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.

Rigidity and Learning: Two Patterns of Communicative Behavior

In these higher forms of communicative organisms the environment, considered as the past experience of the individual, can modify the patterns of behavior into one which in some sense or other will deal more effectively with the future environment.
In other words, the organism is not like the clockwork monad of Leibnitz with its pre-established harmony with the universe, but actually seeks a new equilibrium with the universe and its future contingencies. Its present is unlike its past and its future unlike its present. In the living organism as in the universe itself, exact repetition is absolutely impossible.
Learning, like more primitive forms of feedback is a process which reads differently forward and backward in time. It moves ahead from a known past into an unknown future, and this future is not interchangeable with that past.
Administrative officials, whether of a government or a university or a corporation, should take part in a two-way stream of communication, and not merely in one descending from the top. Otherwise, the top officials may find that they have based their policy on a complete misconception of the facts that their underlings possess.
This matter of social feedback is of very great sociological and anthropological interest. The patterns of communication in human societies vary widely.
It is a thesis of this chapter that this aspiration of the fascist for a human state based on the model of the ant results from a profound misapprehension both of the nature of the ant and of the nature of man.
Variety and possibility are inherent in the human sensorium - and are indeed the key to man's most noble flights - because variety and possibility belong to the very structure of the human organism.
These skeletons of bone or cartilage contain a great deal of tissue which is not in any strict sense alive, but throughout this mass of intercellular tissue there is a living structure of cells, cellular membranes, and nutritive blood vessels.
The behavior of an ant is much more a matter of instinct than of intelligence. The physical straitjacket in which an insect grows up is directly responsible for the mental straitjacket which regulates its pattern of behavior.
Cybernetics takes the view that the structure of the machine or of the organism is an index of the performance that may be expected from it.
Theoretically, if we could build a machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings.
If we compare man with the great apes, his closest relatives, we find that mature man in hair, head, shape, body proportions, bony structure, muscles, and so on, is more like the newborn ape than the adult ape. Among the animals, man is a Peter Pan who never grows up.
Man thus spends what may amount to 40% of his normal life as a learner, again for reasons that have to do with his physical structure. It is as completely natural for a human society to be based on learning as for an ant society to be based on an inherited pattern.
This form of learning (about whether a whole policy is successful) is most certainly a feedback, but it is a feedback on a higher level, a feedback of policies and not of simple actions.
If the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.
The adjustment of the general plan of pointing and firing the gun according to the particular system of motions which the target has made is essentially an act of learning. It is a change in the taping of the gun's computing mechanism, which alters not so much the numerical data, as the process by which they are interpreted. It is, in fact, a very general sort of feedback, affecting the whole method of behavior of the instrument.
For practical purposes, machines that measure, as opposed to machines that count, are very greatly limited in their precision. Add this to the prejudices of the physiologist in favor of all-or-nothing action, and we see why the greater part of the work which has been done on the mechanical simulacra of the brain has been on machines which are more or less on a digital basis.
For several centuries, science, dominated by the Aristotelian impulse to classify, neglected the modern impulse to search for ways in which phenomena functioned.
It is interesting to know that the sort of phenomenon which is recorded subjectively as emotion may not be merely a useless epiphenomenon of nervous action, but may control some essential stage in learning and other processes.

