The Human Use of Human Beings Quotes

“The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns
that perpetuate themselves.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“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 achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors—that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message. How else do we employ our radio than to transmit patterns of sound, and our television set than to transmit patterns of light? It is amusing as well as instructive to consider what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, of the human brain with its memories and cross connections, so that a hypothetical receiving instrument could re-embody these messages in appropriate matter,”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value.

This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness.

In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement o man.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“I repeat, 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 the 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

“For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“Just as entropy is a measure of 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. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

“We have already seen that certain organisms, such as man, tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation. Life is an island here and now in a dying world.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“an adequate theory of language as a game should distinguish between these two varieties of language, one of which is intended primarily to convey information and the other primarily to impose a point of view against a willful opposition. I do not know if any philologist has yet made the technical observations and theoretical propositions which are necessary to distinguish these two classes of language for our purposes, but I am quite sure that they are substantially different forms.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“as efficient as communications’ mechanisms become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it. I have already referred to an interesting view of language made by a cybernetically-minded philologist—that speech is a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“We have thus established the basis in man for the simplest element of his communication: namely, the communication of man with man by the immediate use of language, when two men are face to face with one another. The inventions of the telephone, the telegraph, and other similar means of communication have shown that this capacity is not intrinsically restricted to the immediate presence of the individual, for we have many means to carry this tool of communication to the ends of the earth. Among primitive groups the size of the community for an effective communal life is restricted by the difficulty of transmitting language. For many millennia, this difficulty was enough to reduce the optimum size of the state to something of the order of a few million people, and generally fewer. It will be noted that the great empires which transcended this limited size were held together by improved means of communication.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“the process of transmitting information may involve several consecutive stages of transmission following one another in addition to the final or effective stage; and between any two of these there will be an act of translation, capable of dissipating information. That information may be dissipated but not gained, is, as we have seen, the cybernetic form of the second law of thermodynamics.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machines or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“The physiological condition for memory and hence for learning seems to be a certain continuity of organization, which allows the alterations produced by outer sense impressions to be retained as more or less permanent changes of structure or function . Metamorphosis is too radical to leave much lasting record of these changes. It is indeed hard to conceive of a memory of any precision which can survive this process of radical internal reconstruction.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“Learning, like more primitive forms of feedback, is a process which reads differently forward and backward in time. The whole conception of the apparently purposive organism, whether it is mechanical, biological, or social, is that of an arrow with a particular direction in the stream of time rather than that of a line segment facing both ways which we may regard as going in either direction.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“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

“It is difficult for the average person to achieve an historical perspective in which progress shall have been reduced to its proper dimensions.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“Darwin’s great innovation in the theory of evolution was that he conceived of it not as a Lamarckian spontaneous ascent from higher to higher and from better to better, but as a phenomenon in which living beings showed (a) a spontaneous tendency to develop in many directions, and (b) a tendency to follow the pattern of their ancestors. The combination of these two effects was to prune an overlush developing nature and to deprive it of those organisms which were ill-adapted to their environment, by a process of “natural selection.” The result of this pruning was to leave a residual pattern of forms of life more or less well adapted to their environment. This residual pattern, according to Darwin, assumes the appearance of universal purposiveness.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“If we wish to use the word “life” to cover all phenomena which locally swim upstream against the current of increasing entropy, we are at liberty to do so. However, we shall then include many astronomical phenomena which have only the shadiest resemblance to life as we ordinarily know it. It is in my opinion, therefore, best to avoid all question-begging epithets such as “life,” “soul,” “vitalism,” and the like, and say merely in connection with 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.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“In a system which is not in equilibrium, or in part of such a system, entropy need not increase. It may, in fact, decrease locally. Perhaps this non-equilibrium of the world about us is merely a stage in a downhill course which will ultimately lead to equilibrium. Sooner or later we shall die, and it is highly probable that the whole universe around us will die the heat death, in which the world shall be reduced to one vast temperature equilibrium in which nothing really new ever happens”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“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

“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.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.1”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“One interesting change that has taken place is that in a probabilistic world we no longer deal with quantities and statements which concern a specific, real universe as a whole but ask instead questions which may find their answers in a large number of similar universes. Thus chance has been admitted, not merely as a mathematical tool for physics, but as part of its warp and weft. This recognition of an element of incomplete determinism, almost an irrationality in the world, is in a certain way parallel to Freud’s admission of a deep irrational component in human conduct and thought.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society

“Gibbs’ introduction of probability into physics occurred well before there was an adequate theory of the sort of probability he needed. But for all these gaps it is, I am convinced, Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics. This revolution has had the effect that physics now no longer claims to deal with what will always happen, but rather with what will happen with an overwhelming probability. At the beginning in Gibbs’ own work this contingent attitude was superimposed on a Newtonian base in which the elements whose probability was to be discussed were systems obeying all of the Newtonian laws.”
― Norbert Wiener, The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society