Norbert Wiener (1894–1964)

Norbert Wiener wrote these essays for the interested layman shortly before his unexpected death in his seventieth year. It was issued posthumously and seems like his testament. Wiener was one of the towering pioneers of what is now known as computer science. He coined the term cybernetics. Beyond that, he was one of those rare scientific innovators concerned about his breakthroughs' social and ethical implications.
Reading this book now, more than a half-century after it came out, offers an show more exciting window into the time when the potential of "learning machines" was just beginning to be evident. One of the examples Wiener uses is a machine programmed to play checkers that had been able to learn from each game it played and had reached the point where it would never lose. His expectation that the same would happen with a chess-playing machine took a bit longer than the ten years he expected, though.
Wiener had presented the ideas in these essays in various settings. His assertion that our relation to machines that learn and reproduce themselves is comparable to the traditional notion of God's relation to man seemed blasphemous to some listeners at the time. For some, the indignation was on religious grounds; for others (biologists), the notion of machines made of inorganic matter could be compared to biological life-forms seemed heretical.
There is little wasted verbiage in this book. At times, it is aphoristic. I liked his reworking of the words of Christ: "Render unto man the things which are man's and unto the computer the things which are the computer's." Of course, this is easier said than put into practice. Many of his innovations led to leaps in productivity, but he was bothered by the human cost of workers made redundant by automation, a problem that remains with us.
I especially enjoyed Wiener's account of an essay, "Science and Society," that he had published in a Soviet academic journal a few years earlier. He seemed amused, but not surprised, that the same number of the journal ran a rebuttal—longer than his essay—from an orthodox Marxist standpoint. He suggested that, had he published it in the West instead, it would have been rebutted in the name of free enterprise. His point had been that science made an important contribution to the homeostasis (balance) of the community, yet its contribution had to be assessed anew every generation or so. He was neither anti-Marxist nor anti-Capitalist, Wiener maintained, but anti-rigidity.
Given that stance, Wiener might be skeptical of a reader coming to his book two generations after publication. But then again, his point was not that we should throw out scientific contributions after twenty-years, but that they should be reassessed. I think a reassessment of Wiener's contribution, on the evidence of this slim book, is that we continue to need scientists who are humane while at the same time unafraid to challenge old orthodoxies. show less

In a little Thai Buddhist tract about the Kalama Sutta, how to deal with an overabundance of options, I read a line about computers. That is, though they are powerful, the mind of the designers of the gadgets/tools/programs is that which sets the intention of the device/program's interaction within and between the beings using and/or used by it. Since these minds aren't necessarily held to any standard of enlightenment or even humanistic morals, the tract advises: "computer's shouldn't be show more worshiped so much."

In this book, the only Norbert Wiener text I've read, I was a bit surprised to find a similar sentiment where he criticizes "gadget worshippers" (53) for not taking into account unforseen consequences of technological "magic." Reading it with a critical eye on motivation, as I watch the world be further transformed by tech development, including my home city of Seattle being completely remade into new temples of worship for The Code, its acolytes with their heads in the cloud. He seems to be aware of how AI will probably develop, and possibly is a bit weary of possibilities, but not altogether against them or for them. Instead he points out how the religious (and I'd say, nonsecular humanist) criticism and fear of AI and robotic development is founded, and explains in detail how machines can reproduce themselves.

The motive for the creation of machines and AI may not be on the evil side of the dualistic coin. The argument i read in this text is that doomsday weaponry is the real evil and mechanistic complication and development to the point of AI and self-organizing system is a step in evolutionary curiosity and natural human ingenuity. Reading this in the period of ubiquitous computing and Phillip K. Dick shaped robots making jokes about putting humans in zoos, I still think that creation of complex tools and even other beings isn't scary, it's strong vortexes of capital and power that encourages the direction of such development. The vectors of such development are still influenced by corporate agendas, and even though people like Wiener may have chose not to emphasize the control aspect of cybernetics as much as the systemic efficiency, I'm witnessing a magnetism to develop a future where the minds of the few directly affect the lives of the many, and all systems of the earth are put under concrete (for as long as you can keep them down: a biologist friend of mine saw an abandoned highway completely destroyed by trees growing through it because it was easier for them to grow there than in the thicket of roots). I would emphasize that through the other force I'm seeing arising, involving play, creation for curiosity and symbiogenesis of nonanthropocentric life systems, the tools and epistemology of cybernetics can be used to benefit, but if we keep our underlying metaphors of control and military-industrial complex phrasing like Wiener and many authors of programming manuals seem have as their psyhophysical OSes, we're going to fail and make the world even more damaged; I have a hard time seeing any other future within these conditions.

