Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causal processes such as feedback. Norbert Wiener named the field after an example of circular causal feedback—that of steering a ship[note 1] where the helmsman adjusts their steering in response to the effect it is observed as having, enabling a steady course to be maintained amongst disturbances such as cross-winds or the tide.[1][2]
Cybernetics is concerned with circular causal processes however they are embodied,[3] including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, etc. Its transdisciplinary[4] character has meant that cybernetics intersects with a number of other fields, leading to it having both wide influence and diverse interpretations.
Definitions
Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, reflecting "the richness of its conceptual base."[5] One of the most well known definitions is that of Wiener who characterised cybernetics as concerned with "control and communication in the animal and the machine."[6] Another early definition is that of the Macy cybernetics conferences, where cybernetics was understood as the study of "circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems."[7]Margaret Mead emphasised the role of cybernetics as "a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand."[8]
Other definitions include:[9] "the art of governing or the science of government" (André-Marie Ampère); "the art of steersmanship" (Ross Ashby); "the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control" (Andrey Kolmogorov); "a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information, focuses on forms and the patterns that connect" (Gregory Bateson); "the art of securing efficient operation" (Louis Couffignal);[10][11] "the art of effective organization." (Stafford Beer); "the science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors; showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence" (Gordon Pask);[12] "the art of creating equilibrium in a world of constraints and possibilities" (Ernst von Glasersfeld); "the science and art of understanding" (Humberto Maturana); "the ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness" (Herbert Brun); "a way of thinking about ways of thinking (of which it is one)" (Larry Richards);[13]
The Ancient Greek term κυβερνητικης (kubernētikēs, '(good at) steering') appears in Plato's Republic[14] and Alcibiades, where the metaphor of a steersman is used to signify the governance of people.[15] The French word cybernétique was also used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge.
After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one side or another to serve the future development of the field as well as it should; and as happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greekκυβερνήτης or steersman.
Moreover, Wiener explains, the term was chosen to recognize James Clerk Maxwell's 1868 publication on feedback mechanisms involving governors, noting that the term governor is also derived from κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs) via a Latin corruption gubernator. Finally, Wiener motivates the choice by steering engines of a ship being "one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms".[6]
Feedback is a process where the observed outcomes of actions are taken as inputs for further action in ways that support the pursuit and maintenance of particular conditions or their disruption, forming a circular causal relationship. In steering a ship, where the helmsperson maintains a steady course in a changing environment by adjusting their steering in continual response to the effect it is observed as having.[1] Other examples of circular causal feedback include: technological devices such as thermostats (where the action of a heater responds to measured changes in temperature, regulating the temperature of the room within a set range); biological examples such as the coordination of volitional movement through the nervous system; and processes of social interaction such as conversation.[17]
The initial focus of cybernetics was on parallels between regulatory feedback processes in biological and technological systems. Two foundational articles were published in 1943: "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow –based on the research on living organisms that Rosenblueth did in Mexico–; and the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts. The foundations of cybernetics were then developed through a series of transdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, between 1946 and 1953. The conferences were chaired by McCulloch and had participants included Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener. In the UK, similar focuses were explored by the Ratio Club, an informal dining club of young psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers that met between 1949 and 1958. Wiener introduced the neologism cybernetics to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and popularized it through the book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.[6]
During the 1950s, cybernetics was developed as a primarily technical discipline. For instance, in 1954, Qian Xuesen's published work "Engineering Cybernetics" was the basis of science in segregating the engineering concepts of Cybernetics from the theoretical understanding of Cybernetics as described so far historically. In the Soviet Union, Cybernetics was initially considered with suspicion[18] but became accepted from the mid to late 1950s.
