"We are not eternally unchanging, but rather continue our own patterns. Patterns are information."
"Information will never replace illumination," Susan Sontag asserted while contemplating "the conscience of words." "Words are events, they do things, change things," Ursula K. Le Guin reflected on the magic of genuine human communication during the same period. "They (language) change the speaker and the listener; they feedback energy repeatedly and amplify it. They instill understanding or emotion back and forth, and amplify it." But what happens when language is stripped of its humanity, input into unfeeling machines, and used as a currency of information that no longer enlightens?
Half a century before the golden age of algorithms and twenty years before the birth of the internet, mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 - March 18, 1964) sought to protect us from the influence of such assumptions in his insightful and prescient 1950 work, "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society." Wiener noted that the book focuses on "the limitations of communication between individuals and within individuals," influencing generations of thinkers, creators, and entrepreneurs, including beloved writers Kurt Vonnegut, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier.
Two years earlier, Wiener coined the term cybernetics, pioneering a new way of thinking about causal chains and how feedback loops within systems change the systems themselves. (Today's social media ecosystem is a shallow yet illustrative example.)
As a contemporary insight complementing Hannah Arendt's observations on how tyrants use isolation as a weapon of oppression and manipulation, Wiener explained why communication and control are inevitably linked under this model of information systems:
The content of the name information is what we exchange with the outside world when we regulate it and make our regulation understood by the outside world. The process of receiving and using information is our process of regulating the various contingencies in the external environment and living effectively within that environment. The various needs and complexities of modern life place unprecedented demands on the information process, and our publishers, museums, scientific laboratories, universities, libraries, and textbooks must meet the needs of this process, or they risk losing their purpose for existence. To live effectively means to have sufficient information to live. Thus, communication and control as the essence of individual inner life is as fundamental as their essence in social life.
A pillar of Wiener's perspective is the second law of thermodynamics and its core premise that entropy—the trend toward disorder, chaos, and unpredictability—increases over time in any closed system. However, even if we consider the universe itself to be a closed system—this assumption overlooks the possibility that our universe may be one of many—individuals and the societies they form cannot be considered closed systems. Rather, they are small pockets attempting to establish order and reduce entropy amid the vast chaos of the universe—these attempts are encoded in our systems of organizing and communicating information. Wiener explored the similarities between organisms and machines in this regard—a radical concept in his time, and although not fully understood in ours, it is evident:
If we want to use the term "life" to summarize all phenomena that locally violate the flow of increasing entropy, we can do so at will. However, by doing so, we would include many astronomical phenomena that have only the slightest resemblance to life as we know it. Therefore, in my opinion, it is best to avoid using all such unproven codes as "life," "soul," "vitality," etc., and when discussing machines, merely point out that within the range of increasing total entropy, we have no reason to say that machines cannot be similar to humans in the local areas representing reduced entropy.
When I compare this machine to living organisms, I never mean to say that the specific physical, chemical, and mental processes we typically understand about life are equivalent to those in life-imitating machines. I merely state that both can serve as examples of local anti-entropy processes. Anti-entropy processes may also be exemplified through many other avenues, which should neither be termed biological nor mechanical.
Wiener added with remarkable foresight:
We can only understand society through the study of messages and social communication devices, in which the future development of these messages and communication devices will inevitably occupy an increasingly important place in society between humans and machines, between machines and humans, and between machines and machines.
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In control and communication, we must fight against the natural trend of organizational degradation and meaning loss, that is, against the trend of increasing entropy.
According to Neil Gaiman's concept, stories are "the true symbiotic organisms that live with us, allowing humanity to move forward," Wiener considered how biological organisms are similar and aided by information systems:
Organisms are the opposite of chaos, disintegration, and death, just as messages are the opposite of noise. When describing an organism, we do not attempt to detail every molecule and catalog them one by one, but rather seek to answer several questions about revealing the pattern of that organism: for instance, when that organism becomes a more complete organism, the pattern is something of greater meaning and less change.
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We are not fixed materials, but rather enduring patterns. Patterns are messages.
