THE INHUMAN MESS OUR MACHINES HAVE GOTTEN US INTO Rodney Brooks Rodney Brooks is a computer scientist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics, emeritus, MIT; former director, MIT Computer Science Lab; and founder, chairman, and CTO of Rethink Robotics. He is the author of Flesh and Machines. Mathematicians and scientists are often limited in how they see the big picture, beyond their particular field, by the tools and metaphors they use in their work. Norbert Wiener is no exception, and I might guess that neither am I. When he wrote Zhe Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener was straddling the end of the era of understanding machines and animals simply as physical processes and the beginning of our current era of understanding machines and animals as computational processes. I suspect there will be future eras whose tools will look as distinct from the tools of the two eras Wiener straddled as those tools did from each other. Wiener was a giant of the earlier era and built on the tools developed since the time of Newton and Leibniz to describe and analyze continuous processes in the physical world. In 1948 he published Cybernetics, a word he coined to describe the science of communication and control in both machines and animals. Today we would refer to the ideas in this book as control theory, an indispensable discipline for the design and analysis of physical machines, while mostly neglecting Wiener’s claims about the science of communication. Wiener’s innovations were largely driven by his work during the Second World War on mechanisms to aim and fire anti-aircraft guns. He brought mathematical rigor to the design of the sorts of technology whose design processes had been largely heuristic in nature: from the Roman waterworks through Watt’s steam engine to the early development of automobiles. One can imagine a different contingent version of our intellectual and technological history had Alan Turing and John von Neumann, both of whom made major contributions to the foun