Difference between revisions of "Cybernetics"

Cybernetics is the study of control and communication in mechanical, biological and social systems.

 

In 1947 Norbert Wiener chose the term "cybernetics" to denote the general study of feedback mechanisms in mechanical, biological, and electronic systems. This use of the term clearly refers back to Watt's "governor" as the prototype of a feedback device. Wiener called systems using feedback "teleological," meaning that the system aims towards a specific goal, and thus requires feedback to correct its actions in order to achieve the goal. Wiener's book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine, published in 1948, brought the term "cybernetics" to the attention of the scientific community.

Control systems in electronics were developed starting in 1927 at Bell Telephone Laboratories by Harold S. Black, who worked on the use of negative feedback to control amplifiers. The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy gave his first lecture about General System Theory as a methodology that is valid for all sciences at the University of Chicago in 1938 (although his first paper on the subject was not published until 1945, in German as "Zu einer allgemeinen Systemlehre").

In the early 1940's John von Neumann developed thought-experiments about cellular automata, leading to the concept of self replication, which cybernetics later adopted as a core concept. During World War Two Norbert Wiener studied the use of negative feedback in electronic circuits to control anti-aircraft gun mounts. In 1943 Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow published the paper "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," concerning communication within mechanical, biological, and electronic systems. Also in 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," which considered the brain as a system. In 1945 Ralph Beebe Blackman, Hendrik Wade Bode, and Claude Shannon published an essay titled Data Smoothing and Prediction in Fire-Control Systems. This article treated the problem of fire control as a special case of the transmission, manipulation and utilization of data, formulating the problem in terms of signal processing and thus heralding the coming of information science.

In March 1946 was held the inaugural session of the Macy Conferences, entitled "Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems." At this conference Norbert Wiener presented an overview of automatic mechanisms for self-regulation, and Arturo Rosenblueth described purposive behavior and teleological mechanisms. The ten Macy Conferences held between 1946 and 1953 were the first organised approach to interdisciplinarity, bringing together experts from a wide range of disciplines to discuss systems theory.

In the summer of 1947 Norbert Wiener first used the term "cybernetics" to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms." He published the book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine in 1948. In the UK this book became the focus for the Ratio Club.

Norbert Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, published in 1950, a readable and best-selling sequel to his more technical 1948 book on cybernetics.

Jay Forrester, a graduate student working on electronic control systems at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT during WWII, applied systems ideas to social organizations such as corporations and cities. An original organizer of the MIT School of Industrial Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Forrester is known as the founder of System Dynamics.

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.