Home · Book Reports · 2018 · The Human Use of Human Beings

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

This is a wonderfully nightmarish book. Weiner may have been carrying water for the oligarchs or he may have been a scientist that was simply driven by curiosity, but he - at least later in his career - recognized how extremely powerful his (and Bertalanffy’s) contributions were when in the wrong hands. Hands that they, like every other weapon, will always find their way to since the sociopaths that are willing to do whatever it takes to ascent the power structure are exactly the last ones that should be trusted with these kinds of tools.

The work is very apropos in the sense that today with the rise of social media in general as a worldwide communication we can not only see the effects of propaganda and nudging “followers”, but we can see it in effectively real time. I have little doubt that the Arab Spring (which in great part organized on Facebook) or the Black Lives Matter protests/riots would have almost certainly never happened without social media allowing for the instant communication (that can so easily be hijacked) to amplify sentiment in a kind of feedback loop we now-a-days call echo chambers.

I think the BLM summer was a great case study in how media can deliver a message that pushes individuals into groups (black vs white) and then injects a spark to ignite the whole powder keg. After the protests/riots were sufficiently ramped up (but still seemingly controllable by the media), the dial was turned down, Joe Biden was selected, and everything calmed right down.

Personally I think the people with their hands on the levers and dials that are controlling the human machine were testing how far they could push the masses. Once a critical mass had been reached they dialed everything back so as not to create a Frankenstein’s monster that might very well end up being uncontrollable.

To this end, I submit that memes, podcasts, Youtube, Twitter, etc are the tip of the psychological spear being driven into the minds of the masses. These new tools of worldwide communication allow ideas like diversity (which is anything but diverse), multiculturalism, LGBT, and a host of other deleterious effects on the civilizations of the world.

At the same time these “modern” ideas are pushed, any criticism is minimized. Censorship in the regard is a blunt instrument and even the least savy among us can spot it. On the other hand, those in control of the algorithms (or even manual curation) of the (social) media platforms can use techniques such as boosting, trending, and shadowbanning to manipulate a message’s reach are much more like surgical tools. These techniques are nearly impossible for the lay person to ever spot.

In the end the result is that the ruling class has set us against one another in black vs. white, man vs. woman, young vs. old, and any other number of artificial divide and conquer digital echo chambers. Somehow we have since allowed this digital tail to wag the real world dog. This is EXACTLY what Weiner warns against in this book.

Weiner is very early in his warnings about AI, which we are seeing the rise of, but I don’t think it is anywhere near djinn/monkey paw level. That said, I think automation through AI is certainly going to reduce the need for a lot of human labor in the coming decade or so. People that thought certain jobs that needed a human touch are going in for a series of rude awakenings.

Other Notes:

• many references to Bertrand Russell (I think Russell was an influence on Weiner)

• example of Pavlov’s dogs

• The “Wolf Child” stories, which have led to Kipling’s imaginative Jungle Books

• Kipling “With the Night Mail”

Exceptional Excerpts

messages as a means of controlling machinery and society,

This matter of social feedback is of very great sociological and anthropological interest.

Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.

With the airplane and the radio the word of the rulers extends to the ends of the earth, and very many of the factors which previously precluded a World State have been abrogated. It is even possible to maintain that modern communication, which forces us to adjudicate the international claims of different broadcasting systems and different airplane nets, has made the World State inevitable.

In other words, when there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of be­ coming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet.

All this changed in the war. One of the few things gained from the great conflict was the rapid development of invention, under the stimulus of necessity and the unlimited employment of money; and above all, the new blood called in to industrial research.

this [automation] will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke.

“The machines a gouverner will define the State as the best-informed player at each particular level; and the State is the only supreme co-ordinator of all partial decisions. These are enormous privileges; if they are acquired scientifically, they will permit the State under all circumstances to beat every player of a human game other than itself by offering this dilemma : either immediate ruin, or planned co-operation. This will be the consequences of the game itself without outside violence. The lovers of the best of worlds have something indeed to dream of!” -Pere Dubarle

In comparison with this, Hobbes’ Leviathan was nothing but a pleasant joke. We are running the risk nowadays of a great World State, where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind. Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters. -Pere Dubarle

Funny, there are tons of anthropologists shooting for exactly what he describes. Maybe not some many philosophers, other than to assuage potential guilt.

