How It Works
Cybernetics
The study of how any system — a machine, an animal, a company, a country — steers itself using feedback: it acts, measures the result, and corrects. It is where ideas like control loops, self-regulation and “the system responds to its own output” come from, and it predates artificial intelligence as a field.
Origin
Named by Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,” from the Greek kybernetes, a steersman. The ideas were worked out publicly at the Macy Conferences of the 1940s and 1950s alongside Margaret Mead, Heinz von Foerster and Warren McCulloch. AI largely set the word aside after the 1960s; this free 2024 IFAC paper argues that was a mistake, and traces the history.