Old questions,
asked again.

They thought seriously about thinking machines long before there were any. Norbert Wiener warned that automation would reshape work and society, and that if we hand purposes to machines, "we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire." John von Neumann worked out how a machine could build copies of itself. W. Ross Ashby asked whether intelligence could be amplified. Gregory Bateson argued that mind is not confined to a skull but runs through whole ecologies.

In 1960 Heinz von Foerster and colleagues extrapolated human population growth and found it heading towards infinity on Friday, 13 November 2026. It was never a prophecy. It was a point about what runaway feedback does when nothing pushes back.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to help design, train and evaluate its own successors. That is a recursive loop, and recursive loops tend to accelerate for as long as the resources hold: energy, materials, data, attention.

A cybernetician would ask where the balancing loops are. What slows it down, what corrects it, and who gets to steer? What happens to work, to institutions, to how people make sense of the world, when one part of the system changes much faster than the rest? And, as second-order cybernetics reminds us, we are not outside observers of any of this. We are part of the loop.

Humans have become a planetary-scale force: in the climate, in the oceans, in which other species persist. Bateson thought many of our problems come from the gap between how nature works and how people think. That gap has not closed.

So the question is not only what we can build, but what kind of participant we choose to be in the larger system we depend on, and what responsibility comes with that.

Neo-Cybernetics is a decentralised virtual space: somewhere to gather these questions and to connect the people already thinking about them.

Think of it as a network: people are the nodes, ideas are what flows between them. An idea gets attention because of what it says, not because of who said it. We don't claim to have the answers. We are trying to ask the questions well.