We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the necessity for humans to adapt to the rapidly changing environment created by technology and societal evolution.
Norbert Wiener's quote emphasizes the profound impact that changes in our surroundings—especially those driven by technological advancements—have on human existence. As our environment evolves, driven by our own innovations and modifications, we face the imperative to alter our behaviors, thoughts, and even identities to thrive in this new reality. It suggests a reciprocal relationship between humans and their environment, where the modifications we make necessitate personal adaptation for survival and success.
In practice
In a speech about the future of work, one could say, 'We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves to exist in this new environment.'
In a very real sense, we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet, even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.
I have said that the modern man, and especially the modern American, however much 'know-how' he may have, has very little 'know-what'
Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor.
We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. _x000D_ A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message.
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
When we as a society begin to value mothers as the givers and supporters of life, then we will see social change in ways that matter.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
It is true that when there's a drone attack, those - that the - the terrorists are killed, it's true. But 500 and 5,000 more people rises against it, and more terrorism occurs, and more - more bomb blasts occurs.
Each one of us can make a difference. Together we make change.
As a black and as a woman, I didn't think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work.
Now I am setting out into the unknown. It will take me a long while to work through the grief. There are no shortcuts; it has to be gone through.
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