Quotes About Cybernetics

Frederick Mosteller, who would later found Harvard's statistics department, was there. So was Leonard Jimmie Savage, the pioneer of decision theory and great advocate of the field that came to be called Bayesian statistics.* Norbert Wiener, the MIT mathematician and the creator of cybernetics, dropped by from time to time. This was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the

Con endoesqueletos accionados con servomotor.

This is the experience of living full time on the Net, newly free in some ways, newly yoked in others. We are all cyborgs now.

Cyborg doesn't need to eat or sleep, and whenever he encounters an issue that he's not initially equipped to handle, his technology can transmogrify and immediately adapt to that situation.

I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science.

The truth is, we're all cyborgs with cell phones and online identities.

This is not just an academic exercise, since one day we may have to alter and enhance our bodies using cybernetics or even change our genetic makeup in order to survive in hostile exoplanetary environments. Transhumanism, instead of being a branch of science fiction or a fringe movement, may become an essential part of our very existence.

People already have bionic arms and legs that work by the power of thought. And we increasingly outsource mental and communicative activities to computers. We are merging with our smartphones. Very soon, they will just be part of the body.

The author has greatly enjoyed being able to discuss this subject with a few mathematicians and physicists. The greatest handicap to cooperation is certainly the difference in terms between the individual, specialized fields of knowledge. We hope that this chasm will be bridged in time and that through cybernetics, a true bridge between physics and the automaton theory can be built.

We should find inspiration in the senses that already exist and try to copy them and apply them to us. If we compare our senses to the senses of other animals and species that we don't have, we can get ideas for new abilities that we can adapt to humans by applying cybernetics to the body.

Information is information, not matter or energy.

as efficient as communications' mechanisms become, they are still, as they have always been, subject to the overwhelming tendency for entropy to increase, for information to leak in transit, unless certain external agents are introduced to control it. I have already referred to an interesting view of language made by a cybernetically-minded philologist—that speech is a joint game by the talker and the listener against the forces of confusion.

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.

She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers lightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.

My Johnny, see, he was smart, real flash boy. Started out as a stash on Memory Lane, chips in his head and people paid to hide data there.

the bible—that is, William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, which popularized the term "cyberpunk.

I'm so tired of cyberpunk that says using machines to make your life better makes you less human.

To Wiener, there seemed every possibility that computers and other such technologies of the cybernetic age—he would later coin the phrase "the Second Industrial Revolution"—would have consequences just as dire. Inevitably, he felt, the rich and the powerful would seek to use these new technologies of communication and control to cement their power even further.

Through feedback, said Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth, a mechanism could embody purpose.

I don't know when they first had feeds. Like maybe, fifty or a hundred years ago. Before that, they had to use their hands and their eyes. Computers were all outside the body. They carried them around outside of them, in their hands, like if you carried your lungs in a briefcase and opened it to breathe.

He stepped over to Vidian and turned the man's head. There, in his left ear, he saw a small dataport. A moment's revulsion struck and passed. "All right," he said. "Who wants to download Vidian's brain?

computer chips.

I must repeat: Psycho-Cybernetics does not say that man is a machine. Rather, it says that man has a machine that he uses.

Either technology exists within time or time exists within technology.