Sean Carney

Tag: Cybernetics

  • All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

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    Sean Carney
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    I like to think (andthe sooner the better!)of a cybernetic meadowwhere mammals and computerslive together in mutuallyprogramming harmonylike pure watertouching clear sky. I like to think(right now, please!)of a cybernetic forestfilled with pines and electronicswhere deer stroll peacefullypast computersas if they were flowerswith spinning blossoms. I like to think(it has to be!)of a cybernetic ecologywhere…

  • The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

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    Sean Carney
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    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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Delegating Decision Making to Machines

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    Sean Carney
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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…

  • Norbert Wiener on Progress and Consequences

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    Sean Carney
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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…

  • Norbert Wiener on the Value of Labour and Automation

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    Sean Carney
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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
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    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…