Tag: Automation
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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 or society of these advancements. Norbert Wiener’s book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics…
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Norbert Wiener on Delegating Decision Making to Machines
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…
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Norbert Wiener on the Value of Labour and Automation
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,…
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Norbert Wiener on Automation and Labour
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…