Norbert Wiener
What a machine can do, and what to give it
Two separate questions
The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950
Which work belongs to a tool and which doesn't. Why Wiener said capability doesn't settle it.
What actually happened?
Through The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener keeps returning to one point: what a machine is capable of and what people are for are two independent questions. Whether a machine can do a task is technical. What is left of the person once you hand it over is a different question, and the answer isn't automatically good. What worried him wasn't machines getting stronger. It was people being arranged to do the machine's kind of work: repetitive, judgement-free, instruction-following.
'It can' does not imply 'it should'
Tool capability and division of labour are separate layers. Hand over everything it can do and what's left is often the scraps it can't do and you learn nothing from. What should go is the repetition, not the judgement.
Letting it draft is fine. Letting it decide what the piece is arguing hands over the wrong half.
The fear is people used as machines
Wiener's worry ran the other way round. He wasn't afraid machines would be like people; he was afraid people would be arranged like machines — executing, not judging, not knowing why. Those roles go first, because they were already designed in a machine's shape.
A job that works a ticket queue and never asks why is in the first batch automation takes.
Keep the part where you decide
Once the repetition is handed over, what has to remain is the stretch that needs a call made. Otherwise you gave away repetition and kept repetition. Judgement doesn't get cheaper as the tools improve. It gets dearer.
The tool gives you three options. Which one and why is the step you can't also hand over.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you're shifting work onto a tool and can't say which part should go and which shouldn't.
Ask first: am I handing over the repetition or the judgement? After it's gone, does anything left on my desk require a decision?
Where it goes wrong: using it as grounds for distrusting tools and doing everything yourself — he objected to handing over the judgement, not the repetition; and it isn't a list of things machines may not touch. He's describing a division of labour.
Lines to keep
What a machine can do and what people are for are separate questions.
He feared people being arranged like machines, not machines resembling people.
Hand over the repetition. Not the judgement.