CONCEPT
Purpose and Goals
Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Bigelow's 1943 redefinition of teleology as an observable feedback pattern — and the distinction between mechanical purpose (pursuing a goal) and human purpose (evaluating whether the goal is worth pursuing).
In their landmark 1943 paper 'Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology,' Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow performed an act of intellectual daring. They rehabilitated purpose — teleology, the idea that behavior is directed toward a goal — for scientific discussion, without smuggling in Aristotelian metaphysics. Purpose, they proposed, is not an inner property but an observable pattern: a system behaves purposively when its behavior is directed toward a goal and adjusts based on feedback about the gap between its current state and the goal state. The cat stalking the mouse. The thermostat maintaining temperature. The anti-aircraft system tracking the pilot. Each exhibits purpose in the operational sense. The framework was elegant, productive, and — Wiener later came to realize — incomplete in a way that matters enormously for AI. The incompleteness concerned the goal itself.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Mechanical purpose — the purpose of a thermostat, a tracking system, or a large language model optimizing for