Series · 4 articles
People
The founders, the second-order protagonists, and the people carrying the field today.
The Founders: Lives and Studies
A mathematician, a physiologist, a psychiatrist, a homeless prodigy, two anthropologists, and a British psychiatrist with a box of magnets. Short portraits of the people who built cybernetics.
Norbert Wiener
Child prodigy, MIT mathematician, wartime engineer, and the first scientist to refuse military work on moral grounds after 1945. The life of the man who named cybernetics.
The Protagonists of Second-Order Cybernetics
Von Foerster, Maturana, Varela, Pask, von Glasersfeld, Bateson, Luhmann, and Glanville: where their thinking came from and what they were trying to do.
Paul Pangaro: Cybernetics as Conversation
A Pask student who found AI unsatisfying and cybernetics human. How Paul Pangaro presents the field today: purpose, conversation, and design.