In the 1940's, nobody was talking about "screen time." Yet Norbert Wiener was already studying the forces that would later fuel parental bargaining and childhood meltdowns. He called it cybernetics: the science of control and communication across both machines and people. This idea was born out of World War II, when Wiener worked on antiaircraft systems designed to predict and adjust to the movements of enemy pilots. The guns learned where you were going and got more accurate with each shot.