uman use human of beings AND CYBERNETICS SOCIETY Norbert Wiener SECOND EDITION A Doubleday Anchor Book Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 http://www.archive.org/details/humanuseofhuma1954wien THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS NORBERT WIENER, bom in 1894, was educated at Tufts College and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. at the age of nineteen, and continued his studies at Cornell, Columbia, Cambridge (England), Gottingen, and Copenhagen. He taught at Harvard and the University of Maine, and in 1919 joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is now Professor of Math- ematics. He was joint recipient of the Bocher Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1933, and in 1936 was one of the seven American delegates to the International Congress of Mathematicians in Oslo, Norway. Dr. Wiener served as Research Professor of Mathematics at the Na- tional Tsing Hua University in Peking, China in 1935-36 while on leave from M.I.T. Diuing World War li he de- veloped improvements in radar and Navy projectiles and devised a method of solving problems of fire control. His published works include The Fourier Integral and Certain of Its Applications (1933), Cybernetics (1948), Extrapola- tion and Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications (1949), and the first volume of an autobiography, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood andYouth (1953). The Human Use of Human Beings was first pubUshed in 1950. For the present edition. Dr. Wiener has rewritten the text of the 1950 edition, bringing it up to date and re- vising a^nd clarifyingitthroughout. n^ Human The Use Human of Be By Norbert Wiener Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology DOUBLEDAY ANCHOR BOOKS DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC. Garden City, New York Reprinted by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company Copyright, 1950, 1954, by Norbert Wiener All RightsReserved Printed in the United States To the memory of my father LEO WIENER formerly Professor of Slavic languages at Harvard University my closest mentor and dearest antagonist ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Part of a chapter has aheady appeared in the Philosophy of Science. The author wishes to acknowledge permission which the pubUsher of this journal has given him to reprint thematerial. PREFACE THE IDEA OF A CONTINGENT UNIVERSE The beginning of the twentieth century marked more than the end of one hundred-year period and the start of another. There was a real change of point of view even before we made the poHtical transition from the century on the whole dominated by peace, to the half century of war through which we have just been Hving. This was perhaps first apparent in science, al- though it is quite possible that whatever has afiFected science led independently to the marked break which we find between the arts and literature of the nine- teenth andthose ofthe twentiethcenturies. Newtonian physics, which had ruled from the end of the seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth with scarcely an opposing voice, described a universe in which everything happened precisely according to law, a compact, tightly organized universe in which the whole future depends strictly upon the whole past. Such a picture can never be either fully justified or fully rejected experimentally and belongs in large measure to a conception of the world which is sup- plementary to experiment but in some ways more uni- versal than anything that can be experimentally We verified. can never test by our imperfect experi- ments whether one set of physical laws or another can be verified down to the last decimal. The Newtonian view, however, was compelled to state and formulate physics as if it were, in fact, subject to such laws. This is now no longer the dominating attitude of physics, and the men who contributed most to its downfall were Bolzmann in Germany and Gibbs in the United States. These two physicists undertook a radical appHcation of an exciting, new idea. Perhaps the use of statistics in physics which, in large measure, they introduced was not completely new, for Maxwell and others had 8 THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS considered worlds of very large numbers of particles which necessarily had to be treated statistically. But what Bolzmann and Gibbs did was to introduce statis- tics into physics in a much more thoroughgoing way, so that the statistical approach was valid not merely for systems of enormous complexity, but even for sys- tems as simple as the single particle in a field of force. Statistics is the science of distribution, and the dis- tribution contemplated by these modern scientists was not concerned with large numbers of similar particles, but with the various positions and velocities from which a physical system might start. In other words, under the Newtonian system the same physical laws apply to a variety of systems starting from a variety of positions and with a variety of momenta. The new stat- isticians put this point of view in a fresh hght. They retained indeed the principle according to which cer- tain systems may be distinguished from others by their total energy, but they rejected the supposition accord- ing to which systems with the same total energy may be clearly distinguished indefinitely and described for- everbyfixed causallaws. There was, actually, an important statistical reserva- tion implicit in Newton's work, though the eighteenth century, which Hved by Newton, ignored No phys- it. ical measurements are ever precise; and what we have to say about a machine or other dynamic system really concerns not what we must expect when the initial po- sitions and momenta are given with perfect accuracy (which never occurs), but what we are to expect when they are given with attainable accuracy. This merely means that we know, not the complete initial condi- tions, but something about their distribution. The func- tional part of physics, in other words, cannot escape considering uncertainty and the contingency of events. It was the merit of Gibbs to show for the first time a clean-cut scientific method for taking this contingency into consideration.