The Human Use of Human Beings
I’m excited to take some time to review one of my favorite books: The Human Use of Human Beings. I’ve always had an interest in computers and human behavior, and at it’s heart this book is meant to be an examination of how we might define the intersection of those two things. Before I get too much into the book though, I do feel the need to spend just a bit of time talking about the author.
Who Was Norbert Wiener?
By any standard of the word, I believe that it is fair to say Norbert Wiener was a genius. When we use the word in a contemporary context, someone like Elon Musk might get mentioned as a real genius. And while Mr. Musk was certainly precocious and productive as a young man, his feats of coding his own video game (no small task) and reading all of the books in his local library still pale in comparison to Mr. Wiener, who had been awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard at the ripe old age of 18 for his dissertation on mathematical logic.
Beyond comparisons of their statuses as former child prodigies, it would also be fair to say that Musk, with his incredible contributions to advancing multiple industries is most comparable to an Edison or a Hughes. Again we contrast this with Wiener, with his contributions to the fields of electronic engineering and control systems, is more akin to a Von Neumann or Heisenberg. erhaps more of an academic than industrial genius.
Regardless, of comparisons of old and new genius, Norbert Wiener fits comfortably among any of them, and this gave his book quite a bit more credibility in mine (heh). In particular, Norbert Wiener’s interest in cybernetics stemmed from research he had done on the firing of anti-aircraft guns during WWII, so his foray into the world of information theory was not merely theoretical, but practical as well.
Wiener’s informed background and real genius, when combined with a personal interest in social systems and information theory, culminated in his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. Shortly after (in part due to complaints that the first book was too technical), Wiener simplified the contents of Cybernetics and wrote his 1950 book The Human Use of Human Beings.
There are certainly segments of this “dumbed down” book on cybernetics that scream, “I AM VERY SMART,” but overall the book is a thoughtful and prescient analysis of mankind’s ever-growing dependence on technology, as well as our inevitable loss of control over that technology if we do not formalize means of analyzing our interactions with increasingly complex and intelligent technological systems.
Why Does it Matter Who He Was?
While the first few chapters of the book are well organized, The Human Use of Human Beings is more of a collection of personal essays on a common theme, rather than a unified treatise on cybernetics.
The central message of certain chapters are so isolated in their focus that I’ve actually found it difficult to present the central ideas of the book out of the context of the chapter in which they are addressed. Some of these ideas also take a considerable amount of leading into, so to save myself from thinking too hard, I’m going to give a play-by-play of the more important ideas in each chapter, and then I’ll follow with a quick synopsis of my own.
Not all chapters are made equal, but I will do my best to cover the key concepts in a coherent way. If the chapter-by-chapter breakdown is too cumbersome, please skip to my summary and takeaways.
Preface
- The beginning of the 20th century marked a departure from a deterministic view of the Universe and the forces in it, and the arrival of a more probabilistic one.
- This probabilistic view of the universe was accompanied by an increasing awareness of entropy, the tendency of the universe to move towards the most probable state, or rather a sort of chaos and sameness.
- Despite this seemingly universal rule of heading towards decay, there are certain emergent patterns in the universe which seem to defy that behavior. Most notably among those, is life.
- It is from this point of view that cybernetics began its development.
Chapter 1: Cybernetics in History
- The word cybernetics is derived from the Greek kubernetes, which means “governor”, or “steersman”. This is relevant, as cybernetics presumes that the underlying feedback mechanisms used in communication and control are essentially the same.
“It is the theory of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.”
- Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world to adjust to it or make our adjustments upon it.
- To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
- Messages themselves are a form of pattern/organization, and thus can be seen as having an entropy of their own.
“In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives.”
- The physical functioning of the individual and the operation of “intelligent” machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy via feedback. In both cases, the actual result is acted upon after information on it has been received and interpreted, rather than acting upon the expected result.
Chapter 2: Progress and Entropy
- The Universe’s natural tendency is that towards entropy, as expressed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It would seem however, that living organisms are akin to anti-entropic biological machines.
