Category: 📚 Books
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
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