By the 1960s and 1970s, however, cybernetics' transdisciplinarity fragmented, with technical focuses separating into separate fields. Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at the Dartmouth workshop in 1956, differentiating itself from the broader cybernetics field. After some uneasy coexistence, AI gained funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the study of artificial neural networks were downplayed.[19] Similarly, computer science became defined as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s.[20]
The second wave of cybernetics came to prominence from the 1960s onwards, with its focus inflecting away from technology toward social, ecological, and philosophical concerns. It was still grounded in biology, notably Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis, and built on earlier work on self-organising systems and the presence of anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings. The Biological Computer Laboratory, founded in 1958 and active until the mid-1970s under the direction of Heinz von Foerster at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, was a major incubator of this trend in cybernetics research.[21]
Focuses of the second wave of cybernetics included management cybernetics, such as Stafford Beer's biologically inspired viable system model; work in family therapy, drawing on Bateson; social systems, such as in the work of Niklas Luhmann; epistemology and pedagogy, such as in the development of radical constructivism.[22] Cybernetics' core theme of circular causality was developed beyond goal-oriented processes to concerns with reflexivity and recursion. This was especially so in the development of second-order cybernetics (or the cybernetics of cybernetics), developed and promoted by Heinz von Foerster, which focused on questions of observation, cognition, epistemology, and ethics.
The 1960s onwards also saw cybernetics begin to develop exchanges with the creative arts, design, and architecture, notably with the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (ICA, London, 1968), curated by Jasia Reichardt,[23][24] and the unrealised Fun Palace project (London, unrealised, 1964 onwards), where Gordon Pask was consultant to architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood.[25]
Third wave
From the 1990s onwards, there has been a renewed interest in cybernetics from a number of directions. Early cybernetic work on artificial neural networks has been returned to as a paradigm in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The entanglements of society with emerging technologies has led to exchanges with feminist technoscience and posthumanism. Re-examinations of cybernetics' history have seen science studies scholars emphasising cybernetics' unusual qualities as a science, such as its "performative ontology".[26] Practical design disciplines have drawn on cybernetics for theoretical underpinning and transdisciplinary connections.[27]
Emerging topics include how cybernetics' engagements with social, human, and ecological contexts might come together with its earlier technological focus, whether as a critical discourse[28] or a "new branch of engineering".[29]
Double bind theory: Double binds are patterns created in interaction between two or more parties in ongoing relationships where there is a contradiction between messages at different logical levels that creates a situation with emotional threat but no possibility of withdrawal from the situation and no way to articulate the problem.[30] The theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and colleagues in the 1950s with regard to the origins of schizophrenia,[31] but it is also characteristic of many other social contexts.[30]
Method of levels: The method of levels is an approach to psychotherapy based on perceptual control theory where the therapist aims to help the patient shift their awareness to higher levels of perception in order to resolve conflicts and allow reorganization to take place.
Perceptual Control Theory: A model of behavior based on the properties of negative feedback (cybernetic) control loops. A key insight of PCT is that the controlled variable is not the output of the system (the behavioral actions), but its input, "perception". The theory came to be known as "perceptual control theory" to distinguish from those control theorists that assert or assume that it is the system's output that is controlled.
Second-order cybernetics: Also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics, second-order cybernetics is the recursive application of cybernetics to itself and the practice of cybernetics according to such a critique. It has seen development of cybernetics in relation to family therapy, the social sciences, the creative arts, design research, and philosophy.
As cybernetics has developed it broadened in scope to include work in management, design,[38] pedagogy, and the creative arts,[39] while also developing exchanges with constructivist philosophies, counter-cultural movements[40] and media studies.[41] The development of management cybernetics led to a variety of applications, notably to the national economy of Chile under the Allende government in Project Cybersyn. In design, cybernetics has been influential on interactive architecture, human-computer interaction,[42] design research,[43] and the development of systemic design and metadesign practices.
Cybernetics' broad scope and tendency to transgress disciplinary norms[44] means its own boundaries have shifted over time and can be difficult to define.
Cybernetics is often understood within the context of systems science, systems theory, and systems thinking.[45][46] Systems approaches influenced by cybernetics include:
Metaphorum: The Metaphorum group was set up in 2003 to develop Stafford Beer's legacy in Organizational Cybernetics. The Metaphorum Group was born in a Syntegration in 2003 and have every year after developed a Conference on issues related to Organizational Cybernetics' theory and practice.
RC51 Sociocybernetics: RC51 is a research committee of the International Sociological Association promoting the development of (socio)cybernetic theory and research within the social sciences.[50]
SCiO (Systems and Complexity in Organisation) is a community of systems practitioners who believe that traditional approaches to running organisations are no longer capable of dealing with the complexity and turbulence faced by organisations today and are responsible for many of the problems we see today. SCiO delivers an apprenticeship on masters level and a certification in systems practice.[51]
Ascott, Roy (1967). Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision. Cybernetica, Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics (Namur), 10, pp. 25–56
Heims, Steve Joshua (1993). Constructing a social science for postwar America : the cybernetics group, 1946-1953 (1st ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts u.a.: MIT Press. ISBN9780262581233.
