Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation

Historical context

Norbert Wiener’s Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation appeared in Science on May 6, 1960, as recorded in the publisher’s Crossref metadata.

Purpose and time to intervene

Wiener challenges the assumption that human construction ensures continuing human control. He examines learning game-playing machines and differences between human and machine time scales.^[1]

His bottle-factory example separates maximum production from a business’s actual needs: producing a large unsalable inventory can defeat the owner’s purpose. He then asks whether a fast, irreversible action leaves time to correct an incompletely communicated goal (pp.1357–1358). These are illustrative arguments, not documented industrial incidents.^[1]

What the connection establishes

Read this alongside Outer Alignment and Corrigibility: choosing a purpose and retaining intervention are distinct questions. This is an editorial comparison; shared concerns do not establish direct influence on a particular later researcher.

The origins guide places the argument beside other approaches to learning and delegation.