cybernetics - History, Scope

The study of control systems that exhibit characteristics similar to those of animal and human behaviour. The term was coined by Norbert Wiener in the 1940s, based on a Greek word meaning ‘steersman’. Although the term has tended to fall into disuse with the expansion of the computer field, cybernetics is essentially a broad-based discipline which includes information, message, and noise theories, and can reconcile the work of neurophysiologists, psychologists, and computer engineers.

Cybernetics is the study of communication and control, typically involving regulatory feedback in living organisms, machines and organisations, as well as their combinations. It is an earlier but still-used generic term for many of the subject matters that are increasingly subject to specialization under the headings of adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, complexity theory, control systems, decision support systems, dynamical systems, information theory, learning organizations, mathematical systems theory, operations research, simulation, and systems engineering.

A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as "the art of ensuring the efficacy of action".

History

Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems, electrical network theory, logic modeling, and neuroscience in the 1940s.

The word cybernetics ('cybernétique') had, unbeknownst to Wiener, also been used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge.

The study of teleological mechanisms (from the Greek τέλος or telos for end, goal, or purpose) in machines with corrective feedback dates from as far back as the late 1700s when James Watt's steam engine was equipped with a governor, a centrifugal feedback valve for controlling the speed of the engine.

Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Wiener, McCulloch and others, such as W.

In the spring of 1947, Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy, France and organized by the bourbakian mathematician, Szolem Mandelbrojt (1899-1983), uncle of the world-famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot.

During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the neologism cybernetics into his scientific theory.

Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing analogies between automatic systems such as a regulated steam engine and human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings : Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin, 1950).

While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster was a major center of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.

Scope

In scholarly terms, cybernetics is the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense — that is, it is not grounded in any one empirical field.

The emphasis is on the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system, rather than the parts themselves. The main innovation of cybernetics was the creation of a scientific discipline focused on goals: an understanding of goal-directedness or purpose, resulting from a negative feedback loop which minimizes the deviation between the perceived situation and the desired situation (goal).

Ampère's earlier use of the term echoes in the development of second-order cybernetics, which includes observers as part of whatever system is being studied.

Related fields

Biological cybernetics Biomedical engineering Engineering cybernetics Management science Medical cybernetics Sociocybernetics

Related topics

Artificial intelligence Artificial life Automation Complex systems Connectionism Decision theory Gaia theory/Earth System Science Game theory Information theory Intelligence amplification

Network theory (diktyology) Project Cybersyn Second order cybernetics Systems biology Semiotics Semiotic information theory Synergetics Systems theory