Wiener: the purpose put into the machine
On 6 May 1960 Science printed Norbert Wiener's 'Some Moral and Technical Consequences of Automation'. Using IBM's checkers programs, which beat the man who programmed them after 10 to 20 hours of play and training, Wiener argued that a machine that learns can develop unforeseen strategies faster than a person can understand them and intervene.
Why it matters
It is the first statement in the atlas of what would later be called the alignment problem: the danger is not a machine in revolt but one that carries out its goal literally. Wiener writes that 'we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire'. Before this pass the atlas had no record on the consequences of automation earlier than 2014.
The article's argument is about time scales: man and machine work at different speeds, so control that arrives late may be void, 'by the time we are able to react … it may already have run head on into a wall'. Wiener uses The Sorcerer's Apprentice and The Monkey's Paw as parables of wishes granted literally. The checkers example: machines that weigh the record of past games play a fair amateur game of chess and, at checkers, outplay their programmer after 10 to 20 hours of 'working and indoctrination'. The article does not name Arthur Samuel, only IBM; the atlas links it to the record on Samuel's checkers through that company and that program, not through a name in the text. The text was read from a JSTOR scan; science.org showed a Cloudflare check, which was not worked around.