In 1948, Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics, a difficult book about machines and living things that became a bestseller. Within a decade, many scientists wanted nothing to do with the word. But “information,” a term Wiener and Claude Shannon both used, went on to define how we describe our time.
This episode features Ronald Kline, professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age. We talk about Wiener’s wartime work, the Macy conferences, the Soviet Union’s embrace of cybernetics, the CIA’s role in reviving it, and how “information society” took hold in the 1970s, with help from Daniel Bell and Japan.
