Cibernética e sociedade: o uso humano de seres humanos

by Norbert Wiener, José Paulo Paes (translator)

Only a few books stand as landmarks in social and scientific upheaval. Norbert Wiener's classic is one in that small company. Founder of the science of cybernetics—the study of the relationship between computers and the human nervous system—Wiener was widely misunderstood as one who advocated the automation of human life. As this book reveals, his vision was much more complex and interesting. He hoped that machines would release people from relentless and repetitive drudgery in order to achieve more creative pursuits. At the same time he realized the danger of dehumanizing and displacement. His book examines the implications of cybernetics for education, law, language, science, technology, as he anticipates the enormous impact—in effect, a third industrial revolution—that the computer has had on our lives.

Genres: Philosophy, Science, Nonfiction, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Sociology, Psychology

190 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1949

About the author

Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician and philosopher. He was Professor of Mathematics at MIT. Wiener is considered the father of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society.

Reviews

[DJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughts on accelerated change, the singularity, neuroscience, evolution, and more from a man who refers to the last decade of the 19th century as "the nineties".

This book is the forerunner to a line of fantastic (yet, at times, exaggerated) works straddling mathematics, machines, and biology, known as the "cybernetics" movement. At times, this book suffers from the same affliction that Akira Kirosawa's films do - they seem cliched and unoriginal to the modern reader/viewer who has grown up in a creative world molded by their influence. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth a look for both its historical importance and Wiener's unique interweaving of disparate scientific fields.

Wiener is the first instance I've encountered of a writer adopting contemporary technology as a new framework through which to view the world. (I assume that there were others before him, but I suspect they would have been almost nonexistent before the first Industrial Revolution. New paradigms based on technology require huge technological leaps that occur within a generation for inspiration and I'm not sure there were any before then that qualify.) Today, this baton has been passed to those viewing the world as networks (i.e. Steven Johnson) and information (i.e. Seth Lloyd), but Wiener scooped them all.

Employing Claude Shannon's new information theory, Von Neumann's thoughts on computers, Gibbs' statistical physics, and his own keen intellect, Wiener muses on humans as patterns of information in the entropic flow of the universe, human "transmission" (teleportation), and even the social issues stemming from it, such as the economic leapfrog played by agile third-world economics and the dangers of a wholesale shift away from menial labor (and the ensuing creation of an entire generation with no place in the world). Actually, his awareness of the ethical issues implicated by the changes he describes are outstanding coming from a lifelong theoretical mathematician.

He also employs these paradigms in ways I hadn't seen before such as interpreting science as the decoding of nature's secrets. He describes each species and other entity in their world as adopting its own "secret codes" to communicate with allies and befuddle enemies (yes, this was the era when every scientist in America was employed by the US war effort in some fashion and Wiener indeed worked on code-breaking). Evolution then progresses as a constant effort for an entity in the world to maintain the integrity and secrecy of those communications against the continual efforts of competitors to decode them. Its a fascinating way to view evolution (both of biological species and non-living evolutionarily stable situations in our universe), but Wiener is careful to point out that it would be a mistake to view nature as seeking to keep her secrets from man. I'm not sure he gave a satisfactory justification for believing this beyond the fact that the entire endeavor of science presupposes that we are not being lead on a wild-goose chase. (Though honestly, the physics we're exploring know sometimes makes you wonder...) Half the battle of science and engineering is simply knowing that a solution to your problem exists. For instance, if Russian scientists were to announce that they had figured out how to encode humans and safely transmit them through broadband lines, half the physicists and computer scientists in the US would immediately drop their projects and focus on figuring out how to do it themselves. One, because no American likes to be beat by the Russians, but two, and more importantly, because they know a solution exists. The scientific endeavor (like many others I imagine) is inevitably plagued by that tiny voice of doubt inside every researchers head that says, "This cannot be done." Wiener's sound advice: ignore it.

Wiener's careful consideration of the details of early computers also tipped me off to the technological desensitization that occurs with each passing generation. To Wiener, the computer's great limitation was the time investment needed to design a "tape" customized to the user's needs. Computers, he suspected, would spread as far as cottage industry but not down to the consumer level because consumers would never be able to afford to a hire a team of technicians to create a "tape" suitable to their needs. He never saw desktops, consumers OSs, commoditized software, and ten-year olds programming in their basements... because he never saw past the tape. The shift from "hard" software programs like a tape and those we have today is one that's hard to appreciate if you grew up with C++, STL, and a school full of Dells. Each generation marvels at and analyzes the new; the constant or omnipresent is taken for granted and left unexamined. Wiener analyzes that which to us would not seem worth a second glance.

My one criticism is against Wiener's stoicism. For such a revolutionary thinker, he can still be quite stodgy. His extremely disciplined childhood seems to have closed his mind to any view of invention and scientific investigation but that of the careful, ever-progressing technician. He outright condemns the idea of an engineer taking apart and building things "for fun" when he could be working toward solving the world's problems. While I agree with his statement that its important to prioritize the "know-what" over the "know-how" question, engineering "play" is essential. One, humans are powerful predicting machines but not that powerful and a bit of leeway can lead to many an accidental discovery. Two, science and engineering is not solely for the purpose of progress. Its also a source of pleasure for those who do it. I suspect Wiener would faint like a Victorian duchess in the presence of pot-smoking, bongo-playing Richard Feynman or Dean Kamen and his technotoy paradise island.

[philosovamp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the kind of book that used to be written when scientists and science writers were philosophically literate.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

With its references to the (to me) unfamiliar names of J. Willard Gibbs and Ludwig Boltzmann, the opening pages of The Human Use of Human Beings had me reading Wikipedia articles and watching Youtube videos so that I could get a clearer idea of what Wiener was discussing. As I returned to Wiener's book and continued reading, I saw that I need not have bothered, as I found most of the rest of the book comparatively accessible. Not that I minded doing my own research on Gibbs and Boltzmann: one result of my investigations is that I have cleared up some misconceptions I had about entropy.

It is in this connection, though, that I find the accessibility of Wiener's argument that much more noteworthy: while he makes many references to entropy, he does not include a lot of discussion of physics or mathematics. Rather, employing relatable examples such as elevators, ants and "computing machines," Wiener writes about communication and feedback--and about the entropy to which these are subject--in biological, social and mechanical systems.

The book is a classic early text on the subject of cybernetics. It is well-written, with an argument ranging among topics such as biology, game theory, language, art, and even religion and philosophy.

Acquired Jun 8, 2007
P.T. Campbell Books, London, Ontario

Review added Jun 4, 2022

[X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in 1950 and updated by the author for a new edition in 1954, this book was a fascinating window into an era where - well, actually, they had pretty much the exact same concerns as we do. (McCarthyism! Machine learning!)

I picked this up after DNFing The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies - he mentioned it as a readable source for some of what he was talking about, so I figured I’d give it a try and, with the caveats you would expect re. a white male author writing in the 1950s, it was quite good. A lot of the ideas the book touches on are things that are - well, I would wish they are obvious, or maybe the better word would be fundamental, but I think what we’re seeing is that they are ideas that are so obvious to some people they aren’t worth thinking about (not good), and yet there are some people for whom they’re not obvious at all (not good either). In any case it’s always interesting to see universal ideas presented within an era other than your own, with a specific audience and historical context in mind.

Per my brief googling, I see that Wiener got his PhD at age 18 or 19 and later wrote an autobiography called “Ex-Prodigy” (lol); was related to Maimonides (!); and had his marriage arranged by his parents (oop). This book is dedicated to his dad, his “closest mentor and dearest antagonist.”

A few things I liked, or laughed about, or which made me think:

Organization v. chaos:
“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 probably state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness.”

I liked this idea which Wiener kept coming back to that sort of says: actually, sameness is chaos is bad. Difference is organization is good. He doesn’t take the idea as far, or consider it as thoroughly, as I would have liked (maybe in one of his other books?), but I thought it was an interesting concept which isn’t necessarily intuitive.

I did like this point, on computers (well, machines) but also on evolutionary theory: “we have the appearance of purposefulness in a system which is not purposefully constructed simply because purposeless is in its very nature transitory.”

I also liked this idea: “the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. […] That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives.” In other words, the more likely you are to know what the answer will be, the less useful that information will be to you (because you know it already). Sort of basic but I like the idea that uncertainty is a positive.

Information theory:
There were a couple main points about information that I found to be really accurate, although I hadn’t thought about them exactly that way before: first, that information degrades during its transmission, i.e., “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful” so that you need to introduce external controls to counteract it.

As a result, information is a bad commodity, because it’s hard to conserve, and also because its value is so dependent on what other information is presently available within the community. “The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation in its value is false.” (An interesting concept, while people are trying constantly to monetize data.)

Wiener apparently worked on anti-aircraft missile targeting during WWII, and he used that as a foundational analogy. “The fact is that the efficacy of a weapon depends on precisely what other weapons there are to meet it at a given time, and on the whole idea of war at that time.” In other words, “Information is more a matter of process than of storage. That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it—the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it. […] There is no Maginot Line of the brain.”

