Best Quotes by Norbert Wiener (Top 10)

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
  4. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
  5. 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.
  6. To live effectively is to live with adequate information.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.
  10. The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.

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