Jason

“> In effect, though Wiener didn't quite express it this way, cybernetics was offering an alternative to the Skinnerian worldview, in which human beings were just stimulus-response machines to be manipulated and conditioned for their own good. It was likewise offering an alternative to von Neumann's worldview, wherein human beings were unrealistically rational technocrats capable of anticipating, controlling, and managing their society with perfect confidence. Instead, cybernetics held out a vision of humans as neither gods nor clay but rather "machines" of the new kind, embodying purpose—and thus, autonomy. No, we were not the absolute masters of our universe; we lived in a world that was complex, confusing, and largely uncontrollable. But neither were we helpless. We were embedded in our world, in constant communication with our environment and one another. We had the power to act, to observe, to learn from our mistakes, and to grow. "From the point of view of cybernetics, the world is an organism," Wiener declared in his autobiography. "In such a world, knowledge is in its essence the process of knowing. . . . Knowledge is an aspect of life which must be interpreted while we are living, if it is to be interpreted at all. Life is the continual interplay between the individual and his environment rather than a way of existing under the form of eternity.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal