The Human Use of Human Beings
After publishing Cybernetics in 1948, Norbert Wiener wrote The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). In the introduction he explains,
“Upon the publication of this book (Cybernetics) which possesses a rather forbidding mathematical core, some of my friends urged upon me that I should write a related book for the layman, in which I should avoid mathematical symbolism and ideas as much as possible, and in which I should emphasize the not inconsiderable social consequences of my point of view.”
He succeeds wonderfully, yet the book is unknown today, though it might well be considered the first rigorous thought on a politics of technology. It should be required reading for every high school student, so they can begin purposefully grappling with a society ever more greatly defined by technology. Finding this book made me wonder how at this time, it could remain completely unknown.
Wiener reasoned all learning involved the process of feedback, defined simplistically as any given initial system receiving information back from an action taken and then being able to incorporate that returned information, the feedback, into its next actions. “For any machine subject to a varied external environment, in order to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.” He uses machine here, but feedback is just as essential to learning for any biological organism or for larger social systems comprised of the two.
Wiener came to understand the essential role of feedback in his work developing anti-aircraft guns in World War II. Feedback in regards to the planes' velocities and the trajectory of the shells fired were necessary for calibrating and then recalibrating the guns' aim. Wiener knew the understanding of feedback and the development of the first computers signaled a new era of machine learning, of information systems allowing the automation not only of physical processes but of that most extremely nebulous conceptual process — intelligence. Wiener was gravely concerned the birth of this new technological era was directly tied to World War II, the greatest period of organized human violence in history. He courageously and correctly advocated not allowing militarism to lead the development of this evolving technological era precisely when the US institutionalized the National Security State, thus, the first reason Wiener disappeared.
In a 1947 letter to The Atlantic Magazine, Wiener warns,
“The measures taken during the war by our military agencies, in restricting the free intercourse among scientists on related projects or even on the same project, have gone so far that it is clear that if continued in time of peace this policy will lead to the total irresponsibility of the scientist, and ultimately to the death of science. Both of these are disastrous for our civilization, and entail grave and immediate peril for the public.”
Wiener doubled down on the idiocy of allowing the military to lead technological development in The Human Use of Human Understanding:
“However, it will not do for the masses of our scientific population to blame their appointed and self-appointed betters for their futility, and for the dangers of the present day. It is the great public which is demanding the utmost of secrecy for modern science in all things which may touch its military uses. This demand for secrecy is scarcely more than the wish of a sick civilization not to learn of the progress of its own disease. So long as we can continue to pretend that all is right with the world, we plug up our ears against the sound of 'Ancestral voices prophesying war.'"
Civilization only got sicker. The citizenry ever more purposefully and blissfully ignorant of the actions of the American National Security as a primary force steering technological development, resulting in a continuous rain of death and destruction across the planet for the last 75 years – the latest examples Ukraine and Gaza.
However, there is a second not quite as barbarous reason for Wiener's anonymity, a more sophisticated marginalizing by an unaccountable, entrenched elite. This relegation to obscurity is well represented by a short piece published a decade ago by the MIT News, the university Wiener spent 40 years as a professor. The piece states,
“Wiener’s ideas ended up blending together with those of a number of his contemporaries to help create the intellectual backdrop against which engineering is done today. But it’s difficult to isolate a single strain of thought in Cybernetics that had a lasting influence on subsequent scientific research.”
“A single strain” is engineer think, but it goes much deeper. It is the tradition, blame Newton, of the compartmentalization of scientific thought since incorporated into the political, cultural, and economic structures of modern society. With political economy, Adam Smith defined it as “the division of labor,” but it was preceded by the scientific division of intellect. Knowledge of a single strain of scientific thought proved immensely powerful in creating technology, which could then could be profitably exploited. Yet, political, cultural, and economic systems proved deaf, dumb, blind, and largely impenetrable to the feedback provided by adopted technologies’ impact on the greater societal and environmental whole.
Wiener correctly advocated a more sophisticated and complex thinking, an understanding every division, every strain, remains part of a larger whole, and the action of any part influences the whole, while simultaneously the whole continuously influences actions of any given part. The ability of any specific entity, whether organic, machine, or a greater societal system for that matter, to receive feedback from actions taken and then incorporate this feedback into future actions is learning. The last century of technological development has incorporated little feedback, ignorantly proceeding with seemingly ever greater acceleration.
The MIT News piece adds “researchers in a host of disciplines drew inspiration from Wiener’s syncretic vision.” Wiener's math was foundational for developing present information technologies, his concepts essential for what is now being marketed as AI. The inability to value Wiener’s thinking as a single strain, meant the ideas could not be valued by established convention. The Human Use of Human Beings’ entire thesis is that valuing by dividing, through isolated, single, technological strains is an insufficient mean to measuring the value of any new technology. Just as the technology being created would overthrow established society, the only way to truly value it was to eradicate the limited values creating it.
Today, we remain less aware of the need for a more sophisticated and encompassing, a more whole valuing of technology than Wiener advocated in 1950. He writes a still spot-on critique of tech development,
“To those of us who are engaged in constructive research and in invention, there is a serious moral risk of aggrandizing what we have accomplished. To the public, there is an equally serious moral risk of supposing that in stating new potentials of fact, we scientists and engineers are thereby justifying and even urging their exploitation at any costs. It will therefore be taken for granted by many that the attitude of an investigator who is aware of the great new possibilities of the machine age, when employed for the purpose of communication and control, will be to urge the prompt exploitation of this new "know-how" for the sake of the machine and for the minimization of the human element in life. This is most emphatically not the purpose of the present book.”
He then continues,
“That we shall have to change many details of our mode of life in the face of the new machines is certain; but these machines are secondary in all matters of value that concern us to the proper evaluation of human beings for their own sake and to their employment as human beings, and not as second-rate surrogates for possible machines of the future. The message of this book as well as its title is the human use of human beings.”
Thus the third reason no one knows about Wiener, tech development has preceded apace not on its value to human beings, but simply valued by the technology itself. “It is again the American worship of know-how as opposed to know-what that hampers us.”
Wiener's thought is a seismic shift in the understanding and shaping of both society's physical and social infrastructures, a reformation of value gained only through the concerted, deliberate, and comprehensive reorganization of human associations. It is a radical politics.
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