Cybernetics Quotes

“Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.”
― Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simpleminded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Information is information, not matter or energy.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“A very important function of the nervous system, and, as we have said, a function equally in demand for computing machines, is that of memory, the ability to preserve the results of past operations for use in the future. It will be seen that the uses of the memory are highly various, and it is improbable that any single mechanism can satisfy the demands of all of them. There is first the memory which is necessary for the carrying out of a current process, such as a multiplication, in which the intermediate results are of no value once the process is completed, and in which the operating apparatus should then be released for further use. Such a memory should record quickly, be read quickly, and be erased quickly. On the other hand, there is the memory which is intended to be part of the files, the permanent record, of the machine or the brain, and to contribute to the basis of all its future behavior, at least during a single run of the machine. Let it be remarked parenthetically that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“A proof represents a logical process which has come to a definitive conclusion in a finite number of stages. However, a logical machine following definite rules need never come to a conclusion. It may go on grinding through different stages without ever coming to a stop, either by describing a pattern of activity of continually increasing complexity, or by going into a repetitive process like the end of a chess game in which there is a continuing cycle of perpetual check. This occurs in the case of some of the paradoxes of Cantor and Russell. Let us consider the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Is this class a member of itself? If it is, it is certainly not a member of itself; and if it is not, it is equally certainly a member of itself. A machine to answer this question would give the successive temporary answers: “yes,” “no,” “yes,” “no,” and so on, and would never come to equilibrium.
Bertrand Russell’s solution of his own paradoxes was to affix to every statement a quantity, the so-called type, which serves to distinguish between what seems to be formally the same statement, according to the character of the objects with which it concerns itself—whether these are “things,” in the simplest sense, classes of “things,” classes of classes of “things,” etc. The method by which we resolve the paradoxes is also to attach a parameter to each statement, this parameter being the time at which it is asserted. In both cases, we introduce what we may call a parameter of uniformization, to resolve an ambiguity which is simply due to its neglect.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Can man-made machines learn and can they reproduce themselves? We shall try to show in this chapter that in fact they can learn and can reproduce themselves, and we shall give an account of the technique needed for both these activities.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition

“There is nothing more dangerous to contemplate than World War III. It is worth considering whether part of the danger may not be intrinsic in the unguarded use of learning machines. Again and again I have heard the statement that learning machines cannot subject us to any new dangers, because we can turn them off when we feel like it. But can we? To turn a machine off effectively, we must be in possession of information as to whether the danger point has come. The mere fact that we have made the machine does not guarantee that we shall have the proper information to do this. This is already implicit in the statement that the checker-playing machine can defeat the man who has programmed it, and this after a very limited time of working in. Moreover, the very speed of operation of modern digital machines stands in the way of our ability to perceive and think through the indications of danger.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition

“The new and real agencies of the learning machine are also literal-minded. If we program a machine for winning a war, we must think well what we mean by winning. A learning machine must be programmed by experience. The only experience of a nuclear war which is not immediately catastrophic is the experience of a war game. If we are to use this experience as a guide for our procedure in a real emergency, the values of winning which we have employed in the programming games must be the same values which we hold at heart in the actual outcome of a war. We can fail in this only at our immediate, utter, and irretrievable peril. We cannot expect the machine to follow us in those prejudices and emotional compromises by which we enable ourselves to call destruction by the name of victory.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition

“There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un-"scientific' narrative method of the professional historian.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Bertrand Russell’s solution of his own paradoxes was to affix to every statement a quantity, the so-called type, which serves to distinguish between what seems to be formally the same statement, according to the character of the objects with which it concerns itself —whether these are “things,” in the simplest sense, classes of “things,” classes of classes of “things,” etc. The method by which we resolve the paradoxes is also to attach a parameter to each statement, this parameter being the time at which it is asserted. In both cases, we introduce what we may call a parameter of uniformization, to resolve an ambiguity which is simply due to its neglect.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Two of the phenomena which we consider to be characteristic of living systems are the power to learn and the power to reproduce themselves. These properties, different as they appear, are intimately related to one another. An animal that learns is one which is capable of being transformed by its past environment into a different being and is therefore adjustable to its environment within its individual lifetime. An animal that multiplies is able to create other animals in its own likeness at least approximately, although not so completely in its own likeness that they cannot vary in the course of time.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 second edition

