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The automatic machine, whatever we thinkof any feelings it may or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of the slave.

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
Whatever
Feelings
Automatic
May
Equivalent
Precise
Machine
Machines
Slave
Economic

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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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There is one quality more important than know-how.... This is know-how by which we determine not only how to accomplish our purposes, but what our purposes are to be.
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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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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.
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The advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil.
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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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A faith which we follow upon orders imposed from outside is no faith, and a community which puts its dependence upon such a pseudo-faith is ultimately bound to ruin itself because of the paralysis which the lack of a healthy growing science imposes upon it.
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There are no answers, only cross references.
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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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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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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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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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A professor is one who can speak on any subject - for precisely fifty minutes.
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A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.
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A significant idea of organization cannot be obtained in a world in which everything is necessary and nothing is contingent.
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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.
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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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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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