Again and again I have heard the stateme... by Norbert Wiener | We Heart Quotes

scientist Mathematician Robotics information theory Cybernetics

Again and again I have heard the statement that learning machines cannot subject us to any new dangers, because we can turn them off when we feel like it. But can we? To turn a machine off effectively, we must be in possession of information as to whether the danger point has come. The mere fact that we have made the machine does not guarantee that we shall have the proper information to do this. This is already implicit in the statement that the checker-playing machine can defeat the man who has programmed it, and this after a very limited time of working in.

- Norbert Wiener

Other quotes by Norbert Wiener

Progress

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

- Norbert Wiener

We are in the position of the man who has only two ambitions in life. One is to invent the universal solvent which will dissolve any solid substance, and the second is to invent the universal container which will hold any liquid. Whatever this inventor does, he will be frustrated.

- Norbert Wiener

Decisions Past

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

In all important respects, the man who has nothing but his physical power to sell has nothing to sell which it is worth anyone's money to buy.

- Norbert Wiener

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

Value War May World

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

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

- Norbert Wiener

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

- Leonardo da Vinci