The intellectual debt of extropian transhumanism to the scientific and philosophical ideas advanced by Norbert Wiener is complex and ambivalent, and indeed admits of considerable common ground between the two viewpoints – for example, the moralistic sense of entropy as an ‘evil’ that civilized people must conquer. Wiener's cybernetic optimism, such as it is, proceeds largely from a theologically derived distinction between Augustinian and Manichean diabolisms: whereas the Manichean devil is as clever as he is malevolent, a conscious adversary with whom humankind is engaged in a perpetual battle of wits, the Augustinian devil is dumb and passive. He has no recourse to ploys and stratagems, and therefore ‘may be defeated by our intelligence as thoroughly as by a sprinkle of holy water.’ Happily for us, entropy is an Augustinian evil: a blind and impersonal force that can be studied and effectively resisted by human ingenuity, as surely as pathogenic bacteria may be subdued by antibiotics, or gravity momentarily thwarted by aircraft and rockets. In the near term, at least, Wiener's techno-optimism is robust and intrepid.

Yet while the extropians eagerly take up Wiener's campaign against ‘the arch enemy’ and similarly brandish human intellect and machine computation as talismans against it, they miss his overarching argument about the myth of progress. Theirs is – in Wiener's own terms – an infantile ‘Santa Claus’ mentality that seeks ‘to build up a Heaven on Earth in which unpleasantness has no place,’ naïvely aspiring to ‘an eternal progress, and a continual ascent to Bigger and Better Things.’ Wiener broadly condemns any such transcendental ideation: ‘The simple faith in progress,’ he warns, ‘is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.’

The disconnect between Wiener and his bastard intellectual offspring may be attributable in part to the latter's maturation in a technoscape established and fundamentally shaped by the very cybernetic technologies Wiener and his colleagues introduced, which by the close of the twentieth century is organized under what Hayles has termed the ‘Regime of Computation.’