The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.

Norbert Wiener

Categorized in : Ideas War Information

Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.

Norbert Wiener

slave-labor machines technology

We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.

Norbert Wiener

new-environment our-environment environment

The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.

Norbert Wiener

progress weakness simple

There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.

Norbert Wiener

quality important determination

The world of the future will be an even 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.

Norbert Wiener

robots struggle lying

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. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

Norbert Wiener

organization example giving

The nervous system and the automatic machine are fundamentally alike in that they are devices, which make decisions on the basis of decisions they made in the past.

Norbert Wiener

machines decision past

Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves

Norbert Wiener

air rivers water

It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.

Norbert Wiener

simple running numbers

There are no answers, only cross references.

Norbert Wiener

murphys-law crosses answers

Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.

Norbert Wiener

have-faith faith men

What sometimes enrages me and always disappoints and grieves me is the preference of great schools of learning for the derivative as opposed to the original, for the conventional and thin which can be duplicated in many copies rather than the new and powerful, and for arid correctness and limitation of scope and method rather than for universal newness and beauty, wherever it may be seen.

Norbert Wiener

powerful grieving school

One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor ... is to discourage ... from expecting too much from mathematics.

Norbert Wiener

learning discovery science

The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.

Norbert Wiener

growth land men

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

Norbert Wiener

future progress math

To live effectively is to live with adequate information.

Norbert Wiener

adequate information

In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.

Norbert Wiener

real may looks

Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.

Norbert Wiener

vagueness degrees ideas

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

Norbert Wiener

may rivers water

I have said that science is impossible without faith. ... 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 ... Science is a way of life which can only fluorish when men are free to have faith.

Norbert Wiener

faith men science