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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When we consider a problem of nature such as that of atomic reactions and atomic explosives, the largest single item of information which we can make public is that they exist. Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty percent of his way toward that answer.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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I am writing this book primarily for Americans in whose environment questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American crierion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market. This is the official doctrine of an orthodoxy which it is becoming more and more perilous for a resident of the United States to question. It is perhaps worth while to point out that it does not represent a universal basis of human values: that it corresponds neither to the doctrine of the Church, which seeks for the salvation of the human soul, nor to that of Marxism, which values a society for its realization of certain specific ideals of human well-being. The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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What is true of England is true of New England, which has discovered that it is often a far more expensive matter to modernize an industry than to scrap it and start somewhere else. Quite apart from the difficulties of having a relatively strict industrial law and an advanced labour policy, one of the chief reasons that New England is being deserted by the textile mills is that, frankly, they prefer not to be hampered by a century of traditions. Thus, even in the most material field, production and security are in the long run matters of continued invention and development.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange. In anything like a normal situation, it is both far more difficult and far more important for us to ensure that we have such an adequate knowledge than to ensure that some possible enemy does not have it.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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Some of my friends have even asserted that a Ph.D. thesis should be the greatest scientific work a man has ever done and perhaps ever will do, and should wait until he is thoroughly able to state his life work. I do not go along with this. I mean merely that if the thesis is not in fact such an overwhelming task, it should at least be in intention the gateway to vigorous creative work.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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I speak here with feeling which is more intense as far as concerns the scientific artist than the conventional artist, because it is in science that I have first chosen to say something. What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated into many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen. Moreover, I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality because the people who have elected communication as a career so often have nothing more to communicate.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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What the feedback and the vacuum tube have made possible is not the sporadic design of individual automatic mechanisms, but a general policy for the construction of automatic mechanisms of the most varied type. In this they have been reinforced by our new theoretical treatment of communication, which takes fill cognizance of the possibilities of communication between machine and machine. It is this conjunction of circumstances which now renders possible the new automatic age.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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The machine plays no favourites between manual labour and white-collar labour. Thus the possible fields into which the new industrial revolution is likely to penetrative are very extensive, and include all labour performing judgements of a low level, in much the same way as the displaced labour of the earlier industrial revolution included every aspect of human power. There will, of course, be trades into which the new industrial revolution will not penetrative either because the new control machines are not economical in industries on so small a scale as not to be able to carry the considerable capital costs involved, or because their work is so varied that a new taping will be necessary for almost every job.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. Their whole propaganda is to the effect that it must not be considered as the business of the government but must be left open to whatever entrepreneurs wish to invest money in it. We also know that they have very few inhibitions when it comes to taking all the profit out of an industry that there is to be taken and then letting the public pick up the pieces. This is the history of the lumber and mining industries, and is part of what we have called in another chapter the traditional American philosophy of progress.
Under these circumstances, industry will be flooded with the new tools to the extent that they appear to yield immediate profits, irrespective of what long-time damage they can do.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can only achieve great things by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.
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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