Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory" (Photo: Wikipedia) Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory." (Photo: Wikipedia)
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With the aggressive pace of technological change and the onslaught of news regarding data breaches, cyber-attacks, and technological threats to privacy and security, it is easy to assume these are fundamentally new threats. The pace of technological change is slower than it feels, and many seemingly new categories of threats have actually been with us longer than we remember. Nervous System is a monthly blog that approaches issues of data privacy and cybersecurity from the context of history—to look to the past for clues about how to interpret the present and prepare for the future.

 

In 1950, pioneering information theorist Claude Shannon engineered a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze to find a hunk of metal "cheese." The project had started as a glorified toy, inspired in part by Shannon's having gotten lost in a hedge maze, but it was a bombshell announcement to the general public that had scarcely begun to accept the idea of digital computers that could do rote and automated tasks. Here was one of the fathers of computer science casually announcing that he had successfully built a machine capable of learning from its mistakes and teaching itself how to improve.