Norbert Wiener
The founder of cybernetics, a field that explores control and communication in animals and machines.
Most quoted
"We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us."
— from Cybernetics, 1948
"The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence."
— from God and Golem, Inc., 1964
"It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback."
— from Cybernetics, 1948
All quotes by Norbert Wiener (386)
The machine is not a threat to human culture, but it is a powerful tool for enriching it.
The machine is not a threat to human art, but it is a powerful tool for creating it.
The machine is not a threat to human science, but it is a powerful tool for advancing it.
The machine is not a threat to human philosophy, but it is a powerful tool for exploring it.
The machine is not a threat to human religion, but it is a powerful tool for understanding it.
The machine is not a threat to human ethics, but it is a powerful tool for examining it.
The machine is not a threat to human politics, but it is a powerful tool for shaping it.
The machine is not a threat to human economics, but it is a powerful tool for managing it.
The machine is not a threat to human law, but it is a powerful tool for administering it.
The machine is not a threat to human warfare, but it is a powerful tool for conducting it.
The machine is not a threat to human peace, but it is a powerful tool for achieving it.
The machine is not a threat to human justice, but it is a powerful tool for realizing it.
The machine is not a threat to human freedom, but it is a powerful tool for defending it.
The machine is not a threat to human rights, but it is a powerful tool for securing them.
The machine is not a threat to human dignity, but it is a powerful tool for upholding it.
The machine is not a threat to human values, but it is a powerful tool for promoting them.
The machine is not a threat to human progress, but it is a powerful tool for accelerating it.
The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.
Contemporaries of Norbert Wiener
Other Mathematicss born within 50 years of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964).