Helvey, T.C. (1971). The age of information; an interdisciplinary survey of cybernetics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Educational Technology Publications. ISBN9780877780083.
Ilgauds, Hans Joachim (1980), Norbert Wiener, Leipzig.
Johnston, John (2008). The allure of machinic life : cybernetics, artificial life, and the new AI. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN978-0-262-10126-4.
Medina, Eden (2011). Cybernetic revolutionaries : technology and politics in Allende's Chile. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN978-0-262-01649-0.
Patten, Bernard C.; Odum, Eugene P. (December 1981). "The Cybernetic Nature of Ecosystems". The American Naturalist. 118 (6): 886–895. doi:10.1086/283881. JSTOR2460822?. S2CID84672792.
Pekelis, V. (1974). Cybernetics A to Z. Moscow: Mir Publishers.
Pickering, Andrew (2010). The cybernetic brain : sketches of another future ([Online-Ausg.] ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0226667898.
Wiener, Norbert (1950). Cybernetics and Society: The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin.
Notes
^The ancient Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs) means "steersperson". It is the root of the Latin gubernator, which is in turn the root of governor, both in the sense of government and the centrifugal governor developed by James Watt for steam engines, an archetypical cybernetic device.
^Note that while Wiener's book presents cybernetics in a scientific context, its subtitle does not use the term science[16] and Wiener refers to cybernetics as a "field" when defining it.[6] Ashby, however, misquoted Wiener as defining cybernetics as "the science of communication and control"[3] and many subsequent authors follow Ashby's misquotation.
^ abAshby, W. R. (1956). An introduction to cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall, p. 1.
^Müller, Albert (2000). "A Brief History of the BCL". Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften. 11 (1): 9–30. Archived from the original on 2012-07-22. Retrieved 2012-06-06.
^"It seems that cybernetics is many different things to many different people. But this is because of the richness of its conceptual base; and I believe that this is very good, otherwise cybernetics would become a somewhat boring exercise. However, all of those perspectives arise from one central theme; that of circularity." Foerster, H. von (2003). Ethics and second-order cybernetics, in Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition. Springer-Verlag, New York, NY. P. 288.
^von Foerster, H., Mead, M., & Teuber, H. L. (Eds.). (1951). Cybernetics: Circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems. Transactions of the seventh conference. New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation.
^Mead, M. (1968). The cybernetics of cybernetics. In H. von Foerster, J. D. White, L. J. Peterson, & J. K. Russell (Eds.), Purposive Systems (pp. 1-11). Spartan Books.
^"La cybernétique est l'art de l'efficacité de l'action" originally a French definition formulated in 1953, lit. "Cybernetics is the art of effective action"
^Couffignal, Louis, "Essai d'une définition générale de la cybernétique", The First International Congress on Cybernetics, Namur, Belgium, June 26–29, 1956, Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1958, pp. 46-54.
^Pask, G. (1975). The cybernetics of human learning and performance: A guide to theory and research. Hutchinson. Page 13.
^Richards, Larry (2001). The Praxis of Thinking: Deliberate vs. Improvised. Online Proceedings of the American Society for Cybernetics 2001 Conference, Vancouver, May 2001. http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2001/Richards.htm
^Glanville, R. (2007). Try again. Fail again. Fail Better. The cybernetics in design and the design in cybernetics". Kybernetes, 36(9/10), 1173-1206.
^Dubberly, H., & Pangaro, P. (2019). Cybernetics and design: Conversations for action. In T. Fischer & C. M. Herr (Eds.), Design cybernetics: Navigating the new (pp. 85-99). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18557-2_4
^As a "pseudoscience" and "ideological weapon" of "imperialist reactionaries" (Soviet Philosophical Dictionary, 1954)
^Cariani, Peter (15 March 2010). "On the importance of being emergent". Constructivist Foundations. 5 (2): 89. Retrieved 13 August 2012. artificial intelligence was born at a conference at Dartmouth in 1956 that was organized by McCarthy, Minsky, rochester, and shannon, three years after the Macy conferences on cybernetics had ended (Boden 2006; McCorduck 1972). The two movements coexisted for roughly a de- cade, but by the mid-1960s, the proponents of symbolic ai gained control of national funding conduits and ruthlessly defunded cybernetics research. This effectively liquidated the subfields of self-organizing systems, neural networks and adaptive machines, evolutionary programming, biological computation, and bionics for several decades, leaving the workers in management, therapy and the social sciences to carry the torch. i think some of the polemical pushing-and-shoving between first-order control theorists and second-order crowds that i witnessed in subsequent decades was the cumulative result of a shift of funding, membership, and research from the "hard" natural sciences to "soft" socio-psychological interventions.
