Tag: Norbert Wiener – The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
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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 -
When we consider a problem of nature such as that of atomic reactions and atomic explosives, the largest single item of information which we can make public is that they exist. Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty percent of his way toward that answer.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Where a man’s word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
One may get a remarkable semblance of a language like English by taking a sequence of words, or pairs of words, or triads of words, according to the statistical frequency with which they occur in the language, and the gibberish thus obtained will have a remarkably persuasive similarity to good English. This meaningless simulacrum of intelligent speech is practically equivalent to significant language from the phonetic point of view, although it is semantically balderdash.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society -
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