Great Throughts Treasury

"However, even now the transportation of messages serves to forward an extension of man's senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another. We have already suggested in this chapter that the distinction between material transportation and message transportation is not in any theoretical sense permanent and unabridgeable."

"I agree with what Einstein used to say about the three bombs: there are three bombs. The first one is the atomic bomb, which disintegrates reality, the second one is the digital or computer bomb, which destroys the principle of reality itself - not the actual object - and rebuilds it, and finally the third bomb is the demographic one."

"I am a Mathematician."

"Here I want to interject the semantic point that words such as life, purpose, and soul are grossly inadequate to precise scientific thinking. These terms have gained their significance through our recognition of the unity of a certain group of phenomena, and do not in fact furnish us with any adequate basis to characterize this unity."

"I am afraid that I am convinced that a community of human beings is a far more useful thing than a community of ants, and that if the human being is condemned and restricted to perform the same functions over and over again, he will not even be a good ant, not to mention a good human being. Those who would organize us according to permanent individual functions and permanent individual restrictions condemn the human race to move at much less than half-steam. They throw away nearly all our human possibilities and by limiting the modes in which we may adapt ourselves to future contingencies, they reduce our chances for a reasonably long existence on this earth."

"I am terribly depressed. How are things going?"

"I am myself a former student of Russell and owe much to his influence."

"I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'"

"I have spoken of machines, but not only of machines having brains of brass and thews of iron. When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood."

"I had known for a considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it would be determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of computing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr. Yuk Wing Lee on the design of electric networks. In fact, both proved important. IN the summer of 1940, I turned a large part of my attention to the development of computing machines for the solution of partial differential equations. I had long been interested in these and had convinced myself that their chief problem, as contrasted with the ordinary differential equations so well treated by Dr. Bush ion his differential analyzer, was that of the representation of functions of more than one variable. It was also clear that any scanning process [as in the new television JG] must vastly increase the number of data dealt with as compared with the number of data in a problem of ordinary differential equations. To accomplish reasonable results in a reasonable time, it thus became necessary to push the speed of the elementary processes to the maximum, and to avoid interrupting the stream of these processes by steps of an essentially slower nature. It also became necessary to perform the individual processes with so high a degree of accuracy that the enormous repetition of the elementary processes should not bring about a cumulative error so great as to swamp all accuracy. Thus the following requirements were suggested: 1. That the central adding and multiplying apparatus of the computing machine should be numerical, as in an ordinary adding machine, rather than on a basis of measurement, as in the Bush differential analyzer.2. That these mechanisms, which are essentially switching devices, should depend on electronic tubes rather than on gears or mechanical relays, in order to secure quicker action. 3. That, in accordance with the policy adopted in some existing apparatus of the Bell. Telephone Laboratories, it would probably be more economical in apparatus to adopt the scale of two for addition and multiplication, rather than the scale of 10. 4. That the entire sequence of operations be laid out on the machine itself so that there should be no human intervention from the time the data were entered until the final results should be taken off, and that all logical decisions necessary for this should be built into the machine itself. 5. That the machine contain an apparatus for the storage of data which should record them quickly, hold them firmly until erasure, read them quickly, erase them quickly, and then be immediately available for the storage of new material. These recommendations, together with tentative suggestions for the means of realizing them, were sent in to Dr. Vannevar Bush for their possible use in a war. AT that stage of the preparations for war, they did not seem to have sufficiently high priority to make immediate work on them worth while. Nevertheless, they all represent ideas which have been incorporated into the modern ultra-rapid computing machine. These notions were all very much in the spirit of the thought of the time, and I do not for a moment wish to claim anything like the sole responsibility for their introduction. Nevertheless, they have proved useful, and its is my hope that my memorandum had some effect in popularizing them among engineers"

"I have previously said that when an invention is made, a considerable period generally elapses before its full implications are understood."

"I repeat, to live effectively is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. In the figurative sense, to be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange."

"I protest, not only as I have already done against the cutting off of intellectual originality by the difficulties of the means of communication in the modern world, but even more against the ax which has been put to the root of originality."

"I wish to point out... that language is not exclusively an attribute of living beings but one which they may share to certain extent with the machines man has constructed. I wish to show further that man's preoccupation with language most certainly represents a possibility which is not built into his nearest relatives, the great apes. Nevertheless, I shall show that it is a possibility which must be made good by learning."

"I will be able to help steer you from time to time."

"I wondered whether I had not got into a moral situation in which my first duty might be to speak to others concerning material which could be socially harmful."

