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

Norbert Wiener

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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
Progress
Restrictions
Future
Restriction
Possibilities
Mathematical
Math
Prosperity
Mathematics
Imposes
Possibility
Entropy

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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.
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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.
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The simple faith in progress is not a conviction belonging to strength, but one belonging to acquiescence and hence to weakness.
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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
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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.
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I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
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Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
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We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
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Any useful logic must concern itself with Ideas with a fringe of vagueness and a Truth that is a matter of degree.
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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.
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Am I really a good mathematician?
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Any use of a human being in which less is demanded of him and less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste.
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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.
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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.
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What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
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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.
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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.
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There are no answers, only cross references.
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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.
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Science is a way of life which can only flourish when men are free to have faith.
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