But Wiener failed to foresee crucial technological developments. Like pretty much all technologists of the 1950s, he failed to predict the computer revolution. Computers, he thought, would eventually fall in price from hundreds of thousands of (1950s) dollars to tens of thousands; neither he nor his compeers anticipated the tremendous explosion of computer power that would follow the development of the transistor and the integrated circuit. Finally, because of his emphasis on control, Wiener could not foresee a technological world in which innovation and self-organization bubble up from the bottom rather than being imposed from the top. Focusing on the evils of totalitarianism (political, scientific, and religious), Wiener saw the world in a deeply pessimistic light. His book warned of the catastrophe that awaited us if we didn’t mend our ways, fast. The current world of human beings and machines, more than a half century after its publication, is much more complex, richer, and contains a much wider variety of political, social, and scientific systems than he was able to envisage. The warnings of what will happen if we get it wrong, however—for example, control of the entire Internet by a global totalitarian regime—remain as relevant and pressing today as they were in 1950. What Wiener Got Right Wiener’s most famous mathematical works focused on problems of signal analysis and the effects of noise. During World War II, he developed techniques for aiming anti- aircraft fire by making models that could predict the future trajectory of an airplane by extrapolating from its past behavior. In Cybernetics and in The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener notes that this past behavior includes quirks and habits of the human pilot, thus a mechanized device can predict the behavior of humans. Like Alan Turing, whose Turing Test suggested that computing machines could give responses to questions which were indistinguishable from human responses, Wiener was fascinated by the not