Anyways, I'm editorializing. I was actually expecting to read Norbert Wiener as being a way worse person, but besides the uncomfortable references to Hitler and Eichmann and the sketchy red black and white cover inciting paranoia about the fascist ties to futurism, I feel that Wiener was acting based on a type of passionate invention. It also made me wonder how the discussion of mechanical development vs religious/humanistic beliefs has developed in since the 60s when this was written. There seems to be a polarization still, with people mostly leaning towards either technological saviorism or total back-to-nature neopioneerism that I see in America at least, which could ironically destroy the forest just as bad, as Alaska's gentrification and development encouraged by TV shows like "Alaska: The Final Frontier" seem to encourage using the guise of naturalism. A magazine display painted this picture out very nicely to me: the cover of Wired showed Jerry Seinfeld (upper class celeb) wearing Google Glass, propped up on the rack next to American Pioneer magazine with a drawing of the archetype of working class masculinity, a coon-skin hat wearing hunter perfectly capable of self-sustaining in the (hard to find) wilderness.

The title of this book implies this continuing conversation: what are the intersections between what may control us and/or influence us, human control and/or influence over other life, and the patterns we base these actions on such as industry and market capitalism or free market open source type development? There are many voices to listen to along these lines, and not one in particular I feel is worthy of worship. show less

Aqui sou peixe n'água. Minha área é a Teoria da Informação e da Comunicação lançada por Shannon & Weaver nos anos 1940s e explicada por Wiener - cujo lema ¨Viver adequadamente é viver com a informação adequada¨ tem sido meu lema ao longo da vida profissional, ideológica e cultural. O livro nos ensina as teorias de Newton e Bergson, a Mecânica Estatística, a Retroalimentação, a relação entre computadores e n osso sistema nervoso, o Gestaltismo, a relação entre show more informação (Semântica), linguagem (Sintaxe) e sociedade (Pragmática) show less

I was a brand new doctoral student, hoping one day to consider myself an expert in communication arts. I was enrolled in Wendell Johnson’s course in general semantics, doing well, poring over his People in Quandaries, listening to his every recommendation. Oh, I was also enrolled in a Thoreau seminar, a course in contemporary British literature, and something that I think may have been called Teaching Reading to College Students and Adults; and to pay my way, I was teaching eighth graders show more at University High School. But nothing challenged my thinking like general semantics. “You should read Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings,” he said to his auditorium class of more than a hundred students. So, dutiful young scholar that I was, I made my way to the Paper Place and picked up the 95¢ paperback (Doubleday, 1954).

I’m not sure how many times I read the first chapter, but by the time I finished I felt confident enough to label the last paragraph IMP SUMM, “important summary,” in my shorthand. (You must understand that I had never had a course in physics; I didn’t even know the meaning of the word cybernetics in the subtitle: Cybernetics and Society; and I had never understood entropy.)

“We have seen in this chapter the fundamental unity of a complex of ideas which until recently had not been sufficiently associated with one another, namely, the contingent views of physics that [Willard] Gibbs introduced as a modification of the traditional, Newtonian conventions, the Augustinian attitude toward order and conduct which is demanded by this view, and the theory of the message among men, machines, and in society as a sequence of events in time which, though it itself has a certain contingency, strives to hold back nature’s tendency toward disorder by adjusting its parts to various purposive ends.”

I suspect that this first chapter made me wonder if I didn’t need to be taking a course myself that would teach college students and adults how to read. But one or two messages I heard loud and clear, right away. Entropy, at least, I now understood:

“As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs’ universe order is least probable, chaos most probable.” (And after Gibbs, physics is concerned not about what is real or provable, but about what is probable.)

