The Human Use of Human Beings

[Dave Monroe]

... selected selctions from Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human
Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Anchor, 1954 [1950]).

To me, personally, the fact that the signal in its intermediate stages
has gone through a machine rather than a person is irrelevant and does
not in any case greatly change my relation to the signal.  Thus the
theory of control in engineering, whether human or mechanical, is a
chapter in the theory of mesages.  (16-7)

Leibnitz, dominated by ideas of communication, is, in more than one way,
the intellectual ancestor of the ideas in this book, for he was also
interested in machine computation and automata.  My views in this book
are very far from being Leibnitzian, but the problems with which I am
concernes are most certainly Leibnitzian.  Leibnitz's computing machines
were only an offshoot of his interest in a computing language, a
reasoning calculus which again was in his mind, merely an extention of
his idea of a complete artificial language.  Thus, even in his computing
machine, Leibnitz's preoccupations were mostly linguistic and
communicational. (19)

... the idea of entropy represnts several of the most important
departures of gibbsian mecahnics from Newtonian mechanics.  In [Willard]
Gibbs' view we have a quantity which belongs not to the outside world as
such, but to certain sets of possible outside worlds ....  Physics now
becomes not teh discussion of an outside universe which may be reagrded
as the total answer to all teh questions concerning it, but an account
of the naswers to much more limited questions. (21)

Leibnitz saw in the concordance of the time given by clocks set at the
same time, the mnodel for the pre-established harmony of his monads.
For the technique embodied in the automata of his time was that of the
clockmaker.  (21)

Let us consider the activity of the little figures which dance on the
top of a music box.  They move in accordance witha pattern, but it is a
pattern which is set in advance, and in which the past activity of the
figures has practically nothing to do with the pattern of their future
activity. (21-2)

But modern automatic machines such as the controlled missile, the
proximity fue, the automatic door opener, the control apparatus for a
chemical factory, and the rest of the modern armory of automatic
machines which perform military or industrial unctions, possess sense
organs ... (23)

this control of the machine on the basis of it actual performance rather
than its expected performance is known as feedback ... (24)

I have just mentioned the elevator as an example of feedback.  There are
other cases ....  For example, a gun-pointer ... (25)

Something very similar to this occurs in human action. (25)

It is precisely my thesis taht the physical functioning of the living
individual and teh operation of some of the newer communication machines
are precisly parallel in their analogous attempt to control entropy
through feedback. (26)