Cybernetics  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems, their structures, constraints, and possibilities. Cybernetics is relevant to the study of systems, such as mechanical, physical, biological, cognitive, and social systems. Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop; that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in that system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change, originally referred to as a "circular causal" relationship. Some say this is necessary to a cybernetic perspective. System dynamics, a related field, originated with applications of electrical engineering control theory to other kinds of simulation models (especially business systems) by Jay Forrester at MIT in the 1950s.

Etymology

From Greek κυβερνητικός (good at steering, good pilot), possibly based on 1830s French cybernétique "the art of governing." The term was coined in 1948 by U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener.

See also

• Artificial life
• Automation
• Autopoiesis
• Brain-computer interface
• Chaos theory
• Connectionism
• Decision theory
• Family therapy
• Earth system science
• Gaia hypothesis
• Industrial Ecology
• Intelligence amplification
• Management science
• Perceptual control theory
• Principia Cybernetica
• Project Cybersyn
• Viable System Model
• Semiotics
• Superorