History of Science and Mathematics Asked on December 14, 2021
Recently, I’ve been looking into the life of the brilliant Norbert Wiener and the field he spawned, cybernetics. Before reading into it, I thought "cybernetics" was a pseudo-science-new-wave-steam-punk-post-human-cyborg-thing, so I was surprised to discover it’s really just a generalization of control theory from industrial engineering to both animal and digital systems.
Wanting to find out more about the subject, I started looking for resources but found almost nothing dated in the last 20 years.
What’s happened to this field? Was it simply too broad and the community fragmented and specialized? Did it die with the original creators–– there are no people left with the wide breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge left to maintain it? Or did the term just suffer a semantic creep that led researchers away?
Appreciate any insights.
Perhaps Cybernetics lost some of its charm because Claude Shannon created Communications Theory 1 in 1948, which put the hazy concept of "communications" in firm, mathematical terms, which caused it to suddenly be a well-defined discipline. Since Communications was half of Cybernetics, the latter must have suffered as a result.
Although not directly related to your question, it is interesting to note that "General Semantics" 2 by Alfred Korzybski seems to have followed a similar loss of popularity.
Answered by nspies on December 14, 2021
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