“It has become quite evident, both to the nominalists like Hilbert and to the intuitionists like Weyl, that the development of a mathematico-logical theory is subject to the same sort of restrictions as those that limit the performance of a computing machine. [...] it is even possible to interpret in this way the paradoxes of Cantor and of Russell.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“modern automation exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism, and hence there is no reason in Bergson’s considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automation of this type… In fact, the whole mechanist–vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Thus on all sides we have a triple constriction of the means of communication: the elimination of the less profitable means in favor of the more profitable; the fact that these means are in the hands of the very limited class of wealthy men, and thus naturally express the opinions of that class; and the further fact that, as one of the chief avenues to political and personal power, they attract above all those ambitious for such power. That system which more than all others should contribute to social homeostasis is thrown directly into the hands of those most concerned in the game of power and money, which we have already seen to be one of the chief anti-homeostatic elements in the community. It is no wonder then that the larger communities, subject to this disruptive influence, contain far less communally available information than the smaller communities, to say nothing of the human elements of which all communities are built up. Like the wolf pack, although let us hope to a lesser extent, the State is stupider than most of its components.
This runs counter to a tendency much voiced among business executives, heads of great laboratories, and the like, to assume that because the community is larger than the individual it is also more intelligent. Some of this opinion is due to no more than a childish delight in the large and the lavish. Some of it is due to a sense of the possibilities of a large organization for good. Not a little of it, however, is nothing more than an eye for the main chance and a lusting after the fleshpots of Egypt.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings.
Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for theunfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same techniques and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and the receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observe at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“It is said that the situation is considerably better in early infancy, and that in the first six months of life an extensive injury to the dominant hemisphere may compel the normally secondary hemisphere to take its place; so that the patient appears far more nearly normal than he would be had the injury occurred at a later stage. This is quite in accordance with the general great flexibility shown by the nervous system in the early weeks of life, and the great rigidity which it rapidly develops later. It is possible that, short of such serious injuries, handedness is reasonably flexible in the very young child. However, long before the child is of school age, the natural handedness and cerebral dominance are established for life. It used to be thought that left-handedness was a serious social disadvantage. With most tools, school desks, and sports equipment primarily made for the right-handed, it certainly is to some extent. In the past, moreover, it was viewed with some of the superstitious disapproval that has attached to so many minor variations from the human norm, such as birthmarks or red hair. From a combination of motives, many people have attempted and even succeeded, in changing the external handedness of their children by education, though of course they could not change its physiological basis in hemispheric dominance. It was then found that in very many cases these hemispheric changelings suffered from stuttering and other defects of speech, reading, and writing, to the extent of seriously wounding their prospects in life and their hopes for a normal career. We now see at least one possible explanation for the phenomenon. With the education of the secondary hand, there has been a partial education of that part of the secondary hemisphere which deals with skilled motions, such as writing. Since, however, these motions are carried out in the closest possible association with reading, speech, and other activities which are inseparably connected with the dominant hemisphere, the neuron chains involved in processes of the sort must cross over from hemisphere to hemisphere and back; and in a process of any complication, they must do this again and again. Now, the direct connectors between the hemispheres—the cerebral commissures—in a brain as large as that of man are so few in number that they are of very little use, and the interhemispheric traffic must go by roundabout routes through the brain stem, which we know very imperfectly but which are certainly long, scanty, and subject to interruption. As a consequence, the processes associated with speech and writing are very likely to be involved in a traffic jam, and stuttering is the most natural thing in the world.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Lobotomy and shock treatment are methods which by their very nature are more suited to handle vicious circulating memories and malignant worries than the deeper-seated permanent memories, though it is not impossible that they may have some effect here too. As we have said, in long-established cases of mental disorder, the permanent memory is as badly deranged as the circulating memory. We do not seem to possess any purely pharmaceutical or surgical weapon for intervening differentially in the permanent memory. This is where psychoanalysis and other similar psychotherapeutic measures come in. Whether psychoanalysis is taken in the orthodox Freudian sense or in the modified senses of Jung and of Adler, or whether our psychotherapy is not strictly psychoanalytic at all, our treatment is clearly based on the concept that the stored information of the mind lies on many levels of accessibility and is much richer and more varied than that which is accessible by direct unaided introspection;