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

"If I don't promise you the answers would you go. (go away?)"

"In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet."

"In control and communication we are always fighting nature?s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase."

"In man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming."

"In physics, the idea of progress opposes that of entropy, although there is no absolute contradiction between the two."

"It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior."

"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."

"It is my impression that searching together and exchanging information openly has enhanced your progress."

"It is perfectly clear that [automation] will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which? the depression of the [nineteen] thirties will seem a pleasant joke. This depression will ruin many industries?possibly even the industries which have taken advantage of the new potentialities"

"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 feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus. This complex of behavior is ignored by the average man, and in particular does not play the role that it should in our habitual analysis of society; for just as individual physical responses may be seen from this point of view, so may the organic responses of society itself. I do not mean that the sociologist is unaware of the existence and complex nature of communications in society, but until recently he has tended to overlook the extent to which they are the cement which binds its fabric together."

"It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game with each other. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves."

"It matters little whether the military band to which one has pledged oneself be that of Ignatius Loyola or that of Lenin, so long as he considers it more important that his beliefs should be on the right side than that he should maintain his freedom and even his professional naivet‚."

"Let it be remarked... that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry."

"It is the purpose of Cybernetics to develop a language and techniques that will enable us to indeed attack the problem of control and communication in general, but also to find the proper repertory of ideas and techniques to classify their particular manifestations under certain concepts."

"Its 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 indifferent to human possibility as if they had, in fact, been conceived mechanically"

"It is the thesis 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."

"Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. 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. Clich‚s, for example, are less illuminating than great poems."

"Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor."

"Physics is at present a mass of partial theories which no man has yet been able to render truly and clearly consistent. It has been well said that the modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and a student of gravitational relativity theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday he is praying. . . that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views."

"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. We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us until we begin to decay more quickly than we reconstitute ourselves. Then we die."

"Many of those who are most attached to this orderly state of permanently allotted functions would be confounded if they were forced to admit this publicly. They are only in a position to display their clear preferences through their actions. Yet these actions stand out distinctly enough."

"Man has held the notion that language is a mystery since very early times."

"Neither the artist nor the mathematician may be able to tell you what constitutes the difference between a significant piece of work and an inflated trifle; but if he is not able to recognise this in his own heart, he is no artist and no mathematician."

"Now, let me provide a few answers that will perhaps inspire more of you. First of all, as you read further, you will better understand why my identity cannot be revealed. ('the message' does not reveal why)."

"One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians."

"Moreover, with his love for the gadget as a collection of wheels that rotate and make noise, he has emphasized the extended physical transportation of man, rather than the transportation of language and ideas. He does not seem to realize that where man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere."

"Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise."

"One thing at any rate is clear. The physical identity of an individual does not consist in the matter of which it is made... The biological individuality of an organism seems to lie in a certain continuity of process, and in the memory by the organism of the effects of its past development... In terms of the computing machine, the individuality of a mind lies in the retention of its earlier tapings and memories, and in its continued development along lines already laid out."

"Some years ago, a prominent American engineer bought an expensive player piano. It became clear after a week or two that this purchase did not correspond to any particular interest in the music played by the piano but rather to an overwhelming interest in the piano mechanism..."

"Since Leibniz there has perhaps been no man who has had a full command of all the intellectual activity of his day. [Perhaps we should say, since Hegel. JG] Since that time, science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields which show a tendency to grow progressively narrower. A century ago, there may have been no Leibniz, but there was a Gauss, a Faraday, and a Darwin. Today there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a topologist or a coleopterist. He will be filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and al its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy? There are fields of scientific work, as we shall see in the body of this book, which have been explored from the different sides of pure mathematics, statistics, electrical engineering, and neurophysiology; in which every single notion receives a separate name from each group, and in which important work has been triplicated or quadruplicated, while still other important work is delayed by the unavailability in one field of results that may have already become classical in the next field. It is these boundary regions which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor. If the difficulty of a physiological problem is mathematical in essence, then physiologists ignorant of mathematics will get precisely as far as one physiologists ignorant of mathematics, and no further. If a physiologist who knows no mathematics works together with a mathematician who knows no physiology, the one will be unable to state his problem in terms that the other can manipulate, and the second will be unable to put the answers in any form that the first can understand. Dr. Rosenbleuth has always insisted that a proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another's intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance e of a colleague's new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he mus5t be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look."

"Power and the search for power are unfortunately realities that can assume many garbs."

"The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat."

"That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clich‚s, for example, are less illuminating than great poems"