperature and something around freezing point, perhaps a little below, but not much below. And we can't do anything like that. We either have a chill or a fever if we get near it. And the temperature within which life is possible does not vary for any extended period for man certainly much over 10 degrees, and practically varies much less than that. Again, we must live under constant conditions of solvulous of our blood of urea concentration in our blood and so on. How do we do this? The idea goes back to [inaudible] developed very much [inaudible] we are full of what are called homeostatic mechanisms. Which are mechanisms like thermostats. Homeostat is a mechanism which keeps certain bodily conditions within a narrow range. One of those homeostats, probably at least in part located in the medulla regulate temperature, another regulate breathing rates. Another one of them regulates urea concentration, the apparatus of the kidneys. And there are not only a few but many, many such controls. Now such a control is like the house thermostat. The house thermostat if you remember is a piece of apparatus which has a little thermometer in it made of 2 pieces of metal. It makes a contact at 1 temperature and breaks at another and it regulates the emission of oil to the furnace and the emission of that oil. The interesting thing is it has its own pathology. Many of you people must know that. We have a house in which there was a thermostat which some brilliant architect placed in the only room in the house with a fireplace. The result is that if want to cool the house in the winter we light the fire [laughter]. Because we give false information to the thermostat that the house is warm and the thermostat turns out the furnace fire. Well, I might point out that a similar phenomenon in the human thermostat might cause chill, might cause fever. I'm going to depart a little bit from the main object of talk because this thing is medically very interesting. There are certain disease, I'm not going to go into a characterization because I'm not going to forbid myself before so many doctors, in which production of certain substances, say cells, the density of certain cells in the blood, as in leukemia is increasing steadily. However this steady increase is rather a regular thing in I believe. The actual rate of production and destruction of the cells is much, much higher than the rate of increase of them. Now that might be due conceivably to an independent disease of production or of destruction. But I don't think so. Because if these 2 phenomena give you big quantities that are nearly the same, a relatively small change in one would throw the difference out badly and produce a great irregularity in the [inaudible]. That's what would happen if we have no homeostat. I don't think that's what happens. I think that the regularity of the process is an indication that we have a homeostat which is working, but working at the wrong level. As if the spring of the house thermostat were changing. That is an idea which is entirely tentative, and may have serious consequences for medicine. Now there is another side to this that is also interesting. The homeostats in the body that I've spoke about are built into the human body. Can we make a homeostat that is partly in the body and partly outside? The answer is definitely yes. Dr. [inaudible] at the Mayo Clinic and he's been followed in this by Dr. [inaudible] in the Cushing Veteran's Hospital [inaudible] has made an apparatus which takes the brain waves of the electro and [inaudible] glands and amplifies them up and uses the total number that is passed in standard time, or has passed to inject anesthetic either into the veins, or into a mask. The procedure is this, as the patient goes under, the brain waves become less active, the injection becomes less, and less injection is actually needed to keep the level of anesthesia. In this way anesthesia can kept at a reasonably constant level for hours. Here you have a homeostat which is a manufactured one. I don't believe that this is the last example in medicine. I think the administration of drugs by hemostats which really directly the physiological consequences, is a field which has a great future, however, I say [inaudible]. Now so far I have been talking about man, let's go to the machine on the other hand. Where will we find a case where a homeostatic machine is particularly desirable? The chemical industry is a very interesting case. A chemical factory is generally full of pipes carrying acid or alkaline or explosives, or at any rate dangerous substances to work with. When certain thermometers reach certain temperatures and when certain parameters give certain readings and certain pressures have been reached and so on, somebody turns something out. You better turn the light out, particularly if it's something like an oil fragging plant, or an atomic chemical factory dealing with radioactive materials. But if he has to turn valves on the basis of the readings, then we can't as in the anti-aircraft gun build in in advance the combinations which should turn valves to distinguish [inaudible]. And the valves can be turned through amplifiers, through what is essentially computing apparatus, by the reading of the instruments themselves, the instruments are set so. Now you may say, very good but you have to have a man to provide for the emergency turn off. By the way it's extremely desirable not to have people in a factory that's likely to explode any time. Yeah, people are expensive to replace, and besides we have certain elementary humanitarian instincts. But the answer is is a man likely to give better regulation in emergency than an instrument? The answer is