At the age of 101, the "opponent" of Marvin Minsky, the father of AI, has passed away. He spent his whole life searching for another kind of AI.

Warren Brodey, an AI pioneer with a legendary life, passed away at the age of 101. This thinker, originally a psychiatrist, explored the path of using technology to unleash human potential at MIT when AI was just in its infancy. His pioneering work in complex systems and responsive technology laid the foundation for the development of fields such as AI.

On August 10, Warren Brodey, a visionary at the dawn of the information age, passed away at home at the age of 101.

Warren Brodey (1924 - 2025)

With his background as a psychiatrist, he put forward a series of far - reaching ideas on the direction of using technology to unleash human potential, paving the way for research in revolutionary fields such as AI at the dawn of the information age.

Brodey's life was full of unexpected twists: he participated in the CIA - funded research on extrasensory perception, lived in a celestial village in New England, and worked as a worker in an iron foundry in Oslo.

Although he was trained as a medical doctor, Brodey's thoughts were imaginative and covered a wide range of fields: architecture, toy design, acoustics, and network computing, which seemingly had nothing to do with each other.

Based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he interacted with thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Negroponte, and Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers in the field of AI.

The Convergence of Hard Science and New Age Thought

Brodey's influence reached its peak in the early 1970s.

It was a period when hard science converged with New Age thought, and people were full of radical optimism about the technology - driven future of the post - industrial era.

He explored those almost crazy questions that could only be seriously proposed in that turbulent era, such as:

Can we explore technology, but can technology explore us?

Can we design a room to make you more creative?

His ideas were rooted in cybernetics, an interdisciplinary approach used to study the complexity of dynamic systems such as cities, organisms, families, and computer networks.

Although cybernetics had existed since the end of World War II, it was not until the late 1960s, as a reflection on the rigid industrial society, that it was truly deeply ingrained in the academic community.

In his early career as a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., Dr. Brodey was the first to apply cybernetics to family research.

In the research, he regarded the family as a system, which had its internal driving forces and was also affected by external systems. For example, if parents had work problems, it might cause turmoil within the family.

At the Forefront of AI Research

In 1965, Brodey resolutely gave up his well - paid private practice and went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take an unpaid position, which was then the forefront center of cybernetics and AI research.

Later, he obtained research funds through a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Like many of his colleagues in Cambridge, Massachusetts at that time, Brodey believed that the rapid development of computing technology brought a choice:

These technological advancements could either be used to strengthen the existing society or greatly enhance human potential in a revolutionary way.

Brodey did not agree with the AI path based on processing massive amounts of data proposed by Minsky and others. And he spent the rest of his life advocating the latter option.

At the same time, he was always vigilant about the risk that capitalism would force humans to choose the former.

In 1967, when Brodey wrote an article for the design theory journal "Landscape", he believed that to this day, we still have not given our environment this creative flexibility:

The intelligence we usually achieve is uncreative, stupid, and largely goes against human well - being. We allow these rigid machines to multiply and control us.

But he was not entirely pessimistic about the future of AI.

In the same year, at a conference on digital technology and creativity held in Manhattan, he gave a speech and mentioned:

The new technology provides us with new potential to live in a personalized environment, provided that we can break free from the old mass - production mindset.

Context is Everything: Early Experiences and the Germination of Ideas

Brodey was born in Toronto on January 25, 1924.

His father, Abraham Brody, was a doctor.

His mother, Blanche (Levy) Brodey, helped dozens of Jewish refugees fleeing from Europe obtain travel permits and visas in the years before World War II.

In 1947, Brodey obtained a medical degree from the University of Toronto.

After completing his psychiatric residency, he served as the deputy director of the Worcester Child Guidance Center in Massachusetts and a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

In 1959, he became a clinical professor at Georgetown University.

While pursuing his qualification as a psychoanalyst, he also served as a consultant for a CIA - funded research on the development of extraordinary hearing in the blind.

These experiences exposed him to an idea:

Our environment, whether natural or man - made, shapes our thoughts.

Thus, Brodey had a new idea: context is everything.

Subsequently, he brought this belief to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Brodey (right) and Avery Johnson

In 1967, Brodey and another researcher, Avery Johnson, jointly founded the Environmental Ecology Laboratory, which was located in a building on an industrial dock in Boston.

Their research direction was to create an environment that could co - evolve with human users and promote the evolution of the users themselves.

There, they jointly developed "soft architecture" and "soft materials", which could respond to human interaction, such as:

· The rubber surface filled with Freon would change shape according to body temperature;

· The "dancing suit" could change music according to the wearer's movements.

The writer Evgeny Morozov believed that Brodey and Avery Johnson hoped to help people break free from the shackles of mass - produced homogeneous goods and interfaces through the research of such materials, inspire users to learn and think, and make corresponding responses to reality.

The foam house built by Brodey and Johnson in Milford, New Hampshire, where they worked under the name of "Ecological Tools and Toys".

Although their laboratory never produced any commercially viable products, their ideas took root in some corners of the Boston academic community.

These ideas inspired researchers there to explore similar fundamental questions in the upcoming technological wave:

In the industrial era, people witnessed humans bowing to machines. In the information era, can the master - servant relationship between humans and machines be reversed?

After the laboratory ran out of funds, Brodey and Avery Johnson moved to a nudist commune in Milford, New Hampshire, and restarted their work under the name of "Ecological Tools and Toys".

Their projects included a house built with a balloon covered with spray foam and a patent on soft control materials.

Similarly, these projects had no possibility of mass production.

Worked as an Iron Foundry Worker and Taught in China

Brodey had two marriages.

In 1957, Brodey married Jane Tolson, and they divorced in 1970.

In 2005, Brodey married Karene Lyngholm.

His survivors include:

His second wife, Karene, his son Benjamin from his first marriage, two other sons, John and Ivan, two daughters, Kim and Lisa Brodey, a step - son, Mathias Lyngholm - Dardeau, 14 grandchildren, and 5 great - grandchildren.

In 1972, Brodey was disillusioned with the United States and moved to Norway.

In 1972, Brodey saw an obvious trend in the United States: large companies would never support the transformative technology he envisioned.

Meanwhile, with the end of the hippie era and the continuation of the Vietnam War, there would be no significant changes in the short term.

Feeling frustrated and disillusioned, Brodey decided to move to Norway and gave up his US citizenship a few years later.

In 1977, he started working as a worker in an iron foundry in Oslo.

In the early 1980s, he came to China and taught cybernetics at Tianjin University.

A few years later, he returned to Norway, dedicated himself to the development of tactile interfaces, and regularly contributed articles to the Norwegian magazine "Flux".

There, he founded the organization "Unite Against Racism" to combat the rising wave of neo - Nazism in Norway.

He also taught at the Oslo University of Technology and continued to advocate for technology that could enhance human creativity.

His son Benjamin said: In recent years, Dr. Brodey had become cautiously optimistic about the development of AI.

Although today's AI is based on the large - language models advocated by Dr. Minsky and others, Brodey believed that it still had the potential to become the "flexible" technology that could inspire human creativity, which he had dreamed of all his life.

Reference:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/technology/warren-brodey-dead.html 

This article is from the WeChat official account "New Intelligence Yuan". The author is New Intelligence Yuan. It is published by 36Kr with permission.