And second, the idea that transmission of information requires energy. That transmission occurs within the system, it is not exogenous to it. He writes that among the “problems which belong peculiarly to our age” is “the growing complexity and cost of communication.” “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”. (If only he knew!)

Nature vs. chess:
I chuckled at this concept - essentially, he’s saying that there are two possible “opponents”, the Augustinian one, which is chaos/disorganization, and the Manichaeans, which is a knowing and crafty opponent, someone who can bluff and lie. In Wiener’s perspective, the scientist is working against an Augustinian opponent, and therefore “his work is governed by his best moments,” whereas the litigator is working against a Manichaean one, and therefore “governed more by his worst moments than his best ones.” I thought that was a really interesting distinction… and the fact that I don’t have the patience for lying/bluffing/“negotiating” is probably why I would be a better scientist than I am a lawyer lol. The roads not taken I guess!

On biology and “technical difficulties”:
Wiener dips a little bit into biology, which I didn’t really trust in a medical level but still interesting - e.g., “The physiological condition for memory and hence for learning seems to be a certain continuity of [biological/physical] organization. […] It is indeed bard to conceive of a memory of any precision which can survive [a metamorphosis/insect-like] process of radical internal reconstruction.”

And a fun sci-fi follow-up to that:“Theoretically, if we could build a machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings.” I liked this idea that we would not exist as sentient beings in the way that we do if it were not for our specific physical makeup - or not even our physical makeup, but our experience of ongoing physical existence.

And to take it to an even MORE fun sci-fi place: “the fact that we cannot telegraph the pattern of a man from one place to another seems to be due to technical difficulties, and in particular, to the difficulty of keeping an organism in being during such a radical reconstruction.” 😂

On America:
Boy did he have some stuff to say lol. And I love it!

“Most of us in the United States prefer to live in a moderately loose social community, in which to blocks to communication among individuals and classes are not too great. I will not say that this ideal of communication is attained in the United States. Until white supremacy ceases to belong to the creed of a large part of the country it will be an ideal from which we fall short.”

And immediately after that “Yet even this modified formless democracy is too anarchic for many of hose who make efficiency their first ideal.”

I lol’ed at his critique of the American upper middle class child who is raised to believe in Santa Claus and the Western frontier, and progress, and other such delusions. He had hot takes!

His comparison of 1950s America to Renaissance-era Venice was food for thought - “On the one hand, we have a network of communication, intranational and international, more complete than history has ever before seen,” and on the other hand, “a national jealousy of secrets” stemming from McCarthyism and the politics of the early Cold War. “It should be possible to examine all the elements of information and secrecy in the modern world with a somewhat greater maturity and objectivity than belong to the thought of the times of Machiavelli.” And yet…

He also had some strong opinions on the American focus on $: “The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.” Per him, “It is my business to show that it leads to the misunderstanding and the mistreatment of information and its associated concepts.” (And see above on how information doesn’t work well as a commodity.)

A shoutout to the baby boomers, I guess: “we are bringing up a generation of young men who cannot think of any scientific project except in terms of large numbers of men and large quantities of money. […] when the scientific ideas of this generation are exhausted, or at least reveal vastly diminishing returns on their intellectual investment, I do not foresee that the next generation will be able to furnish the colossal ideas on which colossal projects naturally rest.” 🔥

Who in America is to blame for turmoil during an industrial revolution? Wiener is extremely clear - “We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential. […] We also know that they have very few inhibitions when it comes to taking all the profit out of an industry that there is to be taken, and then letting the public pick up the pieces. This is the history of the lumber and mining industries, and is part of what we have called in another chapter the traditional American philosophy of progress.”

And this parting burn - “Our papers have been making a great deal of American ‘know-how’ ever since we had the misfortune to discover the atomic bomb. There is one quality more important than ‘know-how’ and we cannot accuse the United States of any undue amount of it. This is ‘know-what’ by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.”

Later, he adds this: “I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much ‘know-how’ he may have, has very little ‘know-what.’ He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind there.”

On creativity:
He makes the point that the more regimented people’s roles are, in an organization or a system or in society, the less creative people are able to be. That’s true in general, but he’s talking about it in terms of scientific research in the Cold War - “It is the great public which is demanding the utmost of secrecy for modern science in all things which may touch its military uses. This demand for secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civilization not to learn of the progress of its own disease.” And “In this new attitude of the masses at league to research, there is a revolution in science far beyond what the public realizes. […] In the past the direction of research had largely been left to the interest of the individual scholar and to the trend of the times. At present, there is a distinct attempt so to direct research in matters of public security”, i.e., the arms race.