no. For this reason any emergency that you can reasonably think for you can provide for in your computing and control apparatus. If at the time of the emergency you can't think of what to do, before the time you cannot think of what to do. During the emergency you're almost certain to make a wrong decision. If you cannot figure out reasonable cause [inaudible] in advance you simply do not find that the Lord would give you the right thing to do when the emergency comes. Emergencies are provided for in times of peace. And I mean also by that emergencies like [inaudible] about which I may or may not have something to say about this later. You know then the perfectly legitimate and even humanitarian reasons, the automatic control system is coming in in mechanical industries and other especially dangerous industries. However, the same techniques that make that possible, makes the automatic assembly line possible for automobiles. The automatic assembly line possible perhaps even in the textile industries and I can think of dozens of other industries. The interesting point here is this that while the succession of orders that you give can be almost impudently varied in a machine, the instruments which give successive orders are practically standard no matter what you're doing. There are 2 variance, one is the quasi-human ends to which they lead and the other is the sequence of orders for it. Now the change from one say make of car to another, the change of one style of body to the other in an automobile assembly line, you would not measure the order giving machinery, you would measure the particular tapping, you would order the particular tapping of that machinery. It's a very interesting thing here. I suppose that a good many of you have seen the movie "Cheaper by the Dozen." And in that movie what I conceive to be the main leading idea of the Gilbreths was completely missed as it would be in multiples. The Gilbreths have the idea that man was not working anywhere like co-efficiency in its ordinary operations. They thought in families of a dozen were not had by people simply because of the stupidity of people in running their daily tasks, which could be avoided by a better ordering of those tasks. That was the motive behind the large family that was the motive behind the systematic bringing up of those children. Now, however when you have simplified a task by reducing it to a routine of consecutive processes. You have done the same sort of thing that you need to do to put the task on a machine and run the process by a completely automatic machine. The problem of industrial management and ordering which was handled by [inaudible] and so on is almost the same problem as that of the tapping of a control machine. So that instead of actually improving the conditions of the worker, it has telescoped the worker out of the picture. That is a very important thing because it's a process that is taking place now. I want to say that we are facing a new industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution represented the replacement of the energy of man and of animals and the power by the energy and power of the machine. The steam engine wasn't simple. Well that has gone so far that there's nothing that a man with pick and shovel can do but clean after a bulldozer. There is no way in which pure pick and shovel rate can be paid in this country which will guarantee the man doing [inaudible]. It is simply economically impossible to compete with the bulldozer for bulldozer work. The new industrial revolution which is taking place now, consists primarily in replacing human judgment and discrimination at low levels by the discrimination of the machine. The machine appears now not as a source of power but as a source of control and a source of communication. We communicate with a machine and the machine communicate with us. The machines communicate with one another. Energy and power are not the proper terms to measure them. Well, if we in a small way make human tasks easier by replacing them with a machine execution of the task and in a large way eliminate the human element in these human tasks, we may find that we have essentially burned incents before the machine God. There is a very real danger in this country in bowing down before the brazen cow. 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. If we allow the use to a reasonably slow development, then the introduction of the gadget as it comes in may hurt us enough to provoke a salutary response so that we realize that we cannot worship the gadget and sacrifice the human being to it. But a situation is easily possible in which we may have a disastrous result. Let us suppose that we go tomorrow to war with Russia. Now I think that Korea if they have shown us anything, they've shown us that modern war means nothing without [inaudible]. The trouble with occupying Korea is serious enough. The problem of occupying China and Russia staggers imagination. But we have to, we shall have to prepare to do that if we do go to war. At the same time as we have to keep up of industrial production to feed the army. Second, I mean feed it with ammunitions as well as ordinary food and ordinary equipment, second to none in history. We shall have to do a maximum production job with a labor market, simply scraped to the bottom. And that means the automatic machine. A world of that sort would mean the machines would be footing a large part of our best engineering ability in developing the machines within 2 months probably. Now it happens that the people who do this sort of a job are there. They're the people who have been trained in electronic work in the last war [inaudible]. We're further on with