WRONG, BUT MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER Seth Lloyd Seth Lloyd is a theoretical physicist at MIT, Nam P. Suh Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener’s 1950 popularization of his highly influential book Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human beings and machines in a world in which machines are becoming ever more computationally capable and powerful. It is aremarkably prescient book, and remarkably wrong. Written at the height of the Cold War, it contains a chilling reminder of the dangers of totalitarian organizations and societies, and of the danger to democracy when it tries to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism’s own weapons. Wiener’s Cybernetics looked in close scientific detail at the process of control via feedback. (“Cybernetics,” from the ancient Greek for “helmsman,” is the etymological basis of our word “governor,” which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener saw the world as a set of complex, interlocking feedback loops, in which sensors, signals, and actuators such as engines interact via an intricate exchange of signals and information. The engineering applications of Cybernetics were tremendously influential and effective, giving rise to rockets, robots, automated assembly lines, and a host of precision-engineering techniques—in other words, to the basis of contemporary industrial society. Wiener had greater ambitions for cybernetic concepts, however, and in 7he Human Use of Human Beings he spells out his thoughts on its application to topics as diverse as Maxwell’s Demon, human language, the brain, insect metabolism, the legal system, the role of technological innovation in government, and religion. These broader applications of cyb