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 communication system of an organism is its nervous system.
The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions.
The answer, of course, is that we must know as scientists what man's nature is and what his built-in purposes are.
The magic of words is that they have power to do physical work.
We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics.
The advantage of the machine is that it can do things that are too dangerous, too onerous, or too boring for man.
The purpose of the computing machine is not to think, but to relieve us of the necessity of thinking.
The world of the future will be a more tightly knit society than ever before.
The greatest lesson of the atomic bomb is that we can no longer live in a world of warring sovereignties.
The concept of learning is as applicable to a machine as it is to a human being.
The feedback principle is older than science itself.
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one who asks the right questions.
The mathematics of the 20th century is as different from that of the 19th as the latter was from that of the 18th.
The boundary between the living and the non-living is not as sharp as it was once thought to be.
The danger of the future is not robots but men.
The function of thought is to produce action.
The human species is strong only insofar as it makes use of its essentially human qualities.
The machine's danger to society is not from the machine itself but from what man makes of it.
The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities.
The second industrial revolution, if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, must be accompanied by a great increase in human understanding.
Contemporaries of Norbert Wiener
Other Mathematicss born within 50 years of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964).