Cybernetics

Named by Norbert Wiener, 1948

The study of control and communication in animals, machines and societies: how systems use feedback to pursue goals, adapt and maintain themselves.

Cybernetics is the study of how systems regulate themselves. Its central idea is that the same patterns of feedback, information and control can be found in a thermostat, a nervous system, a company and an ecosystem, so that one set of concepts can describe them all.

Origins

The word comes from the Greek kybernētēs, steersman, the root also of “govern”. André-Marie Ampère had used cybernétique in the 1830s for the science of government. Norbert Wiener gave it its modern meaning in Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), drawing on wartime work on anti-aircraft prediction and on the Macy Conferences, where mathematicians, engineers, physiologists, psychiatrists and anthropologists met between 1946 and 1953.

Definitions

There has never been a single definition. Wiener stressed control and communication; W. Ross Ashby called it the study of “all possible machines”, interested in what a system can do rather than what it is made of. Stafford Beer called it “the science of effective organisation”, Gordon Pask “the science of defensible metaphors”, and Gregory Bateson saw it as a way of thinking about pattern and form. Louis Couffignal defined it as “the art of ensuring the efficacy of action”.

Branches and legacy

From the 1950s cybernetics fed into many fields that later developed separately: computer science, artificial intelligence, control engineering, cognitive science, systems theory, family therapy and management science. In the late 1960s, a turn to second-order cybernetics applied cybernetic ideas to the observer, asking how those who study systems are part of the systems they describe.

As a distinct field cybernetics declined in the West from the 1970s, though it remained strong in the Soviet Union and China. Its ideas have recently returned to prominence through debates about AI, complex systems and governance.

Further reading

  • Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948)
  • W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)
  • Ronald Kline, The Cybernetics Moment (2015)

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