Norbert Wiener: God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964–) [EN, RU, ES, RO]

“In this book, Norbert Wiener concerns himself with major points in cybernetics which are relevant to religious issues.

The first point he considers is that of the machine which learns. While learning is a property almost exclusively ascribed to the self-conscious living system, a computer now exists which not only can be programmed to play a game of checkers, but one which can “learn” from its past experience and improve on its own game. For a time, the machine was able to beat its inventor at checkers. “It did win,” writes the author, “and it did learn to win; and the method of its learning was no different in principle from that of the human being who learns to play checkers.

A second point concerns machines which have the capacity to reproduce themselves. It is our commonly held belief that God made man in his own image. The propagation of the race may also be interpreted as a function in which one living being makes another in its own image. But the author demonstrates that man has made machines which are “very well able to make other machines in their own image,” and these machine images are not merely pictorial representations but operative images. Can we then say: God is to Golem as man is to Machines? in Jewish legend, golem is an embryo Adam, shapeless and not fully created, hence a monster, an automation.

The third point considered is that of the relation between man and machine. The concern here is ethical. “render unto man the things which are man’s and unto the computer the things which are the computer’s,” warns the author. In this section of the book, Dr. Wiener considers systems involving elements of man and machine.

The book is written for the intellectually alert public and does not involve any highly technical knowledge. It is based on lectures given at Yale, at the Société Philosophique de Royaumont, and elsewhere.”

Publisher MIT Press, 1964
ISBN 0262730111, 9780262730112
ix+95 pages

Publisher

God and Golem (English, 1964, updated on 2021-4-8)
Tvorets i robot (Russian, trans. M.N. Aronz and R.A. Fesenko, 1966, DJVU, added on 2021-4-8)
Dios y Golem (Spanish, trans. Javier Alejo, 1967, EPUB, added on 2021-4-8)
Dumnezeu şi Golem (Romanian, trans. Edmond Nicolau and Lucia Nasta, 1969, added on 2021-4-8)

Manuel DeLanda: Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (2005)

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of today’s science wars. At the start of the 21st Century, Deleuze is now regarded as the most radical and influential of contemporary philosophers. Yet his work is widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. In this already classic work Manuel DeLanda does what the growing host of Deleuzians have falled to do – he makes sense of Deleuze for both analytic and continental thought, for both science and philosophy.

Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005
ISBN 0826479324, 9780826479327
232 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Doron Swade: The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (2001)

In 1821 an inventor and mathematician named Charles Babbage was reviewing a set of mathematical tables. After finding an excess of errors in the results, he exclaimed, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” Thus began Babbage’s lifelong enterprise to design and build a mechanical calculating engine-the world’s first computer. Drawing on Babbage’s original notes and designs, Doron Swade recounts both Babbage’s nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating machine-the Difference Engine-and Swade’s own successful attempt to build a replica for the bicentennial of Babbage’s birth. Set against the tantalizing background of Victorian science and politics with a colorful cast of characters, The Difference Engineis a saga of ingenuity and will-and the dawning of a new age.

Publisher Penguin Books, 2001
ISBN 0670910201
342 pages

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PDF (DJVU; updated on 2012-7-25)