On education:
“[The growing cost and complexity of modern communication] 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. […] Lord only knows that there are enough problems yet to be solved, books to be written, and music to be composed! Yet for all but a very few, the path to these lies through the performance of perfunctory tasks which in nine cases out of ten have no compelling reason to be performed.” And“What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.”

On human life:
I looooved this concept: “the irreversible movement into a contingent future which is the true condition of human life.”

And, like Heraclitus’ idea that you can never step in the same river twice, “We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

On the idea of giving people in society rigid roles and social contexts which they are not supposed to deviate from: “While it is possible to throw away this enormous advantage that we have over the ants, and to organize the fascist ant-state with human material, I certainly believe that this is a degradation of man’s very nature, and economically a waste of the great human values which man possesses.”

I picked this book up knowing it was going to be social commentary, but I knew that Wiener is known as one of the fathers of AI, basically, so given the AI fans I’m aware of today, I didn’t expect Wiener to be quite so blatantly anti-fascist/anti-communist/anti-industrialist. A really pleasant surprise!

Predictions for the future
Wiener is in general very negative on “progress” as a concept, especially in its American iteration - per him, “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. […] May we have the courage to face the eventual doom of our civilization as we have the courage to face the certainty of our personal doom.” ❗️

I do actually really agree with him. One of the things I think you have to come to terms with if you learn about history is the fact that great people, great movements, great civilizations have all passed away from this earth, and will never return. I think that reckoning is a lot like grief, and coming to terms with the fact of mortality on a personal level. You have to be able to love and appreciate something for what it was, always knowing that it’s gone, and that takes a kind of moral awareness, and emotional acceptance, that can be difficult to reach.

And then of course Wiener writes about the effect of automation/“learning machines” on society, as a scientific revolution where “the machine plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor.” He says that “In the long run, the deadly uninteresting nature of the repetitive task may make [automation] a good thing and the source of leisure necessary for man’s full cultural development” (although, hilariously, he also says it might lead to people making some really bad movies with all that free time - very Biting the Sun by Tanith Lee).

But “the intermediate period […] will lead to an immediate transitional period of disastrous confusion.” After all, “Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke. [❗️…] Thus the new Industrial Revolution is a two-edged sword. It may be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough to enter a period in which such a benefit is possible.”❗️

He was writing this 75 years ago, and we see the ways in which he was right, and wrong, and might be right or wrong in times to come.

And of course, the most concerning part of all of this: “[automation’s] real danger, however, is the quite different one that such machines, though helpful by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the human race or that political leaders may attempt to control their populations by means not of machines themselves but through political techniques as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically.”

This isn’t exactly a call to arms, because he does not have one and I think even became a pacifist at some point, but I think it’s at least a key message to leave with: “Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”

And a post script on whether we have to worry about the machines taking over (because I could find anywhere else to put it): “The great weakness of the machine—the weakness that saves us so far from being dominated by it—is that it cannot yet take into account the vast range of probability that characterizes the human situation. The dominance of the machine presupposes a society in the last stages of increasing entropy, where probability is negligible and where the statistical differences among individuals are nil. Fortunately we have not yet reached such a state.”

[I am writing this in my phone and I always worry that the formatting somehow becomes unreadable, especially with reviews like this which are SO long. Fingers crossed that not too much of the message is lost in transmission…]

[Ben Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brilliant, wild little book from a polymath of prodigious proportions, it summarizes his seminal and baffling Cybernetics (1948) and extends an early critique of the information society. Written amid postwar froth, Wiener vaults a theory of communication and control meant to help stabilize any agent (quantum, chemical, biological, human, mechanical, social) into a sweeping philosophically informed lattice of "communal information." A must read for anyone interested in cold war history, philosophy, and politics of information science, technology, and society.

[Kevin Carson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Based on the title and description, I was expecting a book on the application of systems theory to the macro-analysis of society and of social change. This book contains a lot of cranky rambling that is entertaining, and occasionally even thought-provoking, on the nature of life, the universe, and everything a la Buckminster Fuller. But there's very little that's directly related to the subject matter of systems theory or its application to social analysis.

[Hagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming back to this book after three years made me realise how pertinent it is in the history of thought, especially now. This is an extension on his earlier work Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine, and propounds cybernetic theory in relation to society as a whole.

[Faith]

It’s awesome that some guy in the 50s predicted 2026

[Emma Reich · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have some extreme issues with the foreword of the 75th anniversary edition by Brian Christian. In particular, it should be noted that the term “AI” as used today is entirely different than how academics like Norton Wiener used the term in the mid 20th century. In particular, lines like the following are common in the foreword and feel almost purposefully misleading:

“Reading Norbert Wiener in the 2020s, one has the uncanny feeling of reading books that are more relevant today than when they were written. Indeed, they seem to capture the key themes of our present age of artificial intelligence not only earlier but better than many works of the twenty-first century.”