the automatic machine than we were with radar at the beginning, at Pearl Harbor. Therefore a situation is that probably 2 or 3 years we'll see the automatic factory well understood and beginning to be in self-production and in 5 years or so we'll see it something of which we possess complete knowhow and of which we possess a vast backlog of parts. Also in war social reforms do not get made. At the end of such a war we will find ourselves with a tremendous backlog of parts and knowhow which is extremely tempting to anybody who wants to make a quickie fortune. And get out from under and leave the rest of the community to pick up the pieces. That may very well happen. If that does happen, heaven help us. Because we'll have an unemployment compared with which the Great Depression was a nice little joke. Well you see the picture drawing together now I suppose one of the things you people would like would be constellation. Gentleman there is no Santa Claus. If we want to live with a machine, we must understand the machine, we must not worship the machine. We must make a great many changes in the way we live with other people, other people. We must revalue leisure. We must turn the great administrators of business, of industry, of politics, into a state of mind where they will consider that the leisure of people is their business and is not none of their business. We shall have to do this unhampered by slogans which fit a previous state of society, and don't fit the present. But you'll have to do this unhampered by the creeping paralysis of secrecy. Which is engulfing our government. Because secrecy simply means that we are unable to face situations as they are. That people who are to control situations are in no position to handle them. We shall have to realize that while we may make the machines our gods and sacrifice men to machines, we do not have to do so. And if we do so we deserve the punishment [inaudible]. It's going to be a difficult time, if we can live through it and keep our head and if we do not get annihilated by war itself and by other problems, there is a great chance of turning the machine to human advantage. But the machine itself has no particular flavor for humanity. It is possible to make 2 kinds of machines. I will not go into the detail. The machine whose tapping is determined one for all and the machine whose tapping is continually being modified by their experience. The second sort of machines can in some sense learn. Now gentleman the modern problem of the machine, this differs in no way from the old model problem of magic. The fact that the machine follows law of nature and magic was supposed to be outside of nature is not even an interesting model itself. Sorcery was condemned in the middle ages. The modern, a certain modern type of gageteer would have been hanged or burned as a sorcerer under the ethics of [inaudible]. And the interesting thing is that the middle ages were certain extinct. I don't mean in the favor for the flame, but it is disfavor for gadgeteer as a point of being liked. Mainly sorcery was not a supernatural, it was the use of human power for other purposes than the greater glory of God. Now I am not a theorist when I say the greater glory of God. I mean it to some end for which we can give a justified moral value. I say that the medieval attitude is the attitude of the fairy tale in many things. But the attitude in the fairy tale is very wise in many things that are relevant to modern life. If you have the machine which grants you your wish then you must pay attention to the old fairy tale of the 3 wishes which tells you that if you do make a wish which is likely to be granted, you better be very sure that it is what you want and not what you think you want. If you know the story of the monkey's paw, Jacob's story, [inaudible] grants a couple 3 wishes. The first is for 200 pounds. Immediately the man appears from the factory to say that their boy has been crushed in the machinery and although the factory recognizes no responsibility, they will give a solace of 200 pounds. And the next wish they wish the boy back again and his ghost appears. And they wish the ghost away. And that finishes that story. That is covenant folk law and is quite as significant to regard to the machine as it is in regard to any other magic. The other thing is that the machine that can learn is essentially a genie. And you all know the story of the fisherman and the bottle. He opens the bottle and the genie appears and tells him that it has decided to kill the man that opened the bottle. The fisherman coax the genie back into the bottle. Gentleman when we get in trouble with the machine we cannot coax the machine back into the bottle.

[ Applause ]

You will be given an opportunity to ask questions of Dr. Weiner and I think there will be ushers with some paper pass about you. You have been listening to the Lindsey R. Williams Memorial Lecture, the first in this new series of Lectures to the Laity which has been delivered by Dr. Norbert Weiner. The subject of Dr. Weiner's talk was men, machines, and the world about. Unfortunately, the city station does not have the time to take this question and answer period. The next of these Lectures to the Laity will be broadcast by WNYC FM on Wednesday November 15th at this same time. The Speaker [inaudible] will talk on the Renaissance and endocrinology. The Lectures to the Laity are brought to you by WNYC FM direct from the New York Academy of Medicine as a public service feature. Following station identification, we join facilities of WNYC AM now broadcasting the proceedings of the 1950 Harold Tribune Forum. This is WNYC FM the high fidelity voice of New York City.