Regardless, before giving an outline of the questions Weiner raises one has to define what the nature of 'golem' is in the context of the essays. This is another area where the time when the book was written starts to become relevant. And certainly anyone philosophizing now who wishes to be relevant would need to satiate that attitude. Weiner, however, was writing for a time when computers weren't so pervasive, as I touched on above with the somewhat curious origin of IBM's moniker. Yet, if Weiner's introduction seemed stuffy then his focus upon 'machines' is extremely interesting in a modern context.
Computers really seem to have seized people's minds.
We have desktop systems and embedded technologies with all sorts of industrial applications. All of these systems are based around the idea of a computer that operates on a fetch, decode, execute method. The lingua franca of all these computer systems is the idea of an operating system. The OS allows people who don't necessarily have a deep understanding of computer hardware to run programs. I think that Weiner's discussion is much more general than the kind that would occur today.