that it is vitally conditioned by affective experiences which we cannot always uncover by such introspection, either because they never were made explicit in our adult language, or because they have been buried by a definite mechanism, affective though generally involuntary; and that the content of these stored experiences, as well as their affective tone, conditions much of our later activity in ways which may well be pathological. The technique of the psychoanalyst consists in a series of means to discover and interpret these hidden memories, to make the patient accept them for what they are and by their acceptance modify, if not their content, at least the affective tone they carry, and thus make them less harmful. All this is perfectly consistent with the point of view of this book. It perhaps explains, too,
why there are circumstances where a joint use of shock treatment and psychotherapy is indicated, combining a physical or pharmacological therapy for the phenomena of reverberation in the nervous system, and a psychological therapy for the long-time memories which, without interference, might reestablish from within the vicious circle broken up by the shock treatment.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Now there is no normal process except death which completely clears the brain from all past impressions; and after death, it is impossible to set it going again. Of all normal processes, sleep comes the nearest to a non-pathological clearing. How often we find that the best way to handle a complicated worry or an intellectual muddle is to sleep over it! However, sleep does not clear away the deeper memories, nor indeed is a sufficiently malignant state of worry compatible with an adequate sleep. We are thus often forced to resort to more violent types of intervention in the memory cycle. The more violent of these involve a surgical intervention into the brain, leaving behind it permanent damage, mutilation, and the abridgment of the powers of the victim, as the mammalian central nervous system seems to possess no powers whatever of regeneration. The principal type of surgical intervention which has been practiced is known as prefrontal lobotomy, and consists in the removal or isolation of a portion of the prefrontal lobe of the cortex. It has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier. However, prefrontal lobotomy does seem to have a genuine effect on malignant worry, not by bringing the patient nearer to a solution of his problems but by damaging or destroying the capacity for maintained worry, known in the terminology of another profession as the conscience. More generally, it appears to limit all aspects of the circulating memory, the ability to keep in mind a situation not actually presented.
The various forms of shock treatment—electric, insulin, metrazol—are less drastic methods of doing a very similar thing. They do not destroy brain tissue or at least are not intended to destroy it, but they do have a decidedly damaging effect on the memory. In so far as this concerns the circulating memory, and in so far as this memory is chiefly damaged for the recent period of mental disorder, and is probably scarcely worth preserving anyhow, shock treatment has something definite to recommend it as against lobotomy; but it is not always free from deleterious effects on the permanent memory and the personality. As it stands at present, it is another violent, imperfectly understood, imperfectly controlled method to interrupt a mental vicious circle. This does not prevent its being in many cases the best thing we can do at present.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“Thus the nerve may be taken to be a relay with essentially two states of activity: firing and repose. Leaving aside those neurons which accept their messages from free endings or sensory end organs, each neuron has its message fed into it by other neurons at points of contact known as synapses. For a given outgoing neuron, these vary in number from a very few to many hundred. It is the state of the incoming impulses at the various synapses, combined with the antecedent state of the outgoing neuron itself, which determines whether it will fire or not. If it is neither firing nor refractory, and the number of incoming synapses which “fire” within a certain very short fusion interval of time exceeds a certain threshold, then the neuron will fire after a known, fairly constant synaptic delay.
This is perhaps an oversimplification of the picture: the “threshold” may not depend simply on the number of synapses but on their “weight” and their geometrical relations to one another with respect to the neuron into which they feed; and there is very convincing evidence that there exist synapses of a different nature, the so-called “inhibitory synapses,” which either completely prevent the firing of the outgoing neuron or at any rate raise its threshold with respect to stimulation at the ordinary synapses. What is pretty clear, however, is that some
definite combinations of impulses on the incoming neurons having synaptic connections with a given neuron will cause it to fire, while others will not cause it to fire. This is not to say that there may not be other, non-neuronic influences, perhaps of a humoral nature, which produce slow, secular changes tending to vary that pattern of incoming impulses which is adequate for firing.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

“I have said that this new development [automation] has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition. It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the “fifth freedom,” that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary.”
― Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine