Happiness as the ultimate goal of cybernetics

摘要

When human society is looked at as a system, we see that this system is driven by money, in the same way that machinery is driven by energy. Upon careful observation, one realizes that money or capital, is also nothing but energy itself. In a primitive society when the only available forms of energy were manpower; the power generated by the consumption of food, which was produced by the rays of the sun, the amount of capital available was minute. The advent of the utilization of wind and hydraulic power, and the subsequent use of coal - generated steam used in steam engines, altogether changed the order of magnitude of the available amount of energy for human beings. Such ever-increasing use of energy is caused by the insatiable desire of man to build a better society in which one can live a richer and happier life. In other words, the energy that drives this system is not constant. In this way, as a system, human society is quite different from machinery. Furthermore, it is not only difficult to optimize the operation of this system, it is also difficult to determine what the best operation condition is since what is the happy life is a difficult question to answer.