The former Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher helped advance cybernetics, a field that influenced machine learning, the dominant form of artificial intelligence today. He was born in Toronto in January 1924 and died last week in Oslo. (The New York Times)

Talking point: How should machines and humans interact, and should one side be in control? Brodey—a psychiatrist by training, sometime Maoist by ideology, and cyberneticist by choice—proposed a sort of partnership of joint discovery, in which computers could be creative. Canadian researchers helped lay the groundwork for modern AI systems, which are built on top of vast quantities of data processed by layered algorithms using powerful chips. Brodey worried such an approach would lead to machines that were “stupid and in large measure hostile to human well-being.” His writings have inspired a new generation of intellectuals like Evgeny Morozov, who explore the social and economic problems created by dominant tech platforms and AI firms.