Norton Wiener’s AI is nearly an entirely different field with very different academic purposes than the pursuits of the tech world today. See Artificial Unintelligence or How Data Happened for historical context that is actually accurate. I resent modern tech bros claiming Norton Wiener’s legacy when they are just using him as a marketing gimmick.

[quiz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah! Cybernetics is cool

[Tabs · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite frustrating to read.

Wiener was a mathematician that completed his PhD at the age of 19, worked in MIT's mathematics department for 40 years, and won loads of awards etc. etc.

In this book, Wiener makes his previous work Cybernetics more accessible to the "lay person". The central thesis is that machines can be thought of as communicative organisms, and humans as machines. With a strong engineering background, Wiener does a nice job of giving examples to convey principles of feedback, learning, communication and control.

The message of the book is that automation will change the nature of work significantly, and high speed (learning) computers will change the nature of automation.

As for his stance toward the implication of this thesis, I'm still unclear. At times he suggests it would be a great shame for automation to fuel unemployment. Other times he implies people can (and should?) be controlled as if they were a machine. In his first edition of the book, he was supposedly pessimistic about this prospect. By the time he updated it with this edition, he had had two meetings with some important business people, and was reassured their intentions are in the right place.....

Most of all the reasons why I find this book frustrating are:

1) His general sexism (everyone is a he, all the great scientists are of course brilliant gentlemen),

2) His colonialist mindset (all of the history of progress can be attributed to the West),

3) His perspective from the midst of the trap many engineers fall into: that, cultivated by society's high regard for their profession, their gauge of the world is the truest, and that if they could only spread their engineering wisdom far and wide enough, all ailments could be measured, all solutions could be built, and all problems would be solved, and

4) His blatant ignorance (Colonialism referred to as "interests abroad").

So, mix that in with the fact that the technology referred to is now 70 years old and I generally didn't take much from the book at all. Perhaps the only thing was that at times I was amused by the grand manner with which he prophesied his ideas, which today are now common knowledge. Not something he could have helped, of course.

All the references are to only the most commonly known thinkers; the ideas, therefore, similarly predictable. Wiener, if he wasn't already at the time of writing, is now cliché.

[Serdar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The individual technical details have dated a little, hence the docked star -- chess computers now routinely beat human players, for one. I also felt the book hopscotches around a little too much -- there isn't as much of a sense of a through-line with all the arguments, so it feels more like an anthology of essays around a single conceit rather than a work conceived formally end-to-end. But the moral, ethical, and social implications that Wiener outlines in this book have only become more urgent with time.

[Bojan Džodan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Nauka je nacin zivota koji moze da cveta samo ako je ljudima data sloboda da imaju veru. Vera koju sledimo po naredjenju nametnutom spolja nije vera, a zajednica koja se oslanja na takvu pseudoveru osudjena je da sebe unisti zbog paralize koju namece nedostatak zdravog procvata nauke."

[Ask Franck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. Provided a solid next step in my curiosity with information theory.

Nice to hear from a guy who was both very mathematical, and at the same time very well-read and able to put things in a human, philosophical and historical perspective.

[Amy Cowdrey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Had to read this for grad school. If you like listening to someone lecture you on all kinds of things you know nothing about and essentially just feeling like they are far more intellectual than you are, maybe this is the book for you.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

First published in 1950 and substantially revised in 1954, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society is one of the most influential works of twentieth-century intellectual history. Written by mathematician and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener, the book seeks to explain the implications of cybernetics—the study of communication and control in animals and machines—for modern society. Wiener’s central concern is not merely technical but profoundly ethical: how can technological progress be directed toward human flourishing rather than human subordination? The result is a work that combines scientific exposition, social criticism, and philosophical reflection, making it an enduring contribution to discussions of technology and civilization.


Wiener introduces cybernetics as a new scientific framework for understanding communication, feedback, and control systems. Drawing upon developments in mathematics, engineering, biology, and information theory, he argues that both living organisms and machines operate through processes of information exchange. Feedback mechanisms allow systems to adjust their behavior in response to environmental changes, creating a common language for analyzing phenomena as diverse as nervous systems, industrial machinery, and social organizations.


