Cybernetics: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Cybernetics

The study of cybernetics encompasses a wide range of topics and is primarily concerned with cyclical causal processes like feedback. Norbert Wiener gave the field its name after an example of circular causal feedback: the process of steering a ship, in which the helmsman adjusts the ship's steering in reaction to the effect it is perceived as having. This enables the ship to maintain a constant course despite disruptions such as crosswinds or the tide.

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Cybernetics

Chapter 2: Systems theory

Chapter 3: Norbert Wiener

Chapter 4: Heinz von Foerster

Chapter 5: Self-organization

Chapter 6: W. Ross Ashby

Chapter 7: Second-order cybernetics

Chapter 8: Sociocybernetics

Chapter 9: Biocybernetics

Chapter 10: Macy conferences

(II) Answering the public top questions about cybernetics.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of cybernetics in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of cybernetics' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of cybernetics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jul 7, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Cybernetics

Cybernetics is a broad discipline that studies feedback and other forms of cyclical causation. The field was given its name by Norbert Wiener, who used the process of steering a ship as an illustration of circular causal feedback.

Because cybernetics is concerned with circular causal processes in whatever form they take, it has influenced and been interpreted in a wide variety of contexts.

Different attempts at defining cybernetics reflect the richness of its conceptual base.

The Ancient Greek term κυβερνητικης (kubernētikēs, '(good at) steering') appears in Plato's Republic The French word cybernétique was also used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère to denote the sciences of government in his classification system of human knowledge.

Norbert Wiener claims that he and Arturo Rosenblueth created the research team that came up with the term cybernetics in the summer of 1947. Wiener writes in the book:

After a great deal of thought, We have concluded that the current terminology is too heavily biased in one direction to adequately serve the field's continued evolution; and this is a common occurrence among scientists, To bridge the gap, we've created our own neo-Greek expression.

All of control and communication theory will henceforth be referred to as, whether it be mechanical or organic, referred to as Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek κυβερνήτης or steersman.

Moreover, Wiener explains, This name was chosen to honor James Clerk Maxwell's 1868 paper on gubernatorial feedback mechanisms, noting that the term governor is also derived from κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs) via a Latin corruption gubernator.

Finally, Ship steering engines are one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms, according to Wiener, so it makes sense to use them.

In a feedback loop, one observes the effects of one's actions and uses those results as inputs for subsequent actions that either further the pursuit and maintenance of the desired conditions or disrupt them. When at the helm of a ship, the captain keeps the vessel on a steady course despite the ever-shifting conditions outside by constantly adjusting the wheel in response to the effect it is seen to be having.

Cybernetics' initial emphasis was on the similarities between the feedback regulatory processes of biological and technological systems. In 1943, two seminal articles, Behavior, Purpose and Teleology by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow (based on Rosenblueth's research on living organisms in Mexico), and A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, were published. Between 1946 and 1953, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation sponsored a series of inter-disciplinary conferences that laid the groundwork for what would become known as cybernetics. McCulloch presided over these conferences, at which luminaries like Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener spoke. The Ratio Club, an informal dining club of young British psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians, and engineers who met from 1949 to 1958, discussed topics with similar focuses. Wiener's book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine popularized the term he coined, cybernetics, to describe the study of teleological mechanisms. but gained popularity after the mid-1950s.

However, cybernetics' transdisciplinary nature began to break down in the 1960s and 1970s as its technical foci diverged into new disciplines. The Dartmouth workshop in 1956 marked the beginning of artificial intelligence (AI) as a separate academic subfield from cybernetics. AI eventually received funding and public attention after an initially tense coexistence. As a result, fields like cybernetics and artificial neural network research were marginalized.

Beginning in the 1960s, a new school of cybernetic thought emerged with an emphasis on social, ecological, and philosophical issues rather than technological ones. Based on previous work on self-organising systems and the participation of anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings, it was still firmly rooted in biology (most notably Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis). Heinz von Foerster's Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign played a pivotal role in the development of this line of inquiry within cybernetics from its inception in 1958 until the middle of the 1970s. The central concept of circular causality in cybernetics was expanded to include considerations of reflexivity and recursion in addition to goal-oriented processes. Heinz von Foerster's second-order cybernetics (also known as the cybernetics of cybernetics), which centered on issues of observation, cognition, epistemology, and ethics, exemplifies this trend.

Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1968 curated by Jasia Reichardt, is a prime example of how cybernetics began to foster exchanges with the creative arts, design, and architecture in the 1960s and beyond, Multiple fields have shown newfound enthusiasm for cybernetics since the 1990s. The pioneering cybernetic work on artificial neural networks is once again being used as a