Its [Pere’s machine] real danger, however, is the quite different one that such machines, though helpless 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 in­ different to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically.

Let us remember that there are game-playing ma­ chines both of the Monkey’s Paw type and of the type of the Bottled Djinnee. Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal­minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Preface
• 01: Cybernetics and History
• 02: Progress and Entropy
• 03: Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior
• 04: The Mechanism and History of Language<
• 05: Organization as the Message<
• 06: Law and Communication<
• 07: Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy<
• 08: Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist<
• 09: The First and the Second Industrial Revolution<
• 10: Some Communication Machines and Their Future<
• 11: Language, Confusion, and Jam<

• Pdf page numbers.

· Introduction

page 12:

• From the time of the end of the war until his death in 1964, Wiener applied his penetrating and innovative mind to identifying and elaborating on a relation of high technology to people which is benign or, in his words, to the human - rather than the inhuman - use of human beings.

• For him technologies were viewed not so much as applied science, but rather as applied social and moral philosophy.

page 17:

• The Human Use of Human Beings is a popularization of Cybernetics (omitting the forbidding mathematics), though with a special emphasis on the description of the human and the social.

• The present volume is a reprint of the second ( 1954) edition, which differs significantly from the original hard­ cover edition. The notable reorganization of the book and the changes made deserve attention. In the first edition we read that ’the purpose of this book is both to explain the potentialities of the machine in fields which up to now have been taken to be purely human, and to warn against the dangers of a purely selfish exploitation of these possibilities in a world in which to human beings human things are all-important.’ After commenting critically about patterns of social organization in which all orders come from above, and none return (‘an ideal held by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government’), he explains, ‘I wish to devote this book [first edition] to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings. ’ The second edition, in contrast, as stated in the Preface, is organized around Wiener’s other major theme, ’the impact of the Gibbsian point of view on modern life, both through the substantive changes it has made in working science, and through the changes it has made indirectly in our attitude to life in general.’ The second edition, where the framework is more philosophical and less political, appears to be presented in such a way as to make it of interest not only in 1954, but also for many years to come.

• Yet, even though several chapters are essentially unchanged, something was lost in going from the first to the second edition. I miss the bluntness and pungency of some of the comments in the earlier edition, which apparently were ‘cleaned up’ for the second.

page 18:

• At the end of the book, in both editions, Wiener compares the Catholic Church with the Communist Party, and both with cold war government activities in capitalist America. The criticisms of America in these last few pages of the first edition (see Appendix to this Introduction) are, in spite of one brief pointed reference to McCarthyism, largely absent in the second edition.

page 19:

• It reviews vividly the progress in medicine and anticipates new problems, such as the increasing use of synthetic foods that may contain minute quantities of carcinogens. These and other discursive excursions, peripheral to the main line of argument of the book, are omitted in the present edition.

page 20:

• cybernetics can be used within a highly mechanical and dehumanizing, even militaristic, outlook.

page 23:

• we are living in what Ellul has appropriately called a technological society. Within that genre, Wiener’s books, as well as some earlier writings by Lewis Mumford, are among the few pioneering works that have become classics.

· Preface

page 36:

• I am convinced, Gibbs rather than Einstein or Heisenberg or Planck to whom we must attribute the first great revolution of twentieth century physics.

· 01: Cybernetics and History

page 41:

• messages as a means of controlling machinery and society,

• This larger theory of messages is a probabilistic theory,

page 42:

• I classed communication and control together. Why did I do this? When I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him, and when he communicates back with me he returns a related message which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me. When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him, and although this message is in the imperative mood, the technique of communication does not differ from that of a message of fact. Furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed.

