Paul Pangaro is one of the most active voices presenting cybernetics to designers, technologists, and students today. He has served as president of the American Society for Cybernetics, taught at Carnegie Mellon University, and spent decades translating the ideas of his teacher Gordon Pask into practice.
From AI to cybernetics
Pangaro studied humanities and computer science at MIT, graduating in 1974. He attended lectures by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert, the leaders of the AI programme, and found something missing. In an interview for the ANU School of Cybernetics’ Cybernetic Snacks series he described it as a dissatisfaction he could not name at first: AI started from zeros and ones and tried to get as close to human as possible, and the closer it got to the machinery, the more of what it means to be human was lost.
In 1976 he met Gordon Pask in Nicholas Negroponte’s office at MIT’s Architecture Machine Group. Pask talked about intelligence, learning, and conversation in a way that felt both rigorous and human. Pangaro left his PhD programme to follow Pask, joined him in 1981 as a research associate at Concordia University in Montreal, and completed a doctorate under him at Brunel University in the UK. Through Pask he came to know Heinz von Foerster, Stafford Beer, Francisco Varela, and Mary Catherine Bateson.
How he presents cybernetics
Pangaro’s framing has several recurring features.
Start from purpose. Where AI asks how to make a machine that reasons, Pangaro asks what it means for a system to have a goal, and what it needs in order to pursue one. He describes cybernetics as being about “the frame of purpose”: how a system acts and senses so that it gets what it wants.
Conversation is the core. Following Pask, Pangaro treats conversation as the mechanism by which people (and potentially machines) come to shared understanding, agree on goals, and coordinate action. With Hugh Dubberly he developed widely used models of conversation for design, and diagrams that map cybernetic concepts for non-specialists.
Design is cybernetic. Pangaro argues that designing is a feedback process: a designer proposes, observes the response, and revises. Designing for interaction means designing for conversation. This makes cybernetics directly useful to people building software, services, and organisations.
Tell the story through the Macy meetings. Asked for one essential story, Pangaro points past Wiener’s book to the Macy Conferences: a few dozen people meeting ten times in under a decade, alternating specialist talks with discussions of the general pattern. For him that format, specialists in conversation about shared principles, is what changed the world.
Revive the format. In 2020 he started the NewMacy meetings, an attempt to bring Macy-style transdisciplinary conversation to current “wicked” problems: pandemics, climate, AI, and inequality.
Cybernetics and AI, in his account
Pangaro is openly impatient with claims that large language models are close to general intelligence. At the American Society for Cybernetics’ 60th anniversary meeting in 2024 he described his reaction to generative AI bluntly, and rejected the old chain of reasoning that runs from neural nets to Turing machines to “computers will be brains.” What he still wants, he said, is conversational machines built from a cybernetic viewpoint, because intelligence “is not a property of a box but a property of a relationship.”
In Pask’s sense, conversation means participants who hold goals, check understanding, and change through the exchange. Fluent language alone falls well short of that. That gives designers a sharper question to ask of chat interfaces: what would it take for this system to be accountable for what it agrees to?
Preservation work
Pangaro has done a great deal to keep the field’s history accessible. He built a North American archive of Pask’s papers and media, implemented Pask’s THOUGHTSTICKER software in the 1980s, and has recorded long interviews with figures from the field.
Why his version matters
Many introductions to cybernetics begin with thermostats and gun predictors. Pangaro begins somewhere warmer: with people trying to understand one another. That makes his version especially suited to the questions designers and technologists face now, when machines are expected to talk with us.
Further reading
- Paul Pangaro, “Cybernetics: A Definition” (pangaro.com)
- Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro, “What Is Conversation? How Can We Design for Effective Conversation?” (2009)
- ANU School of Cybernetics, Cybernetic Snacks: Paul Pangaro (video)