Quote

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.

Norbert Wiener

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Norbert Wiener
Age: 69 †
Born: 1894
Born: November 26
Died: 1964
Died: March 18
Autobiographer
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Psychologist
University Teacher
Columbia
Missouri
Norbert Vineris
Norbert Viner
Lying
Demanding
Upon
Slaves
Future
Limitations
Even
Limitation
Hammock
World
Slave
Hammocks
Intelligence
Robot
Comfortable
Waited
Struggle
Robots

More quotes by Norbert Wiener

Image
The modern physicist is a quantum theorist on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a student of gravitational relativity on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. On Sunday, he is praying... that someone will find the reconciliation between the two views.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions. It seems almost as if progress itself and our fight against the increase of entropy intrinsically must end in the downhill path from which we are trying to escape.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Mathematics is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst.
Norbert Wiener
Image
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
Norbert Wiener
Image
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.
Norbert Wiener
Image
We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Norbert Wiener
Image
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There are no answers, only cross references.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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
Image
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
Norbert Wiener
Image
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
Norbert Wiener
Image
The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.
Norbert Wiener
Image
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
Image
Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.
Norbert Wiener
Image
A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
Norbert Wiener
Image
It is easy to make a simple machine which will run toward the light or run away from it, and if such machines also contain lights of their own, a number of them together will show complicated forms of social behavior.
Norbert Wiener
Image
Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.
Norbert Wiener
Image
A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
Norbert Wiener