Essay on The Impact and Future of Cybernetics

Cybernetics is basically the interdisciplinary science dealing with communication and control systems in living organisms, machines, and organizations. The term, derived from the Greek word kybernētēs (“steersman” or “governor”), was first applied in 1948 to the theory of control mechanisms by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics developed as the investigation of the techniques by which information is transformed into desired performance. The science arose out of problems that were encountered during World War II in the development of so-called electronic brains and of automatic-control mechanisms for such military apparatuses as bombsights. Systems of communication and control in living organisms and those in machines are considered analogous in cybernetics. To achieve desired performance from human organs or from mechanical devices, information concerning the actual results of intended action must be made available as a guide for future action. In the human body, the brain and nervous system function to coordinate the information, which is then used to determine a future course of action; control mechanisms for self-correction in machines serve a similar purpose. The principle is known as feedback, which is the fundamental concept of automation.( McCulloch, Warren S. and Walter H. Pitts,)

Cybernetics is moreover the study of self-organizing and self-determining systems, usually in terms of flows of information and mechanisms of control. Developed by mathematician Norbert Weiner in the 1940s as a general theory of complex systems, cybernetics was widely adapted to the study of politics and society. In sociology, it is associated with the functionalism of Talcott Parsons , for whom the notion of self-regulation was central, and (mediated by later developments) with the system(s) theory of Niklas Luhmann . In anthropology, the principal figure was Gregory Bateson , who studied the larger question of human interaction with the biosphere and human consciousness as an informational problem of ordering and categorizing........................

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