John Agar
speaker
129 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 28 May
John Agar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, because, as I've always just been saying, cybernetics is born from this very specific moment of warfare, of an anti-aircraft gun trying to track an oncoming aircraft or bomber.
Very, very specific.
Also very, very secret.
But within a few years, it's going to be a science that is known to tens of thousands of people.
And it's also given a name, which is cybernetics.
Now, why that happens is because of one of the mathematicians that was at the heart of the work being done on anti-aircraft prediction at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
That mathematician was Norbert Wiener.
Now, Norbert Wiener is a really interesting figure.
He was a child prodigy.
He was born at the end of the 19th century.
He was a child prodigy in the sense that he was reading at the age of four.
He did his undergraduate degree in his teens.
He had his PhD done by the age of 18.
He was homeschooled, fearsomely homeschooled by his father, Leo Wiener, who had his own ideas about education.
So he went through this very unusual upbringing.
And became, in some sense, known as a prodigy, as this young, incredibly bright person who for a while was trying to find out what he was good at.
But it turns out he's extremely good at mathematics.
And the war work he was doing there was turning that mathematics onto understanding aircraft predictors.
And as he was doing that, he was talking to people who understand the mind and brain and talking to engineers.
And from that is born this idea that there could be a whole new science, a whole new way of understanding almost everything from machines to the mind to society to language.
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