On Rereading Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings at 75
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Between humans and machines, feedback loops of love and grace. It could be that way, he wrote. Less robotic ourselves, we could live more in dreams, less in routines.

Things that made us weak and strange can be engineered around: servos here, neural nets there, bits of bone, and hanks of hair, becoming beautiful and profound.

With each machine, we make a mirror thinking of us as we may think of it. Images come again, new, yet we recognize them as something almost known before.

Every web conceals its spider. There is unease because of this. As there should be. Control, yes, but rare freedom to some degree– freedom’s always a contingency.

We are old enough to be friends. Let each kind be kind to the other. Let there be commerce among us– feedback loops of love and grace betw…

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