^Denning, Peter J. (2000). "Computer Science: The Discipline". Encyclopedia of Computer Science.
^Muller, A., and Muller, K. (eds). An Unfinished Revolution?: Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory / BCL 1958–1976, Edition Echoraum, 2007.
^Glanville, R. (2002). "Second order cybernetics." In F. Parra-Luna (ed.), Systems science and cybernetics. In Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). Oxford: EoLSS
^Reichardt, J. (Ed.). Cybernetic serendipity: The computer and the arts. Studio International [Special issue]
^Fernandez, M. (2009). "Aesthetically-Potent Environments" or How Pask Detourned Instrumental Cybernetics. In P. Brown, C. Gere, N. Lambert, & C. Mason (Eds.), White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960-1980 MIT Press.
^Mathews, S. (2005). The Fun Palace: Cedric Price's experiment in architecture and technology. Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 3(2), 73-91. https://doi.org/10.1386/tear.3.2.73/1
^Pickering, A. (2010). The cybernetic brain: Sketches of another future. University of Chicago Press.
^ abMary Catherine Bateson. (2005). The double bind: Pathology and creativity. Cybernetics and Human Knowing. 12(1-2)
^Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, Toward a theory of schizophrenia.Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, 251–264.
^McCulloch, W.S., 1965b (1964), A Historical Introduction to the Postulational Foundations
of Experimental Epistemology, in Embodiments of Mind, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, pp. 359-373.
^McCulloch, W.S., 1965b (1964), A Historical Introduction to the Postulational Foundations
of Experimental Epistemology, in Embodiments of Mind, The MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, pp. 359-373.
^McCulloch, Warren (1945). "A Heterarchy of Values Determined by the Topology of Nervous Nets". In: Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 7, 1945, 89–93.
^Smith, M., Karam, E. (2018). Second-Order Cybernetics in Family Systems Theory. In: Lebow, J., Chambers, A., Breunlin, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15877-8_308-1
^Tilak, S., Glassman, M., Kuznetcova, I., & Pelfrey, G. L. (2022). Applications of cybernetics to psychological theory: Historical and conceptual explorations. Theory & Psychology, 32(2), 298-325. https://doi.org/10.1177/09593543211053804
^Scholte, T. (2020), "A proposal for the role of the arts in a new phase of second-order cybernetics", Kybernetes, Vol. 49 No. 8, pp. 2153-2170. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-03-2019-0172
^Logan, Robert K. (2015) Feedforward, I. A. Richards, cybernetics and Marshall McLuhan. Systema: Connecting Catter, Life, Culture and Technology, 3 (1). pp. 177-185. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/650/
^Josh Andres, Alexandra Zafiroglu, Katherine Daniell, Paul Wong, Mina Henein, Xuanying Zhu, Ben Sweeting, Michael Arnold, Delia Pembrey Macnamara, and Ariella Helfgott. 2023. Cybernetic Lenses for Designing and Living in a Complex World. In Proceedings of the 34th Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (OzCHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 348–351. https://doi.org/10.1145/3572921.3576209
^Sweeting, B. (2017). Design research as a variety of second-order cybernetic practice. In A. Riegler, K. H. Müller, & S. A. Umpleby (Eds.), New horizons for second-order cybernetics (pp. 227-238). World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789813226265_0035
^Pickering, A. (2010). The cybernetic brain: Sketches of another future. University of Chicago Press. Page 9
^e.g. by Ray Ison: Ison, R. (2012). A cybersystemic framework for practical action. In: Murray, Joy; Cawthorne, Glenn; Dey, Christopher and Andrew, Chris eds. Enough for All Forever. A Handbook for Learning about Sustainability. Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground Publishing, pp. 269–284.
^Checkland, P. (1981). Systems thinking, systems practice. Wiley, Chichester.
