Marian Mazur, “Cybernetyka a humanitaryzm” (‘Cybernetics and Humanitarianism’), in: Cybernetyka. Argumenty za i przeciw (‘Cybernetics: Arguments For and Against’), Książka i Wiedza, Warsaw 1965, pp. 32–42.
A text from a volume of debate in which supporters and critics of cybernetics exchanged arguments. Mazur answers the charge that looking at a human being as a cybernetic system degrades them: it strips them of some special element, revives the old mechanism and leads to treating people as things.
The answer has three steps. First, order in the words: a cyberneticist does not call a human being a machine, but a cybernetic system — just like an animal or a technical device. Next, the distinction between an automaton and an autonom: mechanism failed because it saw in the human being an automaton that always responds in the same way to the same stimulus, whereas cybernetics sees in them an autonomous system whose reactions depend on the whole store of past experiences. Finally, a comparison with the resistance once aroused by the theory of evolution: the difference between a human being, an animal and an autonomous machine is quantitative — it is a matter of the number of registering elements — though enormous.
In the practical part, using the quantitative measure of information (in bits), the author shows two opposite errors. The first is underestimation: a rule that lets the person carrying it out choose only between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ reduces a human being with billions of elements to the role of a relay processing a single bit. The second is overestimation: the assumption that someone who has been notified already knows, although taking in information requires time, energy and patient repetition, and an inexperienced person simply has too few registered experiences. The author illustrates both errors with examples from everyday life and from press reports.
The conclusion: the cybernetic image of the human being does not deprive them of value, but in place of myths gives objective criteria of assessment — this is where the author sees the humanitarianism of cybernetics. The author introduced the distinction between the automaton and the autonom in “Myślenie maszyn” (‘The Thinking of Machines’, 1963), where an autonom is a machine equipped with a homeostat; a precise exposition of these concepts is given in Cybernetyczna teoria układów samodzielnych (‘A Cybernetic Theory of Autonomous Systems’, 1966), and their application to human conduct in Cybernetyka i charakter (‘Cybernetics and Character’, 1976).