Topic · 8 articles
Feedback and Control
Loops, regulation, homeostasis and steering: the core machinery of cybernetics.
Why Does AI Make Things Up?
AI chatbots make things up because they are built to produce likely text, and training often rewards a confident guess over an honest "I don't know".
First-Order Cybernetics
The cybernetics of observed systems: feedback, homeostasis, variety, and the engineering of control.
How Does ChatGPT Decide What to Say?
ChatGPT writes one small piece of a word at a time, picking each from a list of likely next pieces. Here is how it decides, and how training shapes its choices.
What Is an AI Agent?
An AI agent is an AI system that works towards a goal by taking actions, checking the results and deciding what to do next. Here is how agents work and why they go wrong.
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.
In 1936, an Anthropologist Described the AI Sycophancy Spiral
When a chatbot agrees with us a little more each time, the loop that forms was already studied in 1936. Gregory Bateson called it schismogenesis, and his work explains how AI sycophancy builds and what holds it in check.
What Is Cybernetics?
A plain-language introduction to the science of steering: feedback, goals, and the systems that pursue them.
The Recommendation Machine: A Cybernetic Reading of AI
The AI behind your feed is among the most consequential feedback machines ever built. What does cybernetics tell us about why it behaves the way it does?