• society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it;

• Thus the theory of control in engineering, whether human or animal or mechanical, is a chapter in the theory of messages.

page 44:

• To live effectively is to live with adequate information.

page 47:

• In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative I 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.

page 49:

• Every instrument in the repertory of the scientific-instrument maker is a possible sense organ,

page 52:

• 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 feed­ back.

· 02: Progress and Entropy

page 60:

• The machine, like the living organism, is, as I have said, a device which locally and temporarily seems to resist the general tendency for the increase of entropy. By its ability to make decisions it can produce around it a local zone of organization in a world whose general tendency is to run down.

page 65:

• It follows that in considering such a local process as the growth of a tree or of a human being, which depends directly or indirectly on radiation from the sun, an enormous local decrease in entropy may be associated with quite a moderate energy transfer.

page 68:

• Most of us are too close to the idea of progress to take cognizance either of the fact that this belief be­ longs only to a small part of recorded history, or of the other fact, that it represents a sharp break with our own religious professions and traditions. Neither for the Catholic, the Protestant, nor for the Jew, is the world a good place in which an enduring happiness is to be expected. The church offers its pay for virtue, not in any coin which passes current among the Kings of the Earth, but as a promissory note on Heaven.

page 72:

• What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature which, on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival. We are the slaves of our technical improvement…

· 03: Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior

page 74:

• Certain kinds of machines and some living organisms -particularly the higher living organisms-can, as we have seen, modify their patterns of behavior on the basis of past experience so as to achieve specific anti­ entropic ends.

page 75:

• It follows that administrative officials, whether of a government or a university or a corporation, should take part in a two-way stream of communication, and not merely in one descending from the top. Otherwise, the top officials may find that they have based their policy on a complete misconception of the facts that their underlings possess.

page 76:

• This matter of social feedback is of very great sociological and anthropological interest.

• 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.

• The ideal of moderately loose social communication.

page 83:

• Thus the insect is rather like the kind of computing machine whose instructions are all set forth in advance on the “tapes,” and which has next to no feedback mechanism to see it through the uncertain future. The behavior of an ant is much more a matter of instinct than of intelligence. The physical strait jacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental strait jacket which regulates its pattern of behavior.

• Metamorphosis doesn’t allow knowledge to be retained, there is little learning carried between phases.

• Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.

page 84:

• Man spends more time in the immature stage than any other animal. Then continues learning until the early 20s or even 30.

page 87:

• I repeat, feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance.

page 91:

• In other words, for practical purposes, machines that measure, as opposed to machines that count, are very greatly limited in their precision.

· 04: The Mechanism and History of Language

page 105:

• In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being.

page 110:

• The “Wolf Child” stories, which have led to Kipling’s imaginative Jungle Books

page 116:

• Alas, the attitudes of the classicists are often beyond the understanding of the intelligent layman!

page 118:

• With the airplane and the radio the word of the rulers extends to the ends of the earth, and very many of the factors which previously precluded a World State have been abrogated. It is even possible to maintain that modern communication, which forces us to adjudicate the international claims of different broadcasting systems and different airplane nets, has made the World State inevitable.

· 05: Organization as the Message

page 121:

• Life is an is­land here and now in a dying world.

• The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis.

page 122:

• Kipling “With the Night Mail”

page 130:

• The fact that we can not telegraph a man is but a technicality.

· 06: Law and Communication

page 131:

• necessary for the existence of justice. The best words to express these requirements are those of the French Revolution: Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.

page 136:

• Thus the problems of law may be considered communicative and cybernetic-that is, they are problems of orderly and repeatable control of certain critical situations.

page 137:

• The greatest opportunity of the criminal in the modern community lies in this position as a dishonest broker in the interstices of the law.

· 07: Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy

page 138:

• we are approaching a secretive frame of mind paralleled in history only in the Venice of the Renaissance.

page 139:

• The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.

page 146:

• The intrinsic limitations of the commodity nature of communication are hardly considered by the public at large.

• He cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.

page 151:

• Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty per cent of his way toward that answer.

