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Reference

Norbert Wiener (1964). God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/3316.001.0001

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🎙️ Welcome into another electrifying episode of "Revise and Resubmit," your go-to space for intellectual adventures and big thinkers! 📚 This is your "Weekend Classics" edition, where timeless insights and boundary-bending books come alive between your earbuds. Today, we're cracking open a book that's as mind-bending as it is monumental — "God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion," written by none other than the legendary Norbert Wiener and published by The MIT Press.

Before we journey into the digital and the divine, let’s talk about the author who set the stage for all things cybernetic. Norbert Wiener was not just a mathematician at MIT — he was a true pioneer and the very father of cybernetics, the science of communication, control, and feedback in both machines and living things! From revolutionizing prediction theory during World War II to being honored with the National Medal of Science, Wiener’s life reads like an algorithm coded for genius.​

Now, "God & Golem, Inc." is no ordinary book review. This provocative classic dives into what it means for machines to learn, to reproduce themselves, and to edge into territory we once believed only the divine could enter. Imagine a computer that not only beats its inventor at checkers, but learns and evolves with each game, and then ask — where does machine end and man begin? 🤔 Can humanity’s gift for creation ever rival that of the creator himself? Wiener’s exploration is dazzling, cautionary, and loaded with ideas about ethics, automation, and the ever-blurring boundary between artificial and organic intelligence.

With examples that range from games and genetics to automata and morality, Wiener invites us into an ethical whirlwind: Should we fear the golem we've brought to life? Or are we learning to become creators in our own right, echoes of myth and machine blending together? 🌟

Huge thanks to Norbert Wiener, even posthumously, and to The MIT Press for keeping these big questions alive. If you want more episodes like this, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on Spotify and check out our YouTube home, "Weekend Researcher." Plus, we’re spinning on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast, ready for you to tune in anytime, anywhere!

So — here’s the question that’s going to keep us all curious til the last page: When the machines we've built come alive with their own learning and agency, are we still the authors of our own future... or just characters in a rapidly evolving script? 🤯 What do you think?