Flo Conway > Quotes

“The world of the future will be an ever 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.”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“You know, he was very honest about it. He said, ‘What you do not use, you lose. These computers have so much potential, but they will ruin people’s brains.’ He said, ‘Swami, you will live to see it in the next century. I will not be here.”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“For him, information was not merely discrete or continuous, not strictly linear or even circular, not matter or energy, but something altogether new, extended in space and time—and very often alive. In”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“While not averse to commercial enterprise, he viewed the exploitation of information to the detriment of those human values as a threat to the wealth of nations, to their security, and to their very survival, and he called for the “unhampered exchange” of knowledge and information in every form.”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“Unlike a computer or a brain, Wiener observed, the channels of communication in society were formed, not from wires or neural nets, but from the exchange of information between individuals using language and nonverbal communication, from learning and group communication in families and larger social organizations, and from the exchange of knowledge and experience among people of different cultures. Drawing”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“The impact of the thinking machine will be a shock certainly of comparable order to that of the atomic bomb.” He”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“Of all of these anti-homeostatic factors in society, the control of the means of communication is the most effective and most important.”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“The automatic factory could not fail to raise new social problems [as it] threatens to replace [human workers] completely by mechanical agencies. . . . On the other hand, it creates a new demand for the highly skillful professional man who can organize the order of operations.... If these changes . . . come upon us in a haphazard and ill-organized way, we may well be in for the greatest period of unemployment we have yet seen. It seemed . . . quite possible that we could avoid a catastrophe of this sort, but if so, it would only be by much thinking, and not by waiting supinely until the catastrophe is upon us.”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics

“Indeed, Wiener was the first information-age forebear to consider information, not as a tangible good to be bought and sold, but as “content”—whether that content was an ephemeral commodity like the news, a body of scientific knowledge, or the living substance of everyday experience human beings extracted from the world around them. To”
― Flo Conway, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics