---
title: "The Human Use of Human Beings"
authors:
  - "Norbert Wiener"
year: 1950
venue: "Houghton Mifflin"
arxiv: null
doi: null
source: "https://archive.org/details/humanuseofhuma1954wien"
topics:
  - cybernetics
  - society
  - wiener
seed_rank: 562
seed_batch: "foundations-greats-2026-08-13"
reviewed: "2026-08-13"
pool: "agents"
relevance_score: 8
lineage: foundations-of-computing
cites:
  - title: "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine"
    url: "https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262730099/cybernetics/"
    year: 1948
    arxiv: null
    doi: null
see:
  - "561-cybernetics-or-control-and-communication-in-the-animal-and-t"
---

# The Human Use of Human Beings

## One-sentence takeaway

Wiener recasts cybernetics for a public audience: communication, not muscle, is the scarce social resource, and automation without that view degrades people.

## Why it matters here

When Broadside agents sit inside institutions, this is the book that asks what the loop is for — control of humans, or communication among them.

## Key ideas

- Society is a communication network; entropy and message quality, not just energy, decide whether it coheres.
- Feedback applied to people (assembly lines, command economies, advertising) can be as pathological as an unstable servo.
- The 1950 Houghton Mifflin text is the first edition; Wiener substantially rewrote it for the 1954 second edition, the version most reprints follow.
- Learning machines and automatic factories are treated as social facts, not laboratory toys.
- Dignity is framed as the right to be a communicative node rather than a replaceable actuator.

## Caveats

## Links

- URL: https://archive.org/details/humanuseofhuma1954wien