"In 1950, mathematician-philosopher Norbert Wiener ended this classic book on the place of machines in society with a warning: "We shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.... The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door." Wiener, the founder of the science of cybernetics--the study of the relationship between computers and the human nervous system--was widely mislabeled as an advocate for the automation of human life. As The Human Use for Human Beings reveals, his vision was much more complex and interesting, and is more relevant in today's world of AI than anyone could have anticipated. In his new introduction, Brian Christian aptly calls Wiener the "progenitor of contemporary AI-safety discourse." Wiener hoped that machines would release people from relentless and repetitive drudgery to achieve more creative pursuits, yet he anticipated the danger of dehumanizing and displacement. His pioneering views on the human-machine relationship as a "communicative process" are only more crucial now, as we carry in our pockets AI devices that we can literally speak to. His prescient warnings illuminate our contemporary relationships with language, art, and even social media. The Human Use of Human Beings examines the implications of cybernetics for education, law, language, science, technology, as Wiener anticipates the enormous impact--in effect, a third industrial revolution--that the computer has had on our lives."-- Provided by publisher

Internationally honored for brilliant achievements throughout his career, author of Cybernetics, ExProdigy, and the essay God and Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Wiener had an abiding concern about the ethics guiding applications of theories he and other scientists developed. Years after he died, the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The world of science has changed greatly since Wiener's day, and much of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of an environment that encourages inventiveness.Wiener provides an engagingly written insider's understanding of the history of discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line, and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener's comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the "free-lance" scientist are particularly pertinent today. Steve Heims provides a brief history of Wiener's literary output and reviews his contributions to the field of invention and discovery. In addition, Heims suggests significant ways in which Wiener's ideas still apply to dilemmas facing the scientific and engineering communities of the 1990s.

2013 Reprint of 1949 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is the second book by Norbert Wiener on time series and communication engineering. While the first one, "Cybernetics", treated the subject from a general standpoint and was more philosophical than mathematical, the present volume is more technical than theoretical, and forms a kind of companion piece to the first. It is intended as a tool for engineers working in the field of electrical communication and related subjects. The book consists of an introduction, five chapters, and three appendices. After explaining the general outline of the problem in the introduction, the author gives in Chapter I a review of generalized harmonic analysis which is necessary for the understanding of the following chapters. Chapters II and III are devoted to the problems of prediction and filtering respectively. In Chapter IV there is given a brief account of the theory of multiple prediction, that is, the theory of prediction when we deal with more than one time series at the same time. Finally, in Chapter V there is given a short discussion on the application of similar methods to a problem of approximate differentiation.