AI Systems' Impact on Humans

GPS technology enables ride-sharing, but it eroded our innate spatial navigation skills. Social media provides respite from the mundane, but causes a brain chemistry roller-coaster.

In AI, the most advanced feedback and control systems promise improved productivity, but threaten to undermine the very cognitive skills which enable judgment and decision making.

For all the AI hullabaloo, first principles have gone out the window.

Human-machine interactions were lucidly explained by Norbert Wiener in his seminal book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948).

That this book title will strike many as obscure simply underscores the woefully limited awareness of the past. We have well and truly been carried away by the Silicon Valley hype merchants, who care nothing for substance, and only for “click more, watch more, chat more.”

Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundation for the digital applications we are so enamored with, and addicted to, today.

It’s his follow up work that matters: The Human Use of Human Beings (1950).

Richly relevant, principled, and prophetic, it will do you more good to read this book than the dozens of trendy AI treatises hitting bookshops every month only to become outdated the next.

You can read the full text here.

In this edition of Ink & Time you’ll get:

Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) was an American mathematician, philosopher, and computer scientist whose work shaped modern control theory, artificial intelligence, and systems science. He was a child prodigy who earned his bachelor's degree at 14 and doctorate in mathematical logic at 17, before spending most of his career at MIT.

Wiener made groundbreaking contributions to stochastic processes and Brownian motion theory, and his work on generalized harmonic analysis established fundamental tools used in mathematical analysis, signal processing, and engineering. The Wiener process led to applications spanning finance to quantum physics.

Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" to describe the study of feedback control systems in both biological and mechanical systems. This interdisciplinary science revealed that intelligent behavior results from feedback mechanisms where output information returns as input to enable self-regulation and learning.

Wiener was uniquely principled as a mid-century scientist. He declined an invitation to join the Manhattan Project, arguably the most distinguished scientist to do so. Subsequently, in 1947, when approached by an aircraft corporation researcher seeking information about guided missiles, Wiener responded with a scathing refusal that he published in The Atlantic Monthly, titled "A Scientist Rebels.”

Wiener declared his intention to never publish work that could "do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists." He urged other scientists to follow suit. This moral stand led him to refuse all military funding and defense contracts throughout the Cold War, limiting his career advancement but establishing him as a moral center of the scientific community.

Wiener's cybernetic principles became the theoretical foundation for artificial intelligence, neural networks, and modern automation. His work directly influenced computer pioneers like John von Neumann and Claude Shannon, while establishing the conceptual framework for robotics, control systems, and machine learning.

Wiener’s follow up to Cybernetics popularized concepts from his technical research in the context of human and social impacts. He argued that information and feedback are universal principles governing both biological and mechanical systems, as well as human organizations.

The concept of entropy is central: Wiener frames life and intelligence as efforts to create “order” against the universe’s relentless drift toward chaos.

Information is “negative entropy.” Communication and feedback help maintain order.

Cybernetics offered a common language for understanding adaptable, learning systems, in contrast to rigid, inflexible ones prone to failure. Feedback loops, through which systems adjust based on outcomes and memory, are fundamental to both human learning and machine intelligence.

Presciently, Wiener warned about the social impact of automation, predicting both labor displacement from machines and the dehumanization of workers treated merely as machine parts.

He argued that technology applications should enhance, not diminish, human dignity. Control over communication had already become a new form of power, and he cautioned against allowing machines to make unchecked decisions.

Remember this was the warning in 1950. It is hard to appreciate really how far we have traveled unheeding of his uniquely credible advice.

Ultimately, Wiener’s vision was hopeful and cautious.

He recognized the potential for automation to liberate humans from drudgery, if it was guided by a commitment to human flourishing rather than reductionism or exploitation.

His philosophical, technical, and ethical insights are extremely relevant to the dilemmas we face today regarding regulation of AI and digital products, including the commercial business models we accept, and the costs externalized onto society that we tolerate.

Norbert Wiener said society is best understood as a web of messages and responses. Information and communication are what defines and differentiates order from chaos.

The social fabric of information is now saturated with synthetic noise: AI-generated posts, summaries, rankings, transcripts and marketing slop. The problem is not limited to bias or errors. Rather it is the noise itself, the flood of auto-generated text that blurs attention, confuses and weakens judgment.

Feedback means how a system (human, animal, societal, machine) learns from its own results.

It can keep human purpose on track or distort it into myriad abusive shapes and forms. In 2025, with AI everywhere, feedback mechanisms are working on both fronts, at larger scale and higher speed.

The good. When feedback serves clear human ends, it enhances life.