- The last 400 years of history are highly special, in that the pace with which technological changes take place is ever-increasing. One part of this is improvement in communication methods, the other is in mastery over nature.
“…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… We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.“
Chapter 3: Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior
“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.”
- The intelligence of an organism is, to a degree, bound by its size. The physical bounds in which an organism develops up are directly responsible for the mental processes which govern its pattern of behavior.
- An organism’s behavior is analogous to that of a simple automaton. Both can be seen largely as a product of original organization combined with the memories accumulated throughout its behavior.
Chapter 4: The Mechanism of History and Language
“Speech is the greatest interest and the most distinctive achievement of man.”
- Human language is distinguished in both its delicacy and complexity of coding.
Chapter 5: Organization as the Message
- As messages can be viewed as patterns/organization so can organisms.
- The identity of an individual consists not of the matter with which it is made, but rather the continuity of process combined with memories of past developments.
- We could theoretically send people as messages, even if the cost would be incredibly prohibitive.
Chapter 6: Law and Communication
- There is no way to assure a fair and administrable legal code.
Chapter 7: Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy
“On one hand we have a network of communication more complete than the world has ever seen. On the other, we have the blind and excessive classification of military information.“
- There is no point in trying to keep military information secret, as any information with which we arm ourselves will ultimately arm our enemies as well.
Chapter 8: The Role of the Intellectual and the Scientists
- The integrity of all channels of communication is essential to the welfare of society.
Chapter 9: The First and Second Industrial Revolutions
- Wiener predicts the automation of automotive factories within ~10 years of accuracy.
“Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with it must accept the conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce and unemployment situation, in comparison with which the current recession and the depression of the thirties will seem like a pleasant joke.”
Final Chapters
- Wiener gives some warnings against creating super-AI’s without first examining our own ethical foundations, examining the capabilities of the system with which we are interacting, and how/why we can control it.
- Without a concrete understanding of behavior and the knowledge that the machines with which we communicate will fit within our moral framework, we are bound to run into unintended consequences to which we will not be able to respond adequately.
In Summary
The feedback mechanisms related to communication and control are essentially the same. As a result, societal behavior is best understood by examining its messages and communications facilities. As society rapidly accelerates in both mastery of message and environment, our ability to adapt to and control changes in our technology-dependent society will become less and less informed/effective.
It is because of this acceleration of systemic power and unpredictability that we should formally examine the cybernetic relationships of the systems we use within our global society, lest we become unable to survive unforeseen consequences resulting from the technological advancements upon which we have become so dependent as a species.
My Takeaways
While today much of the content of The Human Use of Human Beings is dated enough now that many of Wiener’s predictions might seem like quaint reflections of the past, the truth is that his level of expertise made his predictions on numerous topics like the modernization of automotive factories or the use of unwieldy AI unusually prescient. There are a variety of issues that we face even today which Wiener touched on 70 years ago, from the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution (which will supposedly leave much of the world unemployed), or the nature of tacitly government-approved social networks and oligopolies manipulating dissemination of information and in turn, human behavior.
Were there an effective and rigorous way of analyzing a system like today’s internet, with it’s leviathan platforms and gated flows of communication, it might become apparent just what exactly there is to do about it all.
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be one (at least not presented in this book), and this lack of analytic tools ends up leading us to an important observation about The Human Use of Human Beings. The book serves more as a presentation of Wiener’s personal views within the scope of cybernetics rather than as a systematized explanation on how to analyze cybernetic processes. Instead, we learn of Wiener’s disdain for fascism and communism, his critiques of McCarthyism and contemporary politics, and even get a healthy dose of apologetics for the spies that handed over nuclear secrets to the Soviets so long ago.
