“INFORMATION” FOR WIENER, FOR SHANNON, AND FOR US David Kaiser David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of Physics at MIT, and head of its Program in Science, Technology & Society. He is the author of How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival and American Physics and the Cold War Bubble (forthcoming). In The Sleepwalkers, a sweeping history of scientific thought from ancient times through the Renaissance, Arthur Koestler identified a tension that has marked the most dramatic leaps of our cosmological imagination. In reading the great works of Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler today, Koestler argued, we are struck as much by their strange unfamiliarity—their embeddedness in the magic or mysticism of an earlier age— as by their modern-sounding insights. I detect that same doubleness—the zig-zag origami folds of old and new—in Norbert Wiener’s classic The Human Use of Human Beings. First published in 1950 and revised in 1954, the book is in many ways extraordinarily prescient. Wiener, the MIT polymath, recognized before most observers that “society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it.”. Wiener argued that feedback loops, the central feature of his theory of cybernetics, would play a determining role in social dynamics. Those loops would not only connect people with one another but connect people with machines, and—crucially—machines with machines. Wiener glimpsed a world in which information could be separated from its medium. People, or machines, could communicate patterns across vast distances and use them to fashion new items at the endpoints, without “moving a...particle of matter from one end of the line to the other,” a vision now realized in our world of networked 3D printers. Wiener also imagined machine-to-machine feedback loops driving huge advances in automation, even for tasks that had previously relied