A pacemaker senses the heartbeat, and if it is too slow, delivers electrical impulses to cause it to beat faster. Computerized driving tools warn us before we drift into danger. Power grids balance supply and demand. Disaster alerts reach people before a storm hits.

In the best cases, goals are explicit and human-centric: health, safety, reliability.

People stay in control. We can pause, override, or ask why a choice was made, and consult specialists like doctors when needed.

The bad. Trouble begins when measurement is elevated above core human purpose.

Social platforms supposed to connect people, began prioritizing “engagement,” thus rewarding whatever grabs attention.

Workplace systems that score staff can steer their behavior without explaining how or why. If driven by productivity goals it can easily drive transactional behavior and even create shark tank cultures with a lost sense of civility.

When clicks, views, or throughput take precedence over learning, care, or quality, feedback shifts from human service to human manipulation.

We wrongly call it progress because it looks like machine systems are getting more sophisticated.

Yet ,as Wiener warned, the end result is a degradation of humanity, and the enrichment of those who control other human beings for their own commercial objectives.

The ugly. Worst of all are runaway feedback loops and addiction-by-design.

Infinite scroll, autoplay, and variable notifications drive human compulsion: what we watch shapes what we’re shown next, triggering brain chemical responses, creating a closed circuit of attention.

Time, sleep, and social presence are extracted and monetized, not enriched.

Synthetic media and so-called swarms of commercially-driven bots add self-reinforcing noise that drowns out purposeful correction.

Wiener warned that treating people as replaceable machine parts makes systems brittle and erodes human dignity. Today, we are lurching toward fully automated persuasion, where any sense of human intervention for individual or collective good goes out the window.

We need to remember the value of friction and limits. It’s time to reinsert engineered breaks, rate caps on virality, watermarking for synthetic media.

Human checkpoints are the only real moral test.

We are obsessed with the question of whether smart machines should be able to make decisions. They are already doing so.

Wiener identified a peculiar American weakness: “the… worship of know-how as opposed to know-what.” We tend to love technique, but forget to consider purpose.

So, what is the purpose of machine decisions, driven by feedback, and is it helping humans?

If we stop at know-how, the know-what is reduced to financial gain, and human beings become fodder to be ground up in the machine, just as Wiener warned.

Powerful tools without clear human objectives tend to optimize the wrong things, with great efficiency. This is the managerial mistake of our AI moment: shipping capability before deciding what we want it to do for humans.

Thus, returning to first principles:

Chronicles the influential series of meetings from 1946-1953 that brought together figures like Wiener, von Neumann, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson. Shows how these dialogues shaped ideas across psychology, sociology, anthropology, and psychiatry.

Argues that Wiener's conception of "the enemy" as a rational actor led to his broader vision of cybernetic systems. Demonstrates how military applications influenced the theoretical foundations of cybernetics and information theory.

Reveals Wiener as "a dark hero who has fallen through the cracks in the information age" and chronicles his personal struggles alongside his scientific achievements.

Provides crucial context for understanding how Wiener's cybernetics evolved and ultimately transformed into what we now call the "information age." Traces the movement from cybernetics to information theory and explains why cybernetics as a unified field eventually fragmented.

We hope you enjoyed this brief survey of Norbert Wiener’s pioneering ideas, and their enduring relevance.

Remember, if you’re trying to understand the automated future which is rapidly eating the present, go back to first principles. Read Mr. Wiener.

Ink & Time curates powerful ideas from the best forgotten authors, scientists, philosophers and thinkers of a pre-internet era, many of which are drowned out by the sloppy internet beast that vomits synthetic mash-ups with no clear human purpose.

Explicitly engages with cybernetic principles and Weiner's terminology, exploring artificial intelligence, feedback, and consciousness in a synthetic environment. Herbert was directly influenced by Wiener’s "God & Golem, Inc.," especially machines capable of self-reference and learning.

Vonnegut’s first novel offers a satirical vision of a future society dominated by machines and automation. Vonnegut cited Wiener as a major influence on his thought and fiction, shaping the novel’s dystopian tone and philosophical questions.

Dick’s cybernetic androids and their ambiguous distinction from humans channel key questions about feedback, machine intelligence, and the nature of self. The novel's constant interrogation of boundaries between organism and machine reflect cybernetic theory’s challenge to dualisms.

Pynchon’s epic, though complex and ambiguous, directly cites Wiener and incorporates cybernetic themes of control, feedback, entropy, and information systems at the core of its structure and style.

Heinlein presents a sentient computer ("Mike") whose evolution into self-awareness is described in terms that mirror cybernetic theory—feedback, learning, and emergent intelligence. First published in the 1960s, it draws connections to Wiener's foundational insight about communication and adaptation in complex systems.