After the Second World War, philosophers were playing a bit of a game of catch up behind the scientists. The war machine had driven all sorts of advancement, but there wasn’t a lot of thought about the impacts to people or society of these advancements. Norbert Wiener’s book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society brings a sociologists perspective to examine the impacts resulting from automation and communication.
While the examination communication has a long scholarly history, recent advances had not only changed the speed of communication but also broadened the list of potential senders and recipients to now include machines in addition to people. Machines were moving past a stage in their development of simply reacting to their environments to also learning and changing their behavior based on longer-term experience.
The book examines these changes through a number of lenses examining the impact on institutions, workplaces, professions, and society at large. Weiner is clearly excited by some of the prospects that these changes may bring, but also notes a number of potential conflicts and shortfalls which read as prescient in today’s environment.
I appreciated his discussion on change and people’s reactions to it. While some people want to opt-out of some societal changes, at the end of the day the environment is changing around them, and they are going to have to at least accommodate the change in their own lives. We are all a part of society, for better or worse, and this dictates the options available to us.
Overall I found the book to be an enjoyable, thought provoking, and quotable read; and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wants to dive into the deeper background of today’s discussions of responsible AI and ethics.
Quotes
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It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having entropy like sets of states in the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of the disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner which we may look forward to as worthy of our dignity.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the result of increased communication, but also an increased mastery over nature which, on a limited planet like earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival. We are the slaves of our technical improvement and we can no more return a New Hampshire farm to the self-contained state in which it was maintained in 1800 than we can, by taking thought, add a cubit to our stature or, what is more to the point, diminish it. We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society
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Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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One may get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a sequence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language, and the gibberish thus obtained will have a remarkably persuasive similarity to good English. This meaningless simulacrum of intelligent speech is practically equivalent to significant language from the phonetic point of view, although it is semantically balderdash.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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Where a man’s word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
Metadata
Title: The Human Use of Human Beings
Author: Norbert Wiener
Publication Date: 1954 (revised second edition)
Publisher: Doubleday & Company
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