He added:
Messages themselves are a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, we can view a collection of messages as something that contains entropy, just as we treat a collection of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the messages contained in a collection of messages are a measure of that collection's organization. In fact, the information possessed by a message can essentially be interpreted as the negative entropy of that message, interpreted as the negative logarithm of the probability of that message. This means that the more probable a message is, the less information it provides.
Wiener illustrated this point with an example that would please Emily Dickinson:
Precisely because entropy has a spontaneous tendency to increase in closed systems, information has a spontaneous tendency to decrease; precisely because entropy is a measure of disorder, information is a measure of order. Both information and entropy are not conserved and are equally unsuitable as commodities. For example, the meaning of a cliché is less than that of a great poem.
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The popularity of clichés is not accidental; it is an inherent phenomenon of the nature of information. The ownership of information inevitably encounters the following disadvantage: to enrich the general information in society, that information must express something that is essentially different from what was previously publicly stored in society. In great literary classics, a wealth of evidently valuable information may even be discarded simply because everyone is already familiar with its content. Students dislike Shakespeare because, to them, he is merely a collection of familiar quotes. Only when people have conducted in-depth studies of this author, shedding the part adopted by the shallow clichés of the time, can we rebuild a rapport with this author in terms of information and offer a fresh evaluation of his works.
A corollary of this is that the technological and media environment makes all this clearer, which Wiener never witnessed, and we must indeed live with it:
In a constantly changing world, the idea of storing information without severely devaluing it is absurd.
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Information, rather than being aimed at storage, is aimed at circulation. … The importance of information is fully realized as a stage in the continuous process of observing the external world and acting effectively upon it. ... To live is to participate in a continuous flow influenced by the external world and to act upon it, and in this continuous flow, we are merely intermediaries. In other words, living in a constantly changing world means participating in the continuous development of knowledge and the unobstructed exchange of knowledge.
In a passage reminiscent of Zadie Smith, he offers a sobering correction of the illusion of universal progress, providing a thought-provoking contrast to the pressures faced by contemporary social scientists, who present feel-good versions of "progress" through selectively calming half-truths in statistical data that deliberately ignore who the "progress" is for, Wiener wrote:
We must live a life in which the world as a whole obeys the second law of thermodynamics: chaos is increasing, order is decreasing. However, as previously stated, while the second law of thermodynamics is an effective statement for the overall closed system, it is certainly not effective for its non-isolated parts. In a world where total entropy is tending to increase, there exist some local and temporary regions of reduced entropy, and it is due to the existence of these regions that one can assert the existence of progress.
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Thus, whether we interpret the second law of thermodynamics pessimistically depends on how we assign importance to both the entire universe and the local regions of reduced entropy we find within it. It is worth remembering that we ourselves are such a region of reduced entropy, and we live within other regions of reduced entropy. As a result, the normal perspective, due to differences in proximity, leads us to assign far greater importance to regions of reduced entropy and increased order than to the importance of the entire universe.
Wiener believed that the arrow of historical time aligns with the arrow of "progress" in a general sense, and the core flaw of this view lies in:
Our worship of progress can be examined from two perspectives: one is the factual perspective, and the other is the moral perspective, which provides standards for approval or disapproval. In terms of facts, people assert that after the discovery of America, which marked the beginning of modern civilization, we entered an endless period of invention, an endless period of discovering new technologies to control the human environment. Believers in progress say this period will continue indefinitely, with no end in sight in the foreseeable future. Those who insist on treating the idea of progress as a moral principle believe that this unrestrained, almost spontaneous process of change is a "good thing," assuring future generations of a paradise among tourists. People can believe in progress as a factual principle without treating it as a moral principle; however, in the doctrines of many Americans, the two are inseparable.
Thus, Wiener turned to the greatest blank in the narrative of progress—the acknowledgment of the interconnections that exist between different scales and species, a scene captured a century ago by pioneering naturalist John Muir in his assertion that "when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." A decade before Rachel Carson awakened modern environmental consciousness, Wiener considered the greater costs of human "progress" on Earth:
Many people do not realize that the last 400 years have been a very special period in world history. The pace of change during this period is unprecedented; the nature of these changes is also unique. It is partly the result of strengthened communication, but also the result of humanity's strengthened dominion over nature, which ultimately reinforces our status as slaves to nature on a planet with limited scope like Earth. … We have so thoroughly transformed our environment that we now must transform ourselves to survive in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old environment. Progress not only brings new possibilities for the future but also new limitations. … We must have the courage to face the undeniable fact of personal destruction, and we must also have the courage to face the ultimate destruction of our civilization. A simple faith in progress is not a powerful belief but rather a weak belief reluctantly accepted.
