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Warren Brodey, who used his background as a psychiatrist to develop wide-ranging ideas about the liberating possibilities of technology at the dawn of the information age — ideas that helped lay the groundwork for revolutionary fields like artificial intelligence — died on Aug. 10 at his home in Oslo. He was 101.
His son Benjamin confirmed the death.
Dr. Brodey led a life of unexpected turns, which included stints working on C.I.A.-funded studies on extrasensory perception, living in a New England nudist colony and embracing Maoism in a Scandinavian ironworks.
Although he formally trained as a physician, his thinking sprawled across topics as disparate as architecture, toy design, acoustics and network computing. From his base at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he swapped ideas with other unconventional thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Nicholas Negroponte and Marvin Minsky, one of the intellectual forefathers of artificial intelligence.
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.
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?”
Read full story about Brodey’s legacy.