The Mechanism and History of Language

In general, one would expect the language of animals to convey emotions first, things next, and the more complicated relations of things not at all.
Even the most vocal members of the sub-human world fail to complete with man in ease of giving significance to new sounds, in repertory of sounds carrying a specific codification in extent of linguistic memory, and above all in the ability to form symbols for relations, classes, and other entities of Russell's "higher logical type".
It may seem curious to the reader that we admit machines to the field of language and yet almost totally deny language to the ants. Nevertheless, in constructing machines, it is often very important for us to extend to them certain human attributes which are not found among the lower members of the animal community.
The process of transmitting information may involve several consecutive stages of transmission following one another in addition to the final or effective stage; and between any two of these there will be an act of translation, capable of dissipating information. That information may be dissipated but not gained, is, as we have seen, the cybernetic form of the second law of thermodynamics.
In a certain sense, all communication systems terminate in machines, but the ordinary language systems terminate in the special sort of machine known as a human being.
Three distinct levels of human communication:
- Phonetic - the ear and that part of the cerebral mechanism which is in permanent and rigid connection with the inner ear.
- Semantic - concerned with meaning. This apparatus neither receives nor translates the language word by word, but idea by idea, and often still more generally. In a certain sense it is in a position to call on the whole of past experience in its transformations, and these long-time carry-overs are not a trivial part of its work.
- Behavioral - the translation of the experiences of the individual, whether conscious or unconscious, into actions which may be observed externally.
If a community of children were left out of contact with the language of their seniors through the critical speech-forming years, they would emerge with something, which crude as it might be, would be unmistakably a language.
In man, unlike the apes, the impulse to use some sort of language is overwhelming; but that the particular language used is a matter which has to be learned in each special case. It apparently is built into the brain itself, that we are to have a preoccupation with codes and with the sounds of speech and that the preoccupation with codes can be extended from those dealing with speech to those that concern themselves with visual stimuli.
The gift of speech does not go back to a universal Adamite language disrupted in the Tower of Babel. It is strictly a psychological impulse, and is not the gift of speech, but the gift of the power of speech.
There is a critical period during which speech is most readily learned; and if this period is passed over without contact with one's fellow human beings, of whatever sort they may be, the learning of language becomes limited, slow, and highly imperfect.
To sum up, the human interest in language seems to be an innate interest in coding and decoding, and this seems to be as nearly specifically human as any interest can be. Speech is the greatest interest and most distinctive achievement of man.
Semantically significant information in the machine as well as in man is information which gets through to an activating mechanism in the system that receives it, despite man's and/or nature's attempts to subvert it. From the point of view of Cybernetics, semantics defines the extent of meaning and controls its loss in a communications system.

Organization as the Message

Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise.
The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is know as homeostasis.
We can continue to live in the very special environment which we carry forward with us only until we begin to decay more quickly than we can reconstitute ourselves. Then we die.
It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.
Where a man's word goes, and where his power of perception goes, to that point his control and in a sense his physical existence is extended. To see and to give commands to the whole world is almost the same as being everywhere.
The transportation of messages serves to forward an extension of man's senses and his capabilities of action from one end of the world to another. The distinction between material transportation and message transportation is not in any theoretical sense permanent and unbridgeable.
Just as a computing machines may be used as a pattern on which to tape other computing machines, and just as the future development of these two machines will continue parallel except for future changes in taping and experience, so too, there is no inconsistency in a living individual forking or devaricating into two individuals sharing the same past, but growing more and more different.
Two large machines which had previously not been coupled may become coupled so as to work from that stage on as a single machine.
The individuality of the body is that of a frame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance. This form can be transmitted or modified and duplicated, although at present we know only how to duplicate it over a short distance.
Let us then admit that the idea that one might conceivable travel by telegraph, in addition to traveling by train or airplane is not intrinscically absurd, far as it may be from realization.