As a result of this lack of rigorous explanation, some of Wiener’s ideas fall short. The idea that the information yielded by a message correlates with the inverse logarithm of its probability of occurring comes to mind, for example. If I were to send a message with the word “obstinate” typed out a billion times, I’m sure the probability of that message occurring is every bit as small as the information it would reveal to its recipient. Similarly, I find Wiener’s arguments against the impossibility of a coherent/ethical legal system and against the the efficacy of keeping government military secrets to be particularly presumptive and unconvincing. Even the idea that only the last 400 years of human development have experienced peculiarly accelerated technological growth rings hollow to me, as I personally would argue that we can take that timeline all the way beyond the time of stone tools.
Ultimately, I think it’s better to look at The Human Use of Human Beings as a brief introduction to the basic concepts underlying cybernetics which is then used as a vehicle for the ideas and pieces of work which Wiener held dear. All in all, there is a considerable amount of content in the book which was more than interesting enough to become common fodder for science fiction in the years to come, and it is a book that I found quite mind-opening on first read.
If there was one concept in the book that I found particularly life-changing, it would be one which I don’t believe is ever explicitly stated, although the presumption of its reality is consistent throughout the book.
The Cybernetic Imperative
Anyone who has watched John Carpenter’s Terminator might think I’m about to go on a rant about Austrian-accented cyborgs, but what I’ve chosen to call the Cybernetic Imperative is simply a by-product of the Biological Imperative.
A cybernetic entity can simply be broken down into an anything which follows Wiener’s model of complex interaction to interpret information from its environment, which the entity then uses to act upon itself or its environment to meet some (usually non-entropic) ends.
In other words, anything actively taking sensory information from an environment so that it may react or act may be seen as a cybernetic system of varying complexity. Information is used for feedback which dictates action upon an environment.
Living organisms on Earth are subject to what we call the Biological Imperative, that being the need to survive and reproduce. It is no surprise that the organisms which are most effectively able to act upon and react to their environment are often the fittest, and in turn pass down at least some of the genotypal information which made that organism effective in interacting with its environment.
This need to interact with the environment, as cybernetics would suggest, is a matter of effectively utilizing information for control/communication. As a result, the Biological Imperative to survive and breed yields the Cybernetic Imperative: A need not only to derive relevant information from one’s environment, but also to create an effective enough model of one’s environment from that information to act in a way which complements the Biological Imperative.
(If there’s a better term for this please tell me. I’m sure it’s been said in a number of ways before, but this is the context in which I was introduced to the idea and I’ve made a sweet-ass name, too.)
This Cybernetic Imperative perspective is a large part of why I love biology and computers. Cybernetic systems occur at the cellular level, the multicellular level, at the level of the organism, within society… It’s why specialized cells in our nervous system use electricity rather than relying on chemical diffusion, it’s why we can see and hear, and ultimately why we have language. I remember upon my first reading of this book I felt that cybernetics was a beautiful lens for viewing the origins of almost every interesting system, and it had a profound effect on which subjects I would later become most interested in.
In Closing
I am not sure that I would recommend The Human Use of Human Beings as light reading. For anyone interested in retro-futurism, however, I would say it is one of the better analyses I’ve ever read on what actions human beings might take with machines, what byproducts might emerge from those actions, and what wee need to carefully contemplate before “progress” runs humanity headlong into a fate it can’t control.
While my concept of the Cybernetic Imperative may not be as revelatory to others as it was to me, I truly believe that many of the world’s most interesting problems relate directly to it. From the creation of inherently ethical AI, to understanding consciousness, to emergent behavior derived from complex systems, to handling the future of the world wide web, I believe the question of how entities receive information and model their environment within this sort of framework will be a key player in answering each of these questions, and the Cybernetic Imperative will be the leitmotif.
For those of you who slogged through the chapter sections, I apologize for this post being such a long one. I did feel a need to be concise, but I also wanted to represent the core concepts of the book as much as possible without paraphrasing or reducing them to the point of meaninglessness. I hope you found my take on the Cybernetic Imperative to be interesting, and that you found Wiener’s concerns over the future (or present, rather) of man and machine to be as thought-provoking as I do.
Thanks for reading,
-WellTree