Cybernetics is the transdisciplinary study of circular causalVon Foerster, H. (Ed) (1952). Cybernetics; circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems. Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation. processes such as feedback and recursion, where the outcomes of actions return as inputs for subsequent actions."The earliest cybernetics discussions addressed the way in which the behavior of a systemic entity was best explained in terms of how the effects of its actions (i.e., 'outputs') circled back (i.e., as 'inputs') to influence that entity's state and its subsequent actions. It was this 'circular causality' which would come to be called 'feedback' – the cybernetics group's original self-ascribed topic and the single concept most frequently cited as illustrative of cybernetics thinking." American Society for Cybernetics. Foundations: Pre-History of Cybernetics. https://asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/prehistory7.htm Section: Circular Causality"The analogies developed in cybernetics are constructed in terms of circular causal processes—that is, processes where the observed outcomes of action are taken as input for new action, such as in feedback, conversation, and indeed in designing and researching." Sweeting, B., & Sutherland, S. (2023). Design's secret partner in research: Cybernetic practices for design research pedagogy. Systems Research and Behavioral Science, 40(5), 765–771. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2974 It is concerned with general principles that are relevant across multiple contexts, including engineering, ecological, economic, biological, cognitive and social systems and also in practical activities such as designing, learning, and managing. Cybernetics' transdisciplinary character means that it intersects with a number of other fields, resulting in a wide influence and diverse interpretations.
The field is named after an example of circular causal feedback—that of steering a ship (the ancient Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs) refers to the person who steers a ship). In steering a ship, the position of the rudder is adjusted in continual response to the effect it is observed as having, forming a feedback loop through which a steady course can be maintained in a changing environment, responding to disturbances from cross winds and tide.
Cybernetics has its origins in exchanges between numerous disciplines during the 1940s. Initial developments were consolidated through meetings such as the Macy conferences and the Ratio Club. Early focuses included purposeful behaviour,Rosenblueth, Arturo, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow. "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology". Philosophy of Science 10, no. 1 (1943): 18–24. www.jstor.org/stable/184878 neural networks, heterarchy, information theory, and self-organisation.von Foerster, Heinz. "On Self-Organizing Systems and Their Environments". In Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition, 1–19. New York, NY: Springer, 2003. Originally published in Self-Organizing Systems. M.C. Yovits and S. Cameron (eds.), Pergamon Press, London, pp. 31–50 (1960). As cybernetics developed, it became broader in scope to include work in design, family therapy, management and organisation, pedagogy, sociology, the creative arts and the counterculture.Dubberly, Hugh, and Paul Pangaro. "How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design". In Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 2015. http://www.dubberly.com/articles/cybernetics-and-counterculture.html
Definitions Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, reflecting "the richness of its conceptual base". One of the best known definitions is that of the American scientist Norbert Wiener, who characterised cybernetics as concerned with "control and communication in the animal and the machine". Another early definition is that of the Macy cybernetics conferences, where cybernetics was understood as the study of "circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems". Margaret Mead emphasised the role of cybernetics as "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".
Other definitions include: "the art of governing or the science of government" (André-Marie Ampère); "the art of steersmanship" (Ross Ashby); "the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control" (Andrey Kolmogorov); and "a branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information, focuses on forms and the patterns that connect" (Gregory Bateson).
Etymology
The Ancient Greek term κυβερνητικός (kubernētikos, '(good at) steering') appears in Plato's RepublicBook VI, The philosophy of government and Alcibiades, where the metaphor of a steersman is used to signify the governance of people. 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.
In his 1948 book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, author Norbert Wiener claimed the term cybernetics was coined by a research group involving himself and Arturo Rosenblueth in the summer of 1947:
Moreover, Wiener explains, the term was chosen to recognize James Clerk Maxwell's 1868 publication on feedback mechanisms involving governors, noting that the term governor is also derived from κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs) via a Latin corruption gubernator. And finally, that a ship's steering engine offered "one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanisms".
