Wiener, Norbert (1963, Original 1948): Kybernetik. Regelung und Kommunikation im Tier und in der Maschine. Düsseldorf.
N. Wiener hat das Buch während des sogenannten 2. Weltkrieg geschrieben. Das Buch schien kriegstechnisch relevant und durfte dehalb erst 1948 veröffentlicht werden.
"The machines of which we are now speaking are not the dream of the sensationalist nor the hope of some future time. They already exist as thermostats, automatic gyrocompass ship-steering systems, self-propelled missiles — especially such as seek their target — antiaircraft fire-control systems, automatically controlled oil-cracking stills, ultra-rapid computing machines, and the like. ... They had begun to be used long before the war — indeed, ..." (43, Origialversion) "Thus the modern automaton exists in the same sort of Bergsonian time as the living organism; and hence there is no reason in Bergson's considerations why the essential mode of functioning of the living organism should not be the same as that of the automaton of this type. Vitalism has won to the extent that even mechanisms correspond to the time-structure of vitalism; but as we have said, this victory is a complete defeat, for from every point of view wich has the slightest relation to morality or religion, the new mechanics is fully as mechanistic as the old. Whether we should call the new point of view materialistic is largely a question of words: the ascendancy of matter characterizes a phase nineteenth-century physics far more than the present age, and "materialism" has come to be but little more than a loose synonym for "mechanism. In fact, the whole mechanist-vitalist controversy has been relegated to the limbo of badly posed questions." (44, Origialversion)
Google Books: Original engl (vollständig, mit Index)