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A review by tabsfchnr
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society by Norbert Wiener
2.0
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.
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.