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God & Golem, Inc.
Norbert Wiener's final book, published in 1964, winner of the National Book Award posthumously — the founding meditation on learning machines, self-reproducing systems, and the moral responsibilities of their creators.
Wiener's last book, completed in the weeks before his death in March 1964, is the distillation of two decades of thinking about what it means to build a system that learns, adapts, and acts on consequences its creator did not anticipate. The title references the Golem of Jewish legend — the clay creature animated by a rabbi to serve the community, capable of acting for reasons of its own that did not always align with its creator's intentions. Wiener saw in the Golem the same lesson he saw in the Monkey's Paw and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: the machine will do what you ask it to do, and the catastrophe lives in the gap
between what you asked for and what you should have asked for. The book is short, informal by the standards of his earlier technical works, and more explicitly moral than any previous statement. It won the National Book Award for Science, Philosophy and Religion in 1965. Wiener did not live to