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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 -
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, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries – possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities. However, there is nothing in the industrial tradition which forbids an industrialist to make a sure and quick profit, and to get out before the crash touches him personally.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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