The Human Use of Human Beings
When I was writing about AI last night, something kept nagging at me. I wanted to quote someone, but their name kept eluding me. And then this morning I remembered: Norbert Wiener, the inventor — or one of the principal inventors — of cybernetics. I like the guy…or I like what I read about him. In fact, he’s one of the positive characters in my book, Surveillance Valley. One story about him sticks in my mind: A child prodigy, he was bad with people and utterly unable to talk to women. So his German parents (who were of Jewish heritage) helped him out by arranging a marriage to a nice German girl…who, after their marriage, turned into a big fan of Adolf Hitler.
Norbert as a boy
Norbert was involved in both the theoretical and practical work of creating the first partially autonomous computer systems — including a WWII weapons system that was to help predict the movement of an airplane so a machinegunner could better hit it. He helped create the field of computer science and then turned against it almost immediately after bringing it into being. What people now call AIs — but what he referred to as “thinking machines” — were to him obvious weapons that would be abused by the people who controlled them.
As I wrote in Surveillance Valley:
…He saw scientists and military men taking the narrowest possible interpretation of cybernetics to create better killing machines and more efficient systems of surveillance and control and exploitation. He saw giant corporations using his ideas to automate production and cut labor in their quest for greater wealth and economic power. He began to see that in a society mediated by computer and information systems those who controlled the infrastructure wielded ultimate power.
Wiener envisioned a bleak future and realized that he himself was culpable, comparing his work on cybernetics to that of the world’s greatest scientists who unleashed the destructive power of atomic weapons. In fact, he saw cybernetics in even starker terms than nukes. “The impact of the thinking machine will be a shock certainly of comparable order to that of the atomic bomb,” he said in a 1949 interview. The replacement of human labor with machines—and the social destabilization, mass unemployment, and concentrated economic power, that such change would cause—is what worried Wiener the most. “Let us remember that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. It is perfectly clear that this will produce an unemployment situation, in comparison with which the present recession and even the depression of the thirties will seem a pleasant joke,” Wiener wrote in a dark and prescient follow-up book, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.
Norbert remained a lifelong critic of computer technology. It ultimately led him to a deeper criticism of the entire U.S. political and economic system and landed him on an FBI watch list.
Anyway, Norbert first raised the alarm seventy-six years ago. And not much has changed, except things have progressed far…
This AI business has really captured the imagination of America’s ruling class in the last few years. They can’t wait to call this demon — this efficiency demon — into being. They really want to manifest it. And now a Chinese company is helping inspire them to do it cheaper and faster.
—Yasha
PS: Here is a section from Surveillance Valley where I talk about Norbert Wiener, cybernetics, the U.S. military, and the threat of the thinking machine. For paying subscribers only…