Law and Communication

Law may be defined as the ethical control applied to communication, and to language as a form of communication, especially when this normative aspect is under the control of some authority sufficiently strong to give its decisions an effective social sanction. It is the process of adjusting the couplings connecting the behavior of different individuals in such a way that what we call justice may be accomplished, and disputes may be avoided, or at least adjudicated.
Thus the theory and practice of the law involves two sets of problems; those of its general purpose, of its conception of justice; and those of the technique by which these concepts of justice can be made effective.
What compulsion the very existence of the community and the state may demand must be exercised in such a way as to produce no unnecessary infringement of freedom.
The law must be so clear and reproducible that the individual citizen can assess his rights and duties in advance, even where they appear to conflict with those of others. He must be able to ascertain with a reasonable certainty what view a judge or a jury will take of his position.
Reproducibility is prior to equity, for without it there can be no equity.
No new legal term has a completely secure meaning until it and its limitations have been determined in practice; and this is a matter of precedent.
Every case decided should advance the definition of the legal terms involved in a manner consistent with past decision, and it should lead naturally on to new ones.
Where the law of Western countries is at present least satisfactory is on the criminal side. Law seems to consider punishment, now as a threat to discourage other possible criminals, now as a ritual act of expiation on the part of the guilty man, now as a device for removing him from society and for protecting the latter from the danger of repeated misconduct, and now as an agency for the social and the moral reform of the individual. These are four different tasks, to be accomplished by four different methods; and unless we know an accurate way of proportioning them, our whole attitude to the criminal will be at cross-purposes.
The first duty of the law is to know what it wants, to make clear, unambiguous statements, which not only experts, but the common man of the times will interpret in one way and in one way only. Thus the problems of law are problems of orderly and repeatable control of certain critical situations.
The whole nature of our legal system is that of a conflict in which at least three parties take part - the plaintiff, the defendant, and the legal system as represented by judge and jury.
It is a game in the full Von Neumann sense; a game in which the litigants try by methods which are limited by the code of law to obtain the judge and the jury as their partners.
In ushc a game the opposing lawyer, unlike nature itself, can and deliberately does try to introduce confusion into the messages of the side he is opposing. He tries to reduce their statements to nonsense, and he deliberately jams the messages between his antagonist and the judge and jury. In this jamming, it is inevitable the bluff should occasionally be at a premium.

Communication, Secrecy, and Social Policy

The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.
In the late 19th C, with Edison, invention came to mean, not the gadget-insight of a shop-worker, but the result of a careful, comprehensive search by a team of competent scientists.
The typical American cannot conceive of a piece of information without an owner.
The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation in its value is false.
Information is more a matter of process than of storage. That country will have the greatest security whose informational and scientific situation is adequate to meet the demands that may be put on it - the country in which it is fully realized that information is important as a stage in the continuous process by which we observe the outer world, and act effectively upon it.
No amount of scientific research, carefully recorded in books and papers, and then put into our libraries with labels of secrecy, will be adequate to protect us for any length of time in a world where the effective level of information is perpetually advancing. There is no Maginot Line of the brain.
To be alive is to participate in a continuous stream of influences from the outer world and and acts on the outer world, in which we are merely the transitional stage. To be alive to what is happening in the world, means to participate in a continual development of knowledge and its unhampered exchange.
It is both far more difficult and far more important for us to ensure that we have such an adequate knowledge than to ensure that some possible enemy does not have it. The whole arrangement of a military research laboratory is along lines hostile to our own optimum use and development of information.
The greatest single example of the art of decoding is the decoding of the secrets of nature itself and is the province of the scientist.
Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all.
It is perhaps impossible to devise any secondary code as hard to break as the natural code of the atomic nucleus.
There is a great fertilizing and revivifying values in the contact of two scientists with each other; but this can only come when at least one of the human beings representing the science has penetrated far enough across the frontier to be able to absorb the ides of the neighbor into an effective plan of thinking. The natural vehicle for this type of organization is a plan in which the orbit of each scientist is assigned rather by the scope of his interests than as a predetermined beat.
The whole technique of secrecy, message jamming, and bluff, is concerned with insuring that one's own side can make use of the forces and agencies of communication more effectively than the other side. In this combative use of information it is quite as important to keep one's own message channels open as to obstruct the other side in the use of the channels available to it.
We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever he does, he will be frustrated.

Role of the Intellectual and the Scientist

More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value.
Beauty, like order, occurs in many places in this world, but only as a local and temporary fight against the Niagara of increasing entropy.