History First wave
The initial focus of cybernetics was on parallels between regulatory feedback processes in biological and technological systems. Two foundational articles were published in 1943: "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelowbased on the research on living organisms that Rosenblueth did in Mexicoand the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.
The foundations of cybernetics were then developed through a series of transdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, between 1946 and 1953. The conferences were chaired by McCulloch and had participants that included Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster, Margaret Mead, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener. In the UK, similar focuses were explored by the Ratio Club, an informal dining club of young psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers that met between 1949 and 1958. Wiener introduced the neologism cybernetics to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and popularized it through the book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
During the 1950s, cybernetics was developed as a primarily technical discipline, such as in Qian Xuesen's 1954 "Engineering Cybernetics". The text was quickly translated into multiple languages and became a foundational text on automation. In the Soviet Union, Cybernetics was initially considered with suspicionAs a "pseudoscience" and "ideological weapon" of "imperialist reactionaries" (Soviet Philosophical Dictionary, 1954) but became accepted from the mid to late 1950s.
By the 1960s and 1970s, however, cybernetics' transdisciplinarity fragmented, with technical focuses separating into separate fields. Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at the Dartmouth workshop in 1956, differentiating itself from the broader cybernetics field. After some uneasy coexistence, AI gained funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the study of artificial neural networks were downplayed. Similarly, computer science became defined as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s.Denning, Peter J. (2000). "Computer Science: The Discipline". Encyclopedia of Computer Science.
Second wave The second wave of cybernetics came to prominence from the 1960s onwards, with its focus shifting away from technology toward social, ecological, and philosophical concerns. It was still grounded in biology, notably Maturana and Varela's autopoiesis, and built on earlier work on self-organising systems and the presence of anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings. The Biological Computer Laboratory, founded in 1958 and active until the mid-1970s under the direction of Heinz von Foerster at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, was a major incubator of this trend in cybernetics research.Muller, A., and Muller, K. (eds). An Unfinished Revolution?: Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory / BCL 1958–1976, Edition Echoraum, 2007.
Focuses of the second wave of cybernetics included management cybernetics, such as Stafford Beer's biologically inspired viable system model; work in family therapy, drawing on Bateson; social systems, such as in the work of Niklas Luhmann; epistemology and pedagogy, such as in the development of radical constructivism.Glanville, R. (2002). "Second order cybernetics". In F. Parra-Luna (ed.), Systems science and cybernetics. In Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS). Oxford: EoLSS Cybernetics' core theme of circular causality was developed beyond goal-oriented processes to concerns with reflexivity and recursion, notably in Mead's invocation at the inaugural meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) to apply cybernetics to the activities of the ASC itself.Sweeting B. (2025) Planning organizations in relation to their purposes. Proceedings of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. 69(1). https://journals.isss.org/index.php/jisss/article/view/4427 This focus on reflexivity was especially prominent in the development of second-order cybernetics (or the cybernetics of cybernetics), developed and promoted by Heinz von Foerster, which focused on questions of observation, cognition, epistemology, and ethics.
The 1960s onwards also saw cybernetics begin to develop exchanges with the creative arts, design, and architecture, notably with the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (ICA, London, 1968), curated by Jasia Reichardt,Reichardt, J. (Ed.). Cybernetic serendipity: The computer and the arts. Studio International [Special issue]Fernandez, M. (2009). "Aesthetically-Potent Environments" or How Pask Detourned Instrumental Cybernetics. In P. Brown, C. Gere, N. Lambert, & C. Mason (Eds.), White Heat Cold Logic: British Computer Art 1960–1980 MIT Press. and the unrealised Fun Palace project (London, unrealised, 1964 onwards), where Gordon Pask was consultant to architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood.
In 1962, Qian Xuesen recruited Song Jian and Guan Zhaozhi to establish China's first cybernetics laboratory with him.
Following the Sino-Soviet split, cybernetics was deemed disreputable in China. The field was again favored in the 1970s and 1980s following Deng Xiaoping's emphasis on modernisation.
Third wave