Cybernetics emerged as a new cross-disciplinary scientific approach in the mid-20th century and paved the way for new areas of study, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and systems theory. The biggest catalyst for the emergence of cybernetics were Macy Conferences, which brought together the best and brightest scholars of the time across various disciplines. The conferences held between 1946 and 1953 were attended by prominent physicists John von Neumann and Julian Bigelow, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, mathematicians Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon, psychologists Heinrich Klüver and Kurt Lewin, neurophysiologists Warren McCulloch and John Young, psychiatrist Ross Ashby, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, ecologist George Hutchinson, among many other scholars.
This provided a unique opportunity for the exchange of ideas and knowledge across diverse disciplines. In the process, the scholars identified some high-level systematic commonalities in their respective fields of study. One of the cornerstones of cybernetics is a feedback loop, which is a process in which the outputs of a system are circled back and used as inputs. Today, Artificial Intelligence systems rely on feedback loops to adjust behavior, increase accuracy and optimize performance. Norbert Wiener first introduced cybernetics to the general public in 1948 in his seminal book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.” Shortly after, many scholars offered their insights on Cybernetics. See below for different definitions of cybernetics by scholars from various backgrounds:
…[T]he set of cross-disciplinary ideas which we first called “feed-back” and then called “teleological mechanisms” and then called … “cybernetics” – a form of cross-disciplinary thought which made it possible for members of many disciplines to communicate with each other easily in a language which all could understand.
– Margaret Mead
“A science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control”
– A. N. Kolmogorov
“The study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.”
– Norbert Wiener
“That is the fascinating thing about cybernetics. You ask a couple of people to give you a definition and although you don’t get to know much about cybernetics from them, you find out a lot about the person supplying the definition, including their area of expertise, their relation to the world, their desire to play with metaphors, their enthusiasm for management, and their interest in communications or message theory.”
– Heinz von Foerster