Warren Brodey, 101, dies; a visionary at the dawn of the Information Age

Boston Globe

3 hours ago

Although he formally trained as a physician, his thinking sprawled across topics as disparate as architecture, toy design, acoustics, and network computing. From his MIT base, he swapped ideas with other unconventional thinkers including Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Negroponte, and Marvin Minsky, one of the intellectual forefathers of artificial intelligence.
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Dr. Brodey had his greatest influence in the early 1970s, a time of economic and political malaise but also of radical optimism about a postindustrial, technology-driven future -- a moment when hard science and New Age sensibilities intersected.
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He explored the sort of wild-eyed questions that could be asked with a straight face only during those tumultuous times -- questions like 'We can explore technology, but can technology explore us?' and 'Can a room be designed to make you more creative?'
His thinking was grounded in the field of cybernetics, a cross-disciplinary approach to the complexity of such dynamic systems as cities, organisms, families, and computer networks. Though it had been around since the end of World War II, cybernetics really took hold among academics in the late 1960s, as a response to the perceived rigidity of industrial society.
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During his early career as a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., Dr. Brodey first applied cybernetics to the family, which he saw as a system that had its own internal forces but was also influenced by external systems: A parent might have problems at work, which then cause disruption at home.
But he left his lucrative practice in 1965 to take an unpaid job at MIT, which at the time was a leading center for work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. He later got funding through a grant from NASA.
Like others around him in Cambridge, Dr. Brodey believed that rapid developments in computing technology presented a choice: Such advances could be used to augment society as it was, or they could enhance human potential in revolutionary ways. He spent the rest of his long life advocating for the second option, all the while pushing aside fears that capitalism would force humans to pick the first.
He took issue, for example, with an approach to artificial intelligence advocated by Minsky and others that was based on processing a massive set of data; at the time, this seemed to exclude an alternative AI that would be able to learn and grow -- and to help humans do the same.
'To date, we have not endowed our environment with this creative flexibility,' Dr. Brodey wrote in Landscape, a journal about design theory, in 1967. 'The intelligence we have commonly achieved is uncreative, stupid and in large measure hostile to human well-being. We have allowed hard shell machines to multiply and control us.'
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But he was not all doom and gloom. That same year he spoke at a conference on digital technology and creativity held at the downtown Manhattan studio of the artist Robert Rauschenberg.
New technologies, Dr. Brodey told the audience, offered 'a new potential for living in a personalized environment if we merely can think our way out of the old mass-production mentality.'
Dr. Brodey was considered a key influence on several Boston area visionaries, including Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the MIT Media Lab.
Warren Brodey via Evgeny Morozov
Warren Mortimer Brodey was born on Jan. 25, 1924, in Toronto. His father, Abraham Brodey, a doctor, and his mother, Blanche (Levy) Brodey, helped arrange passage and obtain visas for scores of Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the years before World War II.
He received his medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1947. After his psychiatric residency in New York and Boston, he was the assistant director of the Child Guidance Center in Worcester and a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md.
He became a clinical professor at Georgetown University in 1959. Along with studying for certification in psychoanalysis, he consulted on CIA-funded studies with blind people who had developed advanced senses of hearing.
Such work exposed him to the idea that our environments, both natural and human-made, shape our thoughts. Context, he said, was everything, a conviction that he brought with him to MIT.
In 1967, with a grant from a wealthy friend, he and another researcher, Avery Johnson, founded the Environmental Ecology Lab, which they operated from a building on Lewis Wharf in the North End.
There, they developed what Dr. Brodey called 'soft architecture' and 'soft materials' that responded to interaction with people: freon-filled rubber surfaces that changed shape depending on body temperature, for example, and a 'dancing suit' that changed music based on a user's movements. The idea was to fashion environments that evolved with human users, in a way that would push those same users to evolve as well.
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'At a basic level, Brodey and Johnson were hoping that such materials would help avoid the traps of mass-produced homogenous goods and interfaces, nudging users to learn, to think, to react to reality as reality reacts to them,' the writer Evgeny Morozov, who hosted a podcast series about Dr. Brodey, 'A Sense of Rebellion,' said in an email.
The lab never produced a marketable product, but the two men's thinking took hold in corners of the Boston academic world where researchers were tackling similar foundational questions about the coming waves of technology. The industrial era saw humans bend themselves in the service of machines, Dr. Brodey and others believed; in the Information Era, they asked, could that relationship be reversed?
When the money for the lab ran out, Dr. Brodey and Johnson relocated to a clothing-optional commune in Milford, N.H., where they restarted their work under the name Ecology Tool and Toy. Among their projects was a house built of balloons coated in spray foam and a patent for soft control materials, though again nothing ever went into production.
Dr. Brodey and Dr. Johnson built a home made of balloons and foam in Milford, N.H.
BRODEY FAMILY/NYT
Dr. Brodey married Jane Tolson in 1957. They divorced in 1970. He married Karene Lyngholm in 2005.
Along with his son Benjamin, from his first marriage, and his wife, he leaves two other sons, John and Ivan, and two daughters, Kim and Lisa Brodey, also from his first marriage; a stepson, Mathias Lyngholm-Dardeau; 14 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
By 1972 Dr. Brodey had become frustrated and disillusioned with the United States. It was clear, he said, that corporations would never support the transformational technology he envisioned; at the same time, with the hippie era waning and the Vietnam War ongoing, he lost faith that change would come anytime soon.
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He moved to Norway, and, a few years later, renounced his citizenship and took up Maoism. For a time he worked as a laborer in an iron foundry. He lived in China in the early 1980s, teaching at Tianjin University, but he eventually found Chinese Communism likewise disillusioning and returned to Norway.
There he founded Unite Against Racism, a group opposed to a rising wave of neo-Nazism in Norway. And he taught at the Technical University in Oslo, where he continued to advocate for technologies that would enhance human creativity.
In recent years, his son Benjamin said, Dr. Brodey had grown cautiously optimistic about developments in artificial intelligence. Despite being built on the sort of large language models that Minsky would have supported, he believed it could yet be the sort of 'soft,' creativity-enhancing technology he had long dreamed about.
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