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Thus, the new industrial revolution is a double-edged sword that can be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough to enter this period of benefiting humanity. The new industrial revolution can also destroy humanity; if we do not use it wisely, it could quickly develop to that point.
Thirty years later, the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas articulated the other side of this sentiment in his beautiful reflections on the dangers and possibilities of progress: "If we persist, we will face one surprise after another. We can build structures for human society that are unprecedented, thoughts that are unprecedented, music that is unprecedented… as long as we do not commit suicide, as long as we can connect through emotion and respect, I believe our genes are the same, and what we can do on this planet or beyond it is limitless." Wiener's most visionary point is that if we are to not only survive but thrive as a civilization and species, we must encode these same values of emotion and respect into our machines, information systems, and communication technologies so that "new patterns are used to benefit humanity, increase human leisure time, and enrich its spiritual life, rather than merely for profit and worship of machines."
More than a century after Mary Shelley raised these enduring questions about innovation and responsibility in "Frankenstein," Wiener offered a remarkably prescient and relevant perspective on the artificial intelligence cliff we now find ourselves on, in an era where algorithms determine what we read, where we go, and how much reality we see:
The danger of machines to society does not come from the machines themselves, but from the people who use them.
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Modern individuals, especially modern Americans, despite having much "know-how," possess very little knowledge of "what to do." They readily accept highly agile machine decisions without questioning much about the motives and principles behind them. … Any machine created for the purpose of making decisions that does not have learning capabilities will be a completely rigid-thinking machine. If we allow such machines to decide our actions, we are in trouble unless we have previously studied their patterns of activity and fully understand that their actions are carried out according to principles we can accept! On the other hand, bottled-demon-type machines, while capable of learning and making decisions based on that learning, will not necessarily make decisions that align with our intentions or that we should or could accept. Those who fail to understand this and shift their responsibility onto machines, regardless of whether the machine can learn, are essentially handing their responsibility over to the winds, letting it blow away, only to find that it returns to them riding on the back of a whirlwind.
The core of Wiener's decades-old book is an eternal and urgent point that every programmer, technician, and entrepreneur should engrave in their minds. The pioneering philosopher Susanne Langer considered how the questions we pose affect the answers we give and the worlds we build, and eight years later, he wrote:
When individual humans are used as basic members to weave into a society, if they cannot adequately act as responsible individuals but merely as gears, levers, and links, then even if their material is flesh and blood, they are essentially no different from metal. What is utilized as an element of a machine is, in fact, an element of a machine. Whether we delegate our decisions to machines made of metal or machines made of flesh and blood (organizations, large laboratories, armies, and corporations), unless we pose the questions correctly, we will never get the right answers.
It is precisely because our existence is so incredible against the backdrop of an entropy-dominated universe that it is imbued with a special responsibility—this responsibility is the source and aid of the meaning of human life. Nobel laureate Polish poet Wisława Szymborska would later resonate with this sentiment, as Wiener wrote:
We can fully imagine that life is a phenomenon within a limited time; before the earliest geological ages, life did not exist; and the return of Earth to a lifeless state, becoming a burned or frozen planet, will also come. The physical conditions necessary for the chemical reactions that sustain life are extremely rare, and for those who understand this, the following conclusion is inevitable: the fortunate coincidence that allows any form of life on this planet, even life not limited to humans, to continue must ultimately lead to a completely unfortunate conclusion. However, we may conveniently evaluate ourselves, considering the temporary coincidence of the existence of life and the even more temporary coincidence of human existence as having paramount importance, without having to consider their ephemeral nature.
In a very real sense, we are all passengers on a doomed ship on this planet. But even on a doomed ship, human dignity and value do not necessarily disappear; we must strive to enhance them as much as possible. We are going to sink, but we can adopt an attitude befitting our identity as we look to the future.
Adapted from the article on Brain Pickings The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener on Communication, Control, and the Morality of Our Machines