The Human Use of Human Beings
Norbert Wiener · 1950 CE
Excerpt
“Cybernetics obliges us to view governance not as the affair of commanding but of designing systems that steer without coercion. (paraphrase of the 1950 book)”
Why the atlas keeps it
Wiener applies the theory of feedback and control to law, politics and medicine, and argues that communication is more fundamental than command. The book that gave cybernetics its name in 1948 becomes, two years later, the founding text of the ethics of steering large systems without crushing what they steer. The excerpt below paraphrases the book rather than quoting it.
Terms this text reaches for
Ranked by the codex search index against the summary above, not hand-picked.
Activation steering
technicalEditing behaviour by adding a direction to the residual stream at inference time.
Goodhart's law
alignmentWhen a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
Capability control
alignmentHolding back deployment of systems above a stated level of dangerous capability.
International law
governanceRules binding on states rather than on systems, with no forum above them.
Scaling law
technicalPredictable power-law relationships between model size, compute and loss.
Virtue ethics
ethicsJudging moral character and disposition rather than the moral status of single acts.