Cybernetics, Information, and Control

Abstract

Cybernetics is the science of communication and control. The publication of Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics in 1948 is widely accepted as marking the formal beginning of the field, although most of its central ideas had been anticipated, and some of them well elaborated, much earlier. In the years that followed Wiener’s statement, interest in cybernetics and control theory grew rapidly among practitioners of a variety of disciplines. A large segment of the field of applied mathematics, for example, is devoted to the intricacies of this approach to regulatory systems (see, e.g., Berkovitz, 1974; Davis, 1977; Hestenes, 1966; Straus, 1968); concepts of control play a major role in the engineering profession (e.g., Anand, 1974; Dransfield, 1968; Ogata, 1970); and cybernetic ideas have become increasingly influential among economists (cf. Balakrishnan, 1973; Pindyck, 1973).

“… the servomechanism has always been only an imitation of the real thing, a living organism, and the engineers who invented it had to be, however unwittingly, psychologists. The analogy developed from man to machine—not the other way.”

Powers, 1978