Sean Carney

Author: Sean Carney

  • Norbert Wiener on Progress and Consequences

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    Sean Carney
    in

    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…

  • Norbert Wiener on the Value of Labour and Automation

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    Sean Carney
    in

    Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we may think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labour. Any labour which competes with slave labour must accept the economic conditions of slave labour. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation,…

  • Norbert Wiener on Innovation and Regulation

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    Sean Carney
    in

    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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Automation and Labour

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    Sean Carney
    in

    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…

  • Norbert Wiener on the Automatic Age

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    Sean Carney
    in

    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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Education and Originality

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    Sean Carney
    in

    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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Doctorate Studies

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    Sean Carney
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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…

  • Norbert Wiener on the Exchange of Knowledge and Secrecy

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    Sean Carney
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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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Modernizing Industry

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    Sean Carney
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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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Information as a Commodity

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    Sean Carney
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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…