• In view of this, it is perfectly fair to say that the one secret concerning the atomic bomb which might have been kept and which was given to the public and to all potential enemies without the least inhibition, was that of the possibility on its construction.

page 154:

• In court and war alike:

• The whole technique of secrecy, message jamming, and bluff, is concerned with insuring that one’s own side can make use of the forces and agencies of communication more effectively than the other side.

page 155:

• I have already said the dissemination of any scientific secret whatever is merely a matter of time, that in this game a decade is a long time, and that in the long run, there is no distinction between arming ourselves and arming our enemies.

· 08: Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist

page 157:

• This book argues that the integrity of the channels of internal communication is essential to the welfare of society.

• The cost for newspapers, radio, film, etc is so great that it has become standardized to the least common denominator. In the past small journals could give common men an outlet, but not in the “big leagues” of today (then). This has changed dramatically with the internet. Now the problem is TOO much information, TOO many men broadcasting their views, which ends up creating more noise than signal. On Youtube, for example, it is often difficult to find an original video for the hundreds of videos made that comment on the original.

page 158:

• 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,

page 160:

• In other words, when there is communication without need for communication, merely so that someone may earn the social and intellectual prestige of be­ coming a priest of communication, the quality and communicative value of the message drop like a plummet.

· 09: The First and the Second Industrial Revolution

page 174:

• All this changed in the war. One of the few things gained from the great conflict was the rapid development of invention, under the stimulus of necessity and the unlimited employment of money; and above all, the new blood called in to industrial research.

page 179:

• those factors which have converted modern life to something totally unlike the life of any other period.

page 188:

• this [automation] 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. It may also be used to destroy humanity, and if it is not used intelligently it can go very far in that direction.

• Since the publication of the first edition of this book, I have participated in two big meetings with representatives of business management, and I have been delighted to see that awareness on the part of a great many of those present of the social dangers of our new technology and the social obligations of those responsible for management to see that the new modalities are used for the benefit of man, for increasing his leisure and enriching his spiritual life, rather than merely for profits and the worship of the machine as a new brazen calf.

• So, clearly the business sector knew what would happen, yet, looking around, I see the latter half of this quote: merely for profits, as the actual result.

• I do not feel as thoroughly pessimistic as I did at the time of the publication of the first edition of this book.

• He was also pessimistic in “Cybernetics”.

· 10: Some Communication Machines and Their Future

page 205:

• “The machines a gouverner will define the State as the best-informed player at each particular level; and the State is the only supreme co-ordinator of all partial decisions. These are enormous privileges; if they are acquired scientifically, they will permit the State under all circumstances to beat every player of a human game other than itself by offering this dilemma : either immediate ruin, or planned co-operation. This will be the consequences of the game itself without outside violence. The lovers of the best of worlds have something indeed to dream of!” -Pere Dubarle

page 206:

• In comparison with this, Hobbes’ Leviathan was nothing but a pleasant joke. We are running the risk nowadays of a great World State, where deliberate and conscious primitive injustice may be the only possible condition for the statistical happiness of the masses: a world worse than hell for every clear mind. Perhaps it would not be a bad idea for the teams at present creating cybernetics to add to their cadre of technicians, who have come from all horizons of science, some serious anthropologists, and perhaps a philosopher who has some curiosity as to world matters. -Pere Dubarle

• Funny, there are tons of anthropologists shooting for exactly what he describes. Maybe not some many philosophers, other than to assuage potential guilt.

page 207:

• Its [Pere’s machine] real danger, however, is the quite different one that such machines, though helpless 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 in­ different to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically.

• Reminds me of a military project, Crystal Ball.

page 208:

• Pere’s machine essentially already existed in the Cold War, though not a single machine but a collection of each side working in the same calculating manner.

• even when we must wield this knowledge as soldiers and as statesmen; and we must know why we wish to control him.

page 211:

• Let us remember that there are game-playing ma­ chines both of the Monkey’s Paw type and of the type of the Bottled Djinnee. Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal­minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this, to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.

• 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. The Monkey’s Paw of skin and bone is quite as deadly as anything cast out of steel and iron.

· 11: Language, Confusion, and Jam

page 219:

• Another reference to Alice in Wonderland.

• Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.