A key theme throughout the book is the relationship between information and entropy. Wiener contends that information functions as a counterforce to disorder, enabling both biological and social systems to maintain organization. Modern society, increasingly dependent on communication networks and automated technologies, therefore faces new opportunities as well as new dangers. Automation promises greater productivity and freedom from repetitive labor, but it also threatens economic displacement and social instability if its benefits are not distributed equitably.


Wiener further explores the ethical consequences of technological power. He criticizes both unrestrained capitalism and bureaucratic centralization, arguing that human beings must remain the ultimate beneficiaries of technological development. Machines should serve humanity rather than transform people into components of a mechanized system. The title itself encapsulates this concern: the proper use of technology is measured by its contribution to genuinely human ends.


One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its remarkable foresight. Writing decades before the emergence of personal computers, the internet, artificial intelligence, and digital surveillance, Wiener anticipated many of the issues that dominate contemporary debates. His warnings about the displacement of labor through automation, the concentration of informational power, and the ethical responsibilities associated with intelligent machines appear strikingly relevant in the twenty-first century.


The work is also significant for its interdisciplinary vision. Wiener rejects the compartmentalization of knowledge, demonstrating how principles discovered in one field may illuminate problems in another. Cybernetics serves as a bridge connecting the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. This integrative approach influenced numerous disciplines, including computer science, systems theory, cognitive psychology, communications studies, and management science.


Philosophically, Wiener occupies a distinctive position. Unlike technological optimists who viewed automation as an inevitable path to progress, he emphasizes moral responsibility and human agency. At the same time, he avoids the reactionary tendency to reject technological innovation altogether. His perspective may be described as humanistic technological criticism: technology is neither inherently liberating nor inherently oppressive; its consequences depend upon the social and ethical frameworks within which it operates.


Nevertheless, the book possesses certain limitations. Wiener’s exposition occasionally suffers from conceptual abstraction, making parts of the text difficult for readers without scientific training. Some examples and predictions are rooted in the technological circumstances of the mid-twentieth century and may appear dated. Moreover, his treatment of political economy remains suggestive rather than systematic. While he identifies significant social risks associated with automation, he offers only broad prescriptions for addressing them.


The historical importance of The Human Use of Human Beings extends beyond cybernetics itself. The book emerged during a period marked by the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of electronic computing, and growing concerns about the social consequences of scientific advancement. Wiener sought to ensure that technological innovation would be accompanied by ethical reflection, a concern shared by later thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, and Lewis Mumford.


Its influence can also be detected in contemporary discussions surrounding artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, and digital capitalism. Many current concerns about machine decision-making, data collection, and human autonomy can be traced back to questions Wiener first articulated in a systematic manner.


The Human Use of Human Beings remains a foundational text for understanding the social implications of information technology. Norbert Wiener successfully transformed cybernetics from a technical discipline into a broader framework for examining the relationship between human beings, machines, and society. While some aspects of the book reflect its historical context, its central insights retain remarkable relevance. Wiener’s insistence that technological progress must be evaluated according to human values continues to provide a powerful corrective to both technological determinism and uncritical enthusiasm for innovation. As a work of scientific humanism, it remains essential reading for scholars of technology, communication, political theory, and the history of ideas.

GPT

[Sicofonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let us open this review with a banger of a quote:

In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. 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 may look forward as worthy of our dignity.

Reading this book was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. That is the best superlative I can find to describe it. Norbert Wiener requires no introduction; his contributions to mathematics and the science of Cybernetics are widely known. It is, however, in philosophical essays like "The Human Use of Human Beings" that his intellectual prowess comes to shine.

Cybernetics has been belittled in some quarters as no more than a bunch of theoretical principles with no practical usage at best, or just a generalization of control engineering methods. In this book, Wiener makes use of a number of Cybernetics concepts (namely communication theory, entropy and feedback) to analyze the rapid evolution of science, increased automation and its impact on society.

If you are wondering how come disinformation is rife these days, and the consequences this is having in our democracies, perhaps the following may give some perspective:

When there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of becoming the priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet.

It seems that the vast amount of messages that float in the "Cyberspace" and radio waves may be creating more noise than signal, in which case, whatever information (whose purpose is to enable adaptive behavior, not just to sit there as content) we try to transmit gets lost in the noise. Without information, how are we to make decisions that allow us to survive as individuals, or crucially, as a species?

The advent of more advanced and intelligent machines is also prognosticated here by Wiener. This is what he called the "second industrial revolution," and according to him the power of penetration of this new technique into diverse roles would be like nothing seen before, not even during the so-called Industrial Revolution. But not all is doom and gloom; Wiener can also see a door open where humans will be eventually liberated from all sorts of repetitive and uninteresting jobs, which may give rise in the future to a new generation with enough of a source of leisure to allow humans' full cultural development (not sure if I can agree with that after seeing what sort of "culture" is available on mainstream media myself these days).

All in all, this is a work of many implications that addresses the current malaises of our modern societies. I would perhaps advise anybody who is new to Wiener to read first Ross Ashby's "An Introduction to Cybernetics" to fully appreciate this volume.

PS: Wiener should have got a Nobel Prize.

[Ryan Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

founder of the science of cybernetics talks about its role in society. lots of wild tangents about the dangers of modernity from the guy who codified our new reliance on technology.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

"La cultura non come strumento, ma come fine."

Un libro da leggere che mette al centro il sapere e la passione per la cultura. Wiener, con la sua incredibile formazione e intelligenza (tanto da essere il cosiddetto "bambino prodigio") chiarisce completamente, e indicando quasi tutti gli ambiti del sapere umano, ciò che ha chiamato "cibernetica", e come lo studio di essa sia fondamentale per scegliere tra "bene e male", come scrive nell'ultimo rigo del saggio. Una lettura difficile, ma da fare per comprendere gli albori della comunicazione tra umani, e tra umano e macchine.

[John Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In looking back more than 15 years to when I read this book, I find, as is usually the case, that what persists are general impressions more than specific recollections. Instead of attempting to construct some sort of short essay, I'll present a few comments.

The word "cybernetics" was coined by Norbert Wiener, in 1947 (to use the year specified by the usually reliable Science Fiction Encyclopedia), as an English adaptation of a Greek word, kubernētēs, meaning pilot, steersman, navigator, controller (depending on your source). The history of that Greek word tells us something about Wiener's purposes, though I don't recall whether he puts it this way. From the Greek, the Latin language derived gubernator, which led to the English word "governor," and that word was applied in the 19th century to a component devised to regulate the speed of a steam engine by means of a feedback loop. The feedback loop is a concept central to Wiener's analysis of automatic communication and control processes in biological and mechanical systems (which may have been the limit of his discussion in his original, 1948 book Cybernetics) and in social systems as well. And there you have something that's central to Wiener's broader view: cybernetics is not applicable solely to technology. His work has influenced many fields, including biology and anthropology (the latter through Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead), and it's one of the regrettable, unintended consequences of his coinage that the popular view of cybernetics is limited almost entirely to compounds beginning in "cyber-" and denotes nothing beyond vaguely imagined "computer stuff"…

The coinage "governator," applied to Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role as governor of California, is ironic here. It happens to be an almost-exact lift from the Latin gubernator but was conceived only as a combination of "governor" and "terminator." In the latter role in James Cameron films, I seem to recall that Arnold had defined his character as a cybernetic organism, and in any case that's what a Terminator is. Thus Wiener's influence is detectable even in "governator"…

Wiener's discussion is very wide-ranging and far-seeing. He discusses entropy, aspects of information theory, the potential for machine learning, the inevitability of increasing man-machine interaction, the likelihood of increasing machine autonomy, and the need for human management of machines toward proper, human ends--lest we end up with machine management of humans…

One instance of a detail I do recall: Wiener makes an important point about the development of atomic weapons, which is, I remember thinking, the only important point not explicitly discussed by Richard Rhodes in his magisterial account The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's this: the entire Manhattan Project was conducted in great secrecy, but as soon as the first two bombs were used and reported on, it was apparent to knowledgeable scientists everywhere that they must have employed atomic energy, and the greatest secret, that it was possible to do such a thing, was thereby revealed, for it had not been known ahead of time by anyone whether it was possible or not. Thus any other nation, or non-state agent for that matter, hoping to possess such a weapon no longer needs to determine whether, but only how, it can be done. This has been taken for granted for a long time now, but Wiener was the first author I know to have publicly made the point, and he made it in 1949…

[automathom · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those books that gets better each time you read it.

[Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

I surprisingly enjoyed this book. It was a little rambling at times and probably not the most clear as to what he was trying to say but overall very interesting perspective on communication theory. I enjoyed his personal philosophical reflections as they were very well thought out. Also it was quite interesting to see his take on the current events of the time in the 1940s and 50s. It turned out he was quite right in many of his foreshadowings and interestingly he pretty much encapsulated the escalation and form if the decay of knowledge occurring in his own time with the press and the continuation and epitomization of this decay through todays social media.

