This paper is meant to question the idea that humans in cybernetic systems are autonomous in the traditional western liberal conception. Examination of the history of cybernetics reveals conflicts over the role of humans within human/machine systems over a larger period than is traditionally associated with the field of cybernetics. By comparing cybernetic systems from before the 20th century a...

The American Society for Cybernetics was incorporated in Washington DC, 6th August 1964. We celebrate our 50th anniversary with a major conference on the theme " Living in Cybernetics " .

Heinz von Foerster proposed that the observer should be included in the domain of observation. He suggested that this approach to cybernetics be called second-order cybernetics. Heinz was primarily interested in understanding cognition, based on neurophysiology and mathematics. But there has also been strong interest in cybernetics as a theory of social systems. Using the “second order” idea fo...

The most important initiator of cybernetics was Norbert Wiener (l894–1964) with his book “Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”. The contribution of Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) may be compared to that of Wiener. Cybernetics has also had precursors such as A. M. Ampère who introduced the word cybernétique as well as B. Trentowski who did the same in Polish. ...

Cybernetics is concerned with describing complex interactions and interrelationships between systems which are omnipresent in our daily life. Machine Learning discovers fundamental functional relationships between variables and ensembles of variables in systems. The merging of the disciplines of Machine Learning and Cybernetics is aimed at the discovery of various forms of interaction between s...