Into chapter two

Quickly, quickly - it's been a while, the April post was early, but we still have some May to go.. brief update!

I'm now in the references to chapter 2 of Chaosmosis, the first of which is Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics. It contains many more equations than I am really equipped for, especially first thing in the morning, but I do have (from the introduction) two takeaways that I particularly enjoyed:

1. Wiener's work is (from what I understand..) an important forerunner in the development of AI, concerned with feedback, its importance in living systems, and how it can be developed in machines. On this possibility he writes (p.26-7)

It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save ... the first industrial revolution, the revolution of the "dark satanic mills" was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery.... The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone's money to buy.

Wiener concludes that "the answer, of course, is to have a society based on human values other than buying or selling." Feeling that that might not be on the cards, he went to talk to the unions (this was the US in the late 40s, so labor rather than trade). Dunno.. I found it simultaneously great that that was his response, and depressing that it seems so incomprehensible that anyone would have that approach now.

2. "If I were to choose a patron saint for cybernetics out of the history of science, I should have to choose Leibniz." (p.12). No context needed, I just liked it.

Aside from that, I've been editing, and have discovered that this goes better when it is raining.

I have also, in making this post and trying to put a quotation within an ordered list, discovered that there seems to be no way to edit the html in my CMS, or not one that I can easily find anyway. Disaster.