[sobaba · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Even the Augustinian devil must watch his step or he will be converted to Manicheanism"

Norbert Wiener spends much of his simplified book laying out his theory of cybernetics and the extent of its reach and applications. Cybernetics to him is the "science of control and communication in the animal and the machine", with control being primarily applied through feedback loops: stimulus, reaction and adjustment, assessment of new stimulus, ad infintum; all in the hopes of stability and regulation. Communication being the way that information is transmitted, processed and interpreted within a system. Seeing the world through this lens, he is able to make comments on the nature of language, human beings and biological systems, how society is held together through communication and how a lack of coherent communication leads to disorder, the progress and potential of early computers and of course war. At the centre of all of this, is humanity's cosmic, but brief fight against entropic increase, with open feedback loops providing local opportunities for creative growth and freedom.

Nearer the end of the book, he explores the ethical implications of his theory in the world of the 20th century. Like many thinkers, Weiner wants to understand the consequences of increasing powerful technology, especially as it relates to automation. Starting with a history of the First Industrial Revolution, Weiner showcases how the revolution of technology in the 20th Century is mainly due to the transition to greater control of electricity and thus information. According to him, this has led to an exponential increase in the capabilities of machines, most evident through automation, which would either increase unemployment or force humans to behave more like machines in order to compete. He also manages to conceptualise a "learning machine", which we would likely call machine learning or AI and repeats the same warnings of AGI/ASI ethicists, yet he fundamentally understood that the greatest danger of such a technology would be the human values behind such a system.

The last two chapters, continue his references to numerous works in a much more condensed manner. Referencing Christian theology, Marx, Einstein, Monkey Paw's and "Djinnees", the Prometheus Myth and Paradise Lost, all to build a summary of the predicament of humanity in a time of powerful technology. Throughout the text, he asserts that the scientist should approach their work with an Augustinian attitude, nature is not actively trying to thwart their understanding of the world. Yet in the end he presents caveats, in a world where rational actors have to assume that their opponents are deceiving them, trust is minimal and chaos pursues. As a scientist you have to manage to have faith in an Augustinian worldview with Manichean actors, with this in mind Weiner calls for scientists to develop a better understanding of the "know-what" of humanity's nature with philosophers and anthropologists.

[Sumanth · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many things I love about this book, but most of all is the fact that Norbert Wiener, then a professor at MIT, wrote this book in 1950. Despite its existence well before its time, 'The Human Use of Human Beings' stands as a great precursor to both information technology and media theory.

Analogies fly back and forth throughout the first half of the book, between human individuals, societal systems and machines. He pulls this off especially well, putting an engineer inside fever dreams of sociology and cognition. In the process of evoking thermodynamics, cybernetics, media and information theory, Wiener introduces a very new kind of vocabulary to understand human behavior - in terms of entropy, feedback systems, taping, encoding, transmission and denoising. He does so with the help of fiction, often from the likes of Kipling and Poe, and sometimes the mythical Augustinian and Machiavellian devils.

Starting with a complete lack of surprise at automation by citing humans' basic abilities to perform as cogs, Wiener then uses this vocabulary to comment on the trajectory of industrial revolution, early valuations of information and the use of communication machines in sensory prosthetics - often delving into ideas of secrecy, deception, surveillance and malicious jamming. In 'The Human...', Wiener actively warns about the commodification of information itself, and prophecies the militarization of such an industry, resulting in heavy gate keeping and rhetoric of meaningless invention.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

an interesting take on society from a brilliant guy. you can’t really put Wiener in a box — who else is out here considering communication theory as a theory of society, or who considers society itself as a “local and temporary island of decreasing entropy”?

Wiener is remarkably prescient. before programming languages had taken hold, he was writing about the possibility of machines communicating to each other. before machine learning was even a term, here Wiener was considering the idea of a machine that can learn. if Wiener could see what technology has developed into today, I’d be curious what he’d say.

the book was a little lighter on the sociology than I expected, and more technically-oriented. but it’s largely intelligible, which is quite the feat for someone as uniquely intelligent as Wiener.

“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.”

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read it just to see if there was anything to be gained from returning to the horse’s mouth when it comes to cybernetics and information theory…but there’s not a great deal of interest today, given how much his ideas have permeated our society. It’s a mixum-gatherum of various observations and what he thinks are noteworthy implications of different ideas, a type of free-association of theory in the abstract to try bring it to bear on reality.

[Rashad Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wiener's ideas about the potential consequences of automation and cybernetics are still relevant today. In the book, Wiener argues that technology has the potential to enhance human life, but it also has the power to dehumanize us if we're not careful.

[Shugsy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wiener seemed to have a kind of perverse romance with a position entailing the sidestepping of the transcendent nature of individual human consciousness. Dogmatic scientism, the classical edition. Not a compelling text at all!

[Bria · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is way less about cyborgs than I wanted it to be.

[Ismail N. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dry and hard to follow.