More precisely, the etymology of cybernetics refers to the steerer or helmsman of a ship (the kybernetes). The point is that in the middle of the sea, where there are no stable landmarks, the helmsman cannot navigate by means of pre-establish, static laws in the vein of a mathematician or philosopher. Instead, through interpreting the meaning of celestial bodies, winds, currents, birds, and so on, they have to continuously check their reasoning - they have to find balance. Navigation, medicine and military strategy all shared this mode of knowledge - cunning [metis] - for the ancient Greeks.
Norbert Wiener chose the term cybernetics on the one hand because he was well versed in the classics (he would communicate with his father in Latin, and he wanted to name his popular accompaniment to Cybernetics 'Pandora' but his editor refused and called it the Human Use of Human Beings), and he knew this ancient etymology.
He also chose it because the Latinate translation of kybernetes is 'governor', and that's what James Watt called the self regulating device he installed in his seminal steam engine. The fact that calling his project Cybernetics also rooted it in the tradition of James Clarke Maxwell's famous paper 'On Governors' was not lost on Wiener.
There's no firm evidence as to why Watt himself called the device a 'governor', however he would have known that in 17C England there was a cottage industry of windmill hackers, effectively, who'd introduced mechanisms to regulate the force of windmill sails upon their grinding stones, and they called these mechanisms 'governors'.
In British English a 'governor' is still a term for someone who supervises you.
It's also why a software algorithm that controls CPU frequency scaling is called a "CPU governor" [0] in Linux kernel. Although the mechanism is completely different, but the analogy is used here since it controls the speed.
Very interesting etymology indeed. The relationship is much clearer between cybernetics and the transliterated Greek kybernetes and the occasionally used word gubernatorial (or even more clearly transliterated Russian gubernator).
Brian Eno's development of Ambient music and generative art/music systems was strongly influenced by cybernetics, especially the work of Norbert Wiener and Stafford Beer.
You have one of the like, two good comments in this discussion. To add to this I'd broadly recommend in (loose order) for people interested in Cybernetics.
Has the potential for this approach been stripped, or does it just have a different name now? There are matrices and feedback loops. What was the key insight that kept cybernetics from following machine learning towards neural nets?
It's been renamed several times as things like complexity science, forked into spinoffs like artificial life and dynamical systems theory, and it crosses over into game theory quite a bit. The whole field is fascinating, but it's got a bad case of neologismania. That's a term I just made up to describe the tendency in some scientific fields to constantly make up new terms even if they're redundant.
Thank you for writing your comment. It sounds like you're familiar with this field. Is there some book you'd recommend (for learning about this topic, by whatever names) above this one?
Melanie Mitchell’s “Complexity: A Guided Tour” is a superb introduction to this area.
And while I’m plugging her books, her latest one is one of the best-written lay-audience books about machine learning and AI that I’ve seen. I strongly recommended it for anybody curious about the field, and also for people working in the area- her explanations are crystal-clear but not dumbed down in the slightest. It’s called “Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for the Thinking Person.”
Cybernetics is basically a quaint, archaic name for what we now call control theory. And control theory is basically everywhere these days. Though neural nets are probably way too lacking in robustness, explainability, etc. to be of real interest to control theory folks, or in control-related applications more generally. (Yes, I know they're being used for computer vision, but I don't think anyone is really satisfied with this state of things.)
In the book Cybernetics Weiner examines work on random circuit theory with tunable weights, mentioned as a potential mechanism for replicating black box behavior and even potentially being how life replicates (it was written pre-Watson and Crick).
Second-order cybernetics happened, and as a result there was a split. Like neighboring comments say, there is control theory and game theory for first-order cybernetics, but second-order cybernetics is extremely philosophical and failed to make an impact aside from broad ideas like the emergence of complex behavior from simple designs. The Constructivist movement has a journal [0] and is still alive, but I'm not sure what impact they are having.
One could say that second-order cybernetics has never been more relevant. Sometimes you see so far ahead that it takes time for your vision and its implications to fully become apparent.
Second-order cybernetics defines not only today's technological substrate (especially obvious in cybersecurity and risk modeling) but also contemporary culture.
It feels like elements of that split was always there. You have, on the one hand, very practical engineering cybernetics, what's standard control theory now (PID, optimal linear control, impulse responses and transfer functions, and so on). On the other hand, you have the more general (philosophical, "woolly") part that's filled with comparisons to biology, that deals with society and variety, general patterns, etc.
I once gave a friend of mine Medina's "Cybernetic Revolutionaries", and I think he found it hard to get through because of the latter kind of cybernetics, even though he was very familiar with the former kind.
> On the other hand, you have the more general (philosophical, "woolly") part that's filled with comparisons to biology
But see, that "other" part is also really a generalized/philosophical/speculative etc. take on control theory. "Systems theory" in the cybernetics-related sense is basically a name for 'this control theory stuff is so cool/impressive, let's see if we can generalize it beyond its standard engineering domain and draw any uselful conclusions from it.' Of course this kind of interdisciplinarity would be seen as standard nowadays, you wouldn't need to call attention to it by trying to name a new field.
I would like to point out that second order cybernetics is alive and well in System Thinking, which you will find in Safety-II, Safety-differently, Resilience Engineering, etc etc
I read this thread and I have no idea how this relate to the (little) reading that I have from Prometheus Rising, though I'm told that it also deals with Cybernetics.
How'd you like Prometheus Rising? Did you humor the exercises or just read? I read like half of it a few years back and got a little fatigued, but the ideas stuck.
All of them ultimately are derived for the Greek word for ‘steer’