The uncomfortable question

The newspapers called them “electronic brains.”

The phrase mattered. If a machine could take a problem, work through it, and arrive at a solution, then from the outside it began to look as if something was happening inside: not just motion, but a kind of reasoning.

In 1948, Norbert Wiener gave that feeling a name: . His book treated animals and machines as systems shaped by control and feedback. It explained goal-directed behavior.

Suddenly, people were asking questions they had not asked of looms or printing presses. A loom weaves. A press prints. Nobody wonders what either of them is experiencing. But a machine that takes a problem and works toward a solution looks, from the outside, like reasoning. And once something looks like reasoning, a question follows: is it?

The machines did not answer that question. They made it impossible to avoid.