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I first learned of Wiener's work from Jaron Lanier's [1] Ted Talk years ago, entitled "How we need to remake the internet" [2]: > And I suppose I could mention from one of the very earliest computer scientists, whose name was Norbert Wiener, and he wrote a book back in the '50s [...] called "The Human Use of Human Beings." > And in the book, he described the potential to create a computer system that would be gathering data from people and providing feedback to those people in real time in order to put them kind of partially, statistically, in a Skinner box, in a behaviorist system, and he has this amazing line where he says one could imagine as a thought experiment, and I'm paraphrasing, this isn't a quote, a global computer system where everybody has devices on them all the time, and the devices are giving them feedback based on what they did, and the whole population is subject to a degree of behavior modification. > Such a society would be insane, could not survive, could not face its problems. And then he says, but this is only a thought experiment, and such a future is "technologically infeasible". And yet, of course, it's what we have created, and it's what we must undo if we are to survive. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ-PUXPVlos |
> The whirlpools that swirl in a direction opposed to the main current are called "enclaves". And one of them is life, especially human life, which in a universe moving inexorably towards chaos moves towards increased order.