Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the postwar interdisciplinary science of control and communication in the animal and the machine, founded by the mathematician Norbert Wiener and formalized at the Macy Conferences held in New York from 1946 to 1953. Drawing on feedback, information, and circular causality as its central concepts, it sought a single theory of regulation applicable to organisms, machines, brains, economies, and societies alike. Its vocabulary and methods diffused into digital computing, systems theory, the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and the Whole Earth strand of the Californian counterculture.¹²

Norbert Wiener and the Founding Texts

Norbert Wiener, a prodigy mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek for "steersman" and published the founding text Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine in 1948. The book grew out of his wartime work on anti-aircraft fire-control systems, in which he and the engineer Julian Bigelow modeled the gunner, the gun, and the target as a single feedback loop, an approach he generalized with the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth into a theory of goal-directed, self-correcting behavior. Negative feedback, the process by which a system senses the gap between its output and a goal and adjusts to reduce it, became the organizing idea, applicable equally to a thermostat, a nervous system, and a guided missile.¹³

In 1950 Wiener followed with The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, a popular work that extended the theory to social and ethical questions, warned against treating human beings as mere information-processing components, and reflected on the dangers and promise of automation. Wiener's models of the brain and of machine perception are regarded as direct precursors of later neural-network and deep-learning systems, and the McCulloch-Pitts model of the neuron as a logical threshold element, developed by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in 1943, supplied the cybernetic image of the brain as a computing network. Wiener, a committed pacifist after Hiroshima, later refused military research funding and broke with parts of the field over its weapons applications.⁴⁵

The Macy Conferences

The conceptual core of the field was hammered out at the Macy Conferences, a series of ten meetings funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and held in New York City from 1946 to 1953 under the chairmanship of the neurophysiologist Warren McCulloch. Convened from 1947 onward under the heading "Cybernetics: Circular, Causal, and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems," a title that adopted Wiener's coinage on the suggestion of Heinz von Foerster, who edited the published proceedings, the conferences gathered an unusually broad interdisciplinary group to build a universal theory of regulation spanning living beings, machines, and minds.²⁶

The participants included Norbert Wiener, the mathematician John von Neumann (whose game theory and stored-program computer architecture shaped the era's computing), the engineer Claude Shannon (whose 1948 mathematical theory of communication defined information as a reduction of uncertainty measured against signal and noise), the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, alongside Kurt Lewin, Ralph Gerard, Heinz von Foerster, and others. Bateson and Mead carried cybernetic ideas into anthropology, psychiatry, and the study of communication, and Bateson's later work on the "ecology of mind" and the double-bind theory of schizophrenia drew directly on feedback and systems concepts.²⁶

Diffusion into Computing, AI, and the Counterculture

Cybernetic concepts seeded several of the defining technical projects of the later twentieth century. Shannon's information theory underlies digital communication and data compression; von Neumann's architecture underlies the modern computer; and the cybernetic conception of the brain as a network of neuron-like units fed both the symbolic artificial intelligence pursued from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop and the connectionist neural networks that later dominated machine learning. A "second-order cybernetics," developed from the late 1960s by Heinz von Foerster and others at his Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois, turned the field's attention to the observer as part of the observed system.⁴⁶

The field also entered the 1960s and 1970s American counterculture through figures who treated feedback, systems, and "whole systems" as tools for personal and ecological liberation. Gregory Bateson became a guru of the California counterculture, and his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) circulated widely; von Foerster's laboratory produced the student-made Whole University Catalog in 1969 in the image of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, itself organized around "whole systems," general systems theory, and cybernetics among its first categories of tools. Brand's networks carried cybernetic and systems thinking from the communes into the personal-computer culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, as documented by Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006).⁶⁷