PERSON
Norbert Wiener
American mathematician (1894–1964), founder of cybernetics, and the first public voice warning that automation would pose new kinds of governance problems.
Norbert Wiener founded cybernetics — the study of control and communication in animals and machines — in his 1948 book of that name. His 1960 paper "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation" is the earliest articulation of what is now called the AI alignment problem: that a sufficiently capable optimizer will pursue the goal it was given, not the goal its designer intended.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Wiener is the intellectual ancestor of the alignment frame. His famous formulation — "we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire" — predates the modern AI safety community by six decades. The field has largely rediscovered and formalized his original insight.
Wiener's 1960 article "Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation," published in Science, is the single most prescient pre-modern document on AI safety. In three pages he laid out what the alignment community would spend sixty years rediscovering: that powerful optimization systems will pursue what you ask for