cybernetics

Cybernetics may not be familiar to many readers today, except as part of words like “cyberspace.” The term was coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener (see Wiener, Norbert) in his book about control and communication in animals and machines. The root comes from the Greek kybernetes, meaning steersman or governor.

Cybernetics looks at systems as a whole. A key con-cept is feedback, which allows a system to adjust itself in response to changes in the environment. A familiar exam-ple is a thermostat, which includes a switch that expands as the air heats, turning off the heater when the temperature reaches its indicated setting. Similarly, as the air cools the switch contracts and restarts the heater.

In addition to feedback, cybernetics looks at how infor-mation is communicated between the environment and a machine or organism, or between component parts. Cyber-netics is also interested in structures that may be built up through feedback and communication—ultimately, in humans: the structures of self, identity, and consciousness.

Cybernetics is fundamental to the operation of robots (see robotics). Around the time of Wiener’s book, Grey Walter built one of the earliest robots, a “cybernetic turtle” that could autonomously explore an environment, respond-ing to changes in light.

In computers, any program that changes its behavior in response to new data might be called cybernetic. Cybernet-ics is relevant to a variety of fields in computer science that involve machine learning or reasoning (see artificial intel-ligence, genetic programming, and neural network).

During the 1950s and 1960s cybernetics concepts became quite influential and were applied to such diverse fields as neurology, cognitive science, psychology, phi-losophy, anthropology, sociology, and economics. How-ever, the term cybernetics itself gradually fell out of favor, even though the concepts remain at the heart of systems thinking. For some writers such as Gregory Bateson and anthropologist Margaret Mead, the focus shifted to a “new cybernetics” or “second-order cybernetics” that studies the interaction of observers with phenomena and attempts to construct a model of the mind itself.