The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society

Preface

• This random element, this organic incompleteness, is one which without too violent a figure of speech we consider evil.
• As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs universe order is least probable, chaos most probable.
• But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves. It is with this point of view at its core that the new science of Cybernetics began its development.

Cybernetics and History

• It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and mad, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.
• The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
• Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment.
• Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
• The control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is know as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors - that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

Progress and Entropy

• We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information received.
• In 19th C physics, it seemed to cost nothing to get information. Modern physics, however, recognizes that Maxwell's demon can only gain the information with which it opens or closes the door from something like a sense organ, which for these purposes is an eye.
• In a system which is not in equilibrium, or in part of such a system, entropy need not increase. It may, in fact, decrease locally.
• Machines also contribute to a local and temporary building up of information, notwithstanding their crude and imperfect organization compared with that of ourselves.
• The nervous system and the automatic machines are fundamentally alike in that they are devices which make decisions on the basis of the decisions they have made in the past.
• The synapse in the living organism corresponds to the switching devise in the machine.
• There are local and temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world in which the entropy as a whole tends to increase, and the existence of these islands enables some of us to assert the existence of progress.
• What many of us fail to realize is that the last 400 years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This partly the result of increased communication, but also of an increased master over nature which, on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.
• We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.