The Human Use of Human Beings

The purpose of this book is both to explain the potentialities of the machine in fields which up to now have been taken to be purely human and to warn against the dangers of a purely selfish exploitation of these possibilities. This then suggests the possibility of replacing human behavior with machines, not just human muscle power replaced with steam engines but human adaptivity being replaced with cybernetic circuits or even machine learning. The message of this book, as well as its title is the human use of human beings. That we shall have to change many details of our mode of life in the face of the new machines is certain, but these machines are secondary in all matters of value that concern us.