13 Facts About Cybernetics

Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with regulatory and purposive systems.

Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causality, that of 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.

Cybernetics is concerned with feedback processes such as steering however they are embodied, including in ecological, technological, biological, cognitive, and social systems, and in the context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, conversation, and the practice of cybernetics itself.

Cybernetics has its origins in exchanges between numerous fields during the 1940s, including anthropology, mathematics, neuroscience, psychology, and engineering.

Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, reflecting "the richness of its conceptual base".

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The term was used by Norbert Wiener, in his book Cybernetics, to define the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.

Cybernetics is sometimes understood within the context of systems science, systems theory, and systems thinking.

Cybernetics is associated with the enactive approach to cognitive science through the work of Francisco Varela.

Cybernetics has been used as a general reference for the science between the interjection of disciplines Medicine and technology.

Cybernetics was an influence on thinking in architecture and design in the decades after the Second World War.

Cybernetics has been influential in the development of educational technology, notably in the work of Gordon Pask, and in theories of teaching and learning, including Pask's Conversation Theory, Ernst von Glasersfeld's Radical Constructivism, and Gregory Bateson's conception of deuterolearning.

Cybernetics saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it was allowed to maintain homeostasis, and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its environment.

Cybernetics was influential on the development of countercultural movements through figures such as Stewart Brand and publications such as the Whole Earth Catalogue and Co-Evolution Quarterly.