"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 humanity, fed into unfeeling machines, and used as a currency of information that no longer enlightens?
Half a century before the age of algorithmic gold 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 book, "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 writer 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.)
In complement to Hannah Arendt's contemporary insights 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 known to 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 high demands on the information process, and our publishers, museums, scientific laboratories, universities, libraries, and textbooks must meet the various needs of that process, or else they will lose their purpose for existence. To live effectively means having enough information to live. Thus, the essence of communication and control as part of an individual's inner life is just as essential as their essence in an individual's social life.
One pillar of Wiener's viewpoint 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 ignores the possibility that our universe may be one of many—individuals and the societies they form cannot be considered closed systems. Instead, they are small pockets attempting to establish order and reduce entropy amid the vast chaos of the universe—these attempts are encoded in the systems we organize and communicate information. Wiener explored the similarities between organisms and machines in this regard—a radical concept in his time, and although not yet fully understood in ours, it is evident:
If we want to use the term "life" to summarize all phenomena that locally violate the trend of increasing entropy, we can do so at will. However, doing so would include many phenomena in astronomy that are only very slightly similar 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 talking about machines, merely point out: within the range of total entropy tending to increase, 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 with living organisms, I never mean to say that the specific physical, chemical, and mental processes we usually understand about life are equivalent to those processes in life-imitating machines. I merely say 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 called 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 the 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 of ourselves. 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 contained in 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 also 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 both 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 unfavorable condition: to enrich the general information in society, that information must express something that is essentially different from the previously public store of information in society. In great literary classics, a large amount of evidently valuable information may even be discarded simply because everyone is already familiar with its content. Students dislike Shakespeare because, in their view, 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 our rapport with this author in terms of information and offer a fresh evaluation of his works.
A corollary of this is that technology and media environments make all of this clearer, things that Wiener never witnessed, which we must indeed live with:
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 taking effective action in response to it. ... To live is to participate in a continuous flow influenced by the external world and to act in response to it, and in this continuous flow, we are merely intermediaries connecting the past and the future. 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 provided a sobering correction to the illusion of universal progress, offering a thought-provoking contrast to the pressures faced by today's social scientists, who provide feel-good "progress" versions through selectively soothing 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 mentioned, 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 tends to increase, there exist some local and temporary regions of reduced entropy, and due to the existence of these regions, some can assert the existence of progress.
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Therefore, whether we should 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 important to remember that we ourselves are such a region of reduced entropy, and we live within other regions of reduced entropy. The result is that the differences in normal perspectives caused by varying distances make us 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 universal sense, and the core flaw of this viewpoint lies in:
Our worship of progress can be explored from two perspectives: one is a factual perspective, and the other is a moral perspective, the latter providing standards for approval or disapproval. In terms of facts, it is asserted that after the early progress of discovering America (which corresponds to 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 unrestricted, almost spontaneous process of change is a "good thing," assuring future generations of a paradise among tourists. People can believe in progress as a fact 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—acknowledging the interconnections that exist between different scales and species, a scene captured memorably 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 that has occurred during this period is unprecedented; the nature of these changes is also such. It is partly a result of enhanced communication, but also a result of people's increased domination over nature, and on a planet with such limited scope as Earth, this domination ultimately strengthens our identity as slaves of nature. ... 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 for the future. ... 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. The mere belief in progress is not a powerful conviction, but rather a weak belief that is reluctantly accepted.
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Thus, the new industrial revolution is a double-edged sword; it can be used for the benefit of humanity, but only if humanity survives long enough for us to enter this period of benefiting humanity. The new industrial revolution can also destroy humanity if we do not use it wisely, and it could quickly develop to that point.
Thirty years later, the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas, in his beautiful reflections on the dangers and possibilities of progress, articulated another side of this sentiment: "If we persist, we will face one surprise after another. We can build unprecedented structures, unprecedented thoughts, unprecedented music for human society... 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 is endless." Wiener's most visionary point is that if we are to not only survive but also 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 posed these enduring questions about innovation and responsibility in "Frankenstein," Wiener offered a remarkably prescient and realistic perspective on the artificial intelligence cliff we now find ourselves at, in an age where algorithms determine what we read, where we go, and how much reality we see:
The danger to society from machines does not come from the machines themselves, but from the people who use the machines.
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Modern individuals, especially modern Americans, despite having much "know-how," possess very little knowledge of "what to do." They are willing to 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 the capacity to learn will be a completely rigid machine. If we let such a machine decide our actions, we would be in trouble unless we have previously studied its patterns of activity and fully understand that its actions are carried out according to principles we can accept! On the other hand, a bottled demon-type machine, while capable of learning and making decisions based on that learning, will not necessarily make decisions in accordance with our intentions or those that we should or could accept. Those who fail to understand this and shift their responsibility onto the machine, regardless of whether the machine can learn, are essentially handing their responsibility over to the wind, letting it blow away, only to find that it has returned to them riding on the whirlwind.
The core of Wiener's decades-old book is an eternal and urgent viewpoint that every programmer, technician, and entrepreneur should engrave in their minds. The pioneering philosopher Susanne Langer considered how the questions we pose influence 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 properly 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.
Precisely because our existence is so incredible against the backdrop of an entropy-dominated universe, it is endowed 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 of limited time; before the earliest geological ages, life did not exist; and the return of the Earth to a lifeless state, becoming a burned or frozen planet, will also come. The physical conditions necessary for the chemical reactions required for life are extremely rare, and for those who understand this, the following conclusion is inevitably drawn: the fortunate coincidence that allows any form of life on this Earth, not limited to human life, to continue must ultimately lead to an entirely unfortunate conclusion. However, we might conveniently evaluate ourselves, considering the existence of life as this temporarily fortunate event and the existence of humanity as an even more temporarily fortunate event to have paramount importance, without having to consider their fleeting nature.
In a very real sense, we are all passengers on a doomed ship on this inescapable planet. But even aboard a doomed ship, human dignity and value do not necessarily disappear; we must strive to enhance them as much as possible. We are destined 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