The First and the Second Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution concerned the machine purely as an alternative to human muscle.
The first fields to show the impact of the Newtonian ere were those of navigation and of clockmaking.
For navigation, measuring latitude was relatively easy, but longitude was much more difficult and prizes were offered, as advances in navigation would help dominance on the seas. Prizes were won for:
- An accurate ship's chronometer, able to keep the time within a few seconds over a voyage in which it was subject to the continual viloent motion of the ship.
- The construction of good mathematical tables of the motion of the moon, which enabled the navigator to use that body as the clock with which to check the apparent motion off the sun.
Navigation and the instruments necessary for it were the locus of an industrial revolution before the main industrial evolution, which began with the steam engine.
Steam transportation on the Mississippi opened up the interior of the US, starting as a means of hauling freight.
The textile mills furnished the model for almost the whole course of the mechanization of industry. They began the transfer of the workers from the home to the facroy and from the country to the city.
In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy.
The machine plays no favorites between manual labor and white-collar labor. The possible fields into which the new industrial revolution is likely to penetrate are very extensive, and include all labor performing judgments of a low level, in much the same way as the displaced labor of the earlier inductrial revolution included every aspect of human power.
"Machinery of Judgment"

Some Communication Machines and Their Future

The simples type of breakdown exhibits itself as an oscillation in a goal-seeking process which appears only when that process is actively invoked. This corresponds rather closely to the human phenomenon known as intention tremor, in which, ofr example, when the patient reaches for a glass of water, his hand swings wider and wider, and he cannot lift up the glass.
There is another type of human tramor which is in some ways diametrically opposite to intention tremor. It is known as Parkinsonianism, and is familiar to all of us as the shaking palsy of old men. Here the patient displays the tremor even at rest; and, in fact, if the disease is not too greatly marked, only at rest. When he attempts to accomplish a definite purpose this tremor subsides to such an extent that the victim of an early stage of Parkinsonianism can even be a successful eye surgeon.
This machine has two principal modes of action, in one of which it is positively photo-tropic and searches for light, and in the other of which it is negatively photo-tropic and runs away from light. We called the machine in its two respective functions, the Moth and the Bedbug. The machine consists of a little three-wheeled cart with a propelling motor on the rear axle.
This feedback tends to accomplish the purpose of either positive or negative feed back, for in man we consider that a voluntary action is essentially a choice among tropisms. When this feedback is overloaded by increasing the amplification, the little car will seek the light or avoid it in an oscillatory manner, in which the oscillations grow ever larger. This is a close analog to the phenomenon of intention tremor, which is associated with injury to the cerebellum.
Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions, if it does not possess the power of learning, will be completely literal-minded. Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct, unless we have previously examined the laws of its action, and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us! On the other hand, the machine like the djinnee, which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning, will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made, or will be acceptable to us. For the man who is not aware of this, tho throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine, whether it can learn or not, is to cast his responsibility to the winds, and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.
Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions. The Mondkey's Paw of skin and bone is quite as deadly as anything case out of steel and iron. The djinnee which is a unifying figure of speech for a whole corporation is just as fearsome as if it were a glorified conjuring trick.
The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.

Language, Confusion, and Jam

The game theory of Von Neumann concerns one team which is deliberately trying to get the message across and another team which will resort ot any strategy to jam the message.
The devil whom the scientist is fighting is the devil of confusion, not of willful malice. The view that nature reveals an entropic tendency is Augustinian, not Manichaean. Its inability to undertake an aggressive policy, deliberately to defeat the scientist, means that its evil doing is the result of a weakness in his nature rather than of a specifically evil power that it may have, equal or inferior to the principles of order in the universe which, local and temporary as they may be, still are probably not too unlike what the religious man means by God.
In Augustinianism the black of the world is negative and is the mere absence of white, while in Manichaeanism, white and back belong to two opposed armies drawn up in line facing one another. There is a subtle emotional Manichaenism implicit in all crusades, all jihads, and all wars of communism against the devil of capitalism.
The laws of induction in logic cannot be established inductively. Inductive logic, the logic of Bacon, is rather something on which we can act than something which we can prove, and to act on it is a supreme assertion of faith.
Einstein's dictum concerning the directness of God is itself a statement of faith. Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthily growing science imposes upon it.