Epstein Secrets

he debate over how to manage an age when it was, for the first time, possible for humans to destroy the planet was colored still by fresh memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was charged too with the fear of communist expansion, not an unreasonable worry for Americans who had just fought a world war agains

But at the center it is dense, still, even quiet with the silently cranking algorithms of massively concentrated power. The computer science pioneer Claude Shannon saw information in 1949 as wild, uncertain, and pulsing with the instability of an entropic system. Yang. The machine architect Norbert Weiner, writi

et about the production of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was whether such bombs could be built. Once that secret had been revealed, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no amount of state-imposed secrecy would stop others from puzzling through chains of reasoning like those the Manhattan Project researc

arguments in Zhe Human Use of Human Beings seem closer to the 19th century than the 21st. In particular, although Wiener made reference throughout to Claude Shannon’s then-new work on information theory, he seems not to have fully embraced Shannon’s notion of information as consisting of irreducible, meaning-free

et about the production of nuclear weapons, he wrote, was whether such bombs could be built. Once that secret had been revealed, with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no amount of state-imposed secrecy would stop others from puzzling through chains of reasoning like those the Manhattan Project researc

arguments in Zhe Human Use of Human Beings seem closer to the 19th century than the 21st. In particular, although Wiener made reference throughout to Claude Shannon’s then-new work on information theory, he seems not to have fully embraced Shannon’s notion of information as consisting of irreducible, meaning-free