Difference between revisions of "Human use of Human Beings"

Revision as of 21:22, 6 May 2023

Full Title or Meme

"The Human Use of Human Beings"^[1] was published by Norbert Wiener in 1950 and was revised later to exclude some controversial material. That original book is available online at this link.

Context

"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 machine and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part."

While recent proposals to asymmetrically slow AI advances seems hopelessly naive from a game theory perspective, there does seem to be some value in considering long-term ramifications, safeguards, and Vulnerabilities created by advances in Artificial Intelligence. Norbert Wiener's combined enthusiasm and caution towards the AI that would be born from Cybernetics half a decade later is insightful and notable.

Ideas

Progress

The population seems to swing between valuing social and technical progress as a benefit to an extreme rebellion and a desire to return to an old "Golden Age". The past century went through many wild swings between appreciating the advances and cursing the evils brought about by change. What is most troubling is that the rate of change seems to have risen to the point where most of the population of the world cannot adapt to change at this accelerating pace. A pace that Artificial Intelligence (Wiener labeled it "an artificial external cortex") can only accelerate this rate of change further.

"it is certainly true that the whole scale of phenomena has changed sufficiently since the beginning of modern history to preclude any easy transfer to the present time of political, racial, and economic notions derived from earlier stages." He then goes on to recite all the reason we all know for why the current direction of the consumer economy cannot continue, even though this was known to John M Keynes decades earlier. See the wiki page on Capitalism for a discussion that that topic.

Modern Slavery

Several governments in the British Commonwealth have passed acts requiring organization operating in their countries to attest to the use only of humanely sourced products.

Our culture at Avast can be described based on the 5 A’s Principles: Adult relationships based on mutual trust, transparency and maturity), Accountability, Achievement focused, Autonomy and Asynchronous working. We offer high levels of flexibility, with many staff on work from anywhere contracts.

References

1. ↑ Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings MIT (1988-03-22) ISBN 978-0306803208