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WRONG, BUT MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER
Seth Lloyd

Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist at MIT, Nam P. Suh Professor in the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener’s 1950 popularization of his highly
influential book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human beings and machines in a
world in which machines are becoming ever more computationally capable and powerful.
It is a remarkably prescient book, and remarkably wrong. Written at the height of the
Cold War, it contains a chilling reminder of the dangers of totalitarian organizations and
societies, and of the danger to democracy when it tries to combat totalitarianism with
totalitarianism’s own weapons.

Wiener’s Cybernetics looked in close scientific detail at the process of control via
feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological
basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking
feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was
immersed in problems of control, Wiener saw the world as a set of complex, interlocking
feedback loops, in which sensors, signals, and actuators such as engines interact via an
intricate exchange of signals and information. The engineering applications of
Cybernetics were tremendously influential and effective, giving rise to rockets, robots,
automated assembly lines, and a host of precision-engineering techniques—in other
words, to the basis of contemporary industrial society.

Wiener had greater ambitions for cybernetic concepts, however, and in The
Human Use of Human Beings he spells out his thoughts on its application to topics as
diverse as Maxwell’s Demon, human language, the brain, insect metabolism, the legal
system, the role of technological innovation in government, and religion. These broader
applications of cybernetics were an almost unequivocal failure. Vigorously hyped from
the late 1940s to the early 1960s—to a degree similar to the hype of computer and
communication technology that led to the dotcom crash of 2000-2001—cybernetics
delivered satellites and telephone switching systems but generated few if any useful
developments in social organization and society at large.

Nearly seventy years later, however, The Human Use of Human Beings has more
to teach us humans than it did the first time around. Perhaps the most remarkable feature
of the book is that it introduces a large number of topics concerning human/machine
interactions that are still of considerable relevance. Dark in tone, the book makes several
predictions about disasters to come in the second half of the 20th century, many of which
are almost identical to predictions made today about the second half of the 21st.

For example, Wiener foresaw a moment in the near future of 1950 in which
humans would cede control of society to a cybernetic artificial intelligence, which would
then proceed to wreak havoc on humankind. The automation of manufacturing, Wiener
predicted, would both create large advances in productivity and displace many workers
from their jobs—a sequence of events that did indeed come to pass in the ensuing
decades. Unless society could find productive occupations for these displaced workers,
Wiener warned, revolt would ensue.

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