Category: 📢 Media
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When God rescues your heart from its natural rebellion, and makes it new through your trust in him, your baptism and your following of Jesus, the way this newness works must be through your own decisions, your own thinking things through, your own will power (aided and strengthened at every point, Christians would say, by the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ own spirit).
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2 -
Forgiveness is more like the air in our lungs. There’s only room for you to inhale the next lungful when you’ve just breathed out the previous one. If you insist on withholding it, refusing to give someone the kiss of life they may desperately need, you won’t be able to take in any more yourself and you will suffocate very quickly.
N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2 -
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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…
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Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that it’s conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
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