I recognized the biblical Leviathan, the monster underlying the surface of our world, threatening to unleash chaos at any moment. The sense of order, according to these prophets of antiquity, is just the crust of the earth, fragile, insubstantial, artificial. “In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet.” In such a world, the idea of progress, e e cummings had taught me to say, “is a comfortable disease.” Wiener reminded me that to neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jew was “this world” a happy, well-ordered, progressive place. The Communist, he said, “is just as skeptical of the Big Rock Candy Mountains of the Future as of the Pie in the Sky when you Die.” Neither are Islam or Buddhism any more receptive to ideal progress. To the latter, the hope is “for Nirvana and a release from the external Wheel of Circumstances.”

So the messages I heard clearly in the opening of Wiener’s book were clear. You can imagine my trepidation. (You must understand that I was also a fundamentalist Christian, having just recently decided not to enter my church’s ministry; I was a young husband and a brand new father.) But I recognized too, and gratefully, that the basis of all of Wiener’s work, of his cybernetic vision, was a modified hope: it is best to say “in connection with [new automated] machines that there is no reason why they may not resemble human beings in representing pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the large entropy tends to increase.” Aha. Pockets of decreasing entropy. “Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we make look forward as worthy of our dignity.” Ah so. Human decencies and values. “We are not yet spectators at the last stages of the world’s death.”

But he does not place his hope in a naive idealism, nor does he express faith in the certainty of scientific progress. “An increased mastery over nature,” he asserts with astute prescience, “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.” Then he continues with advice that will underlie his messages throughout the rest of the book: “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. . . . Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.”

The remaining nine chapters of the book develop a science of information and the human value of communication. We must analyze and adapt to information that is new and unsettling, for only what is challenging embodies information that is useful. He uses an analogy to express this that warms an English teacher’s heart: “. . . the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.” With what pleasure I underlined that one. In fact, one of the features of Wiener’s writing that renders it so provocative is his facility in finding metaphors and verbal maxims that illuminate, helping the common reader to follow him into unfamiliar territory.

The thesis of his next chapter, “Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior,” is simply stated but infinitely complex in its potential impact: Man “has the physiological and hence intellectual equipment to adapt himself to radical changes.” As the son of a philologist, he writes a chapter on “The Mechanism and History of Language,” which he calls amateurish, but is insightful though it is familiar territory to students of language. Speaking of the history of, say, the Indo-European language group, he says, “Thus evolutionism in language antedates the refined Darwinian evolutionism in biology.” In his chapter on “Communication and the Law,” he insists that the first duty of law [and of legislation] is to know what it wants. Criminal law falls far short:

“Law seems to consider punishment, now as a threat to discourage other possible criminals, now as a ritual act of expiation on the part of the guilty man, now as a device for removing him from society and for protecting the latter from the danger of repeated misconduct, and now as an agency for the social and moral reform of the individual. These are four different tasks, to be accomplished by four different methods; and unless we know an accurate way of proportioning them, our whole attitude to the criminal will be at cross-purposes.” Anyone with any knowledge of the working of the USAmerican prison systems will say a hearty Amen! to that.

But perhaps the most sensitive and the most currently relevant chapter is the one entitled appropriately, “Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy.” Listen, and reflect upon, just a few of his statements:

“Just as entropy tends to increase spontaneously in a closed system, so information tends to decrease; just as entropy is a measure of disorder, so information is a measure of order.”

“. . . a piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of the community, must say something substantially different from the community’s previous common stock of information.”

“The idea that information can be [secretly] stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation in its value is false.”

“Information is more a matter of process than of storage.”

“An over-all policy in matters of secrecy almost always must involve the consideration of many more things than secrecy itself.”

“The loyalty to humanity which can be subverted by a skillful distribution of administrative sugar plums will be followed by a loyalty to official superiors lasting just so long as we have the bigger sugar plums to distribute.”

Personally, I am fairly certain that today’s political elite are more interested in hiding the bigger sugar plums for themselves than they are in any “loyalty to humanity.”

Evangelists and politicians in this current milieu, scholars and educators, scientists and critics of science need to read the last page of this provocative book: “I have said that science is impossible without faith. . . . [for] without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. . . . ¶ Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith.” show less