Panelist

Frank Levy discussed Wiener's remarkably prescient 1949 essay predicting the impact of computers on society. Wiener had anticipated that machines would increasingly replace human judgment, warning of "an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty" if society failed to prepare for the displacement of workers. Levy evaluated this prediction against six decades of subsequent technological and economic development.

Levy identified three things Wiener did not anticipate: the vulnerability of service-sector jobs to automation, an overestimation of machine intelligence in certain domains, and the prevalence of indirect rather than direct labor displacement. He emphasized Wiener's cautionary insight that "machines will do what we ask them to do, not what we ought to ask them to do," a distinction that remains profoundly important for the design and deployment of artificial intelligence systems.