Textbook of AI

Abstract. Wiener's 1960 Science article. The author of Cybernetics (1948) and The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) returns to the moral problem posed by autonomous machines whose objectives might diverge from those of the humans who built them. The famous passage anticipates Bostrom's argument fifty years later: "If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot interfere effectively ... we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire." The article is one of the first explicit statements of the alignment problem in the modern technical literature.