Quotes About Cybernetics

#1. 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.

Guy Davenport

#2. The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence

Francisco Varela

#3. With the subsequent strong support from cybernetics , the concepts of systems thinking and systems theory became integral parts of the established scientific language, and led to numerous new methodologies and applications
systems engineering, systems analysis, systems dynamics, and so on.

Fritjof Capra

#4. Cybernetics is NOT the banana.

Heinz Von Foerster

#5. Use the word 'cybernetics', Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments.

Claude Shannon

#6. The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.

Norman Mailer

#7. 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.

Poul Anderson

#8. If you can remember, worry, or tie your shoe, you can succeed with Psycho-Cybernetics!

Maxwell Maltz

#9. If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control

Anthony Stafford Beer

#10. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.'" "GPP feature?" said Arthur. "What's that?" "Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.

Douglas Adams

#11. The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With'.

Douglas Adams

#12. The New Psycho-Cybernetics with Maxwell Maltz and Dan Kennedy.

Rachel Rofe

#13. First-order cybernetics is the science of observed systems; Second-order cybernetics is the science of observing systems.

Heinz Von Foerster

#14. 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.

Neil Harbisson

#15. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system. Arthur

Douglas Adams

#16. on the meanings of the behaviors rather than the behaviors themselves. Chapter 2 reviews the historical roots of identity theory, not only in symbolic interaction, but also, just as crucially, in the cybernetics

Anonymous

#17. Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity.

Heinz Von Foerster

#18. It bears emphasizing: our traditional ways of thinking have ignored - and virtually made invisible - the relationship between people and technology.

Kim J. Vicente

#19. 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

#20. The science of control and communication in the animal and the machine

Norbert Wiener

#21. It is an old psychological axiom that constant exposure to the object of fear immunizes against the fear.

Maxwell Maltz

#22. Your brain may give birth to any technology, but other brains will decide whether the technology thrives. The number of possible technologies is infinite, and only a few pass this test of affinity with human nature.

Robert Wright

#23. Big whirls have little whirls,
That feed on their velocity;
And little whirls have lesser whirls,
And so on to viscosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson

#24. It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Albert Einstein

#25. Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project.

Maxwell Maltz

#26. There is reason to fear that men love better to investigate how muslins, hay-rakes, and, above all and inclusive of all, money may be made, than how their own minds are constructed

Fitz Hugh Ludlow

#27. Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress

Steve Grand

#28. An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#29. I shall act always so as to increase the total number of choices.

Heinz Von Foerster

#30. Technology - with all its promise and potential - has gotten so far beyond human control that its threatening the future of humankind.

Kim J. Vicente

#31. IF YOU WANT TO CREATE A CHANGE, you must challenge not only the models of Unreality, but the paradigms that underwrite them.

Stafford Beer

#32. Begin to imagine what the desirable outcome would be like. Go over these mental pictures and delineate details and refinements. Play them over and over to yourself.

Maxwell Maltz

#33. By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.

Donna J. Haraway

#34. The map is not the territory.

Alfred Korzybski

#35. Happiness isn't something that happens to you. It is what you yourself do and determine upon.

Maxwell Maltz

#36. 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

#37. cause and effect act in webs, not chains.

Steve Grand

#38. Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book ... an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.

Scarlett Thomas

#39. Management, a science? Of course not, it's just a waste-paper basket full of recipes which provided the dish of the day during a few years of plenty and economic growth. Now the recipes are inappropriate and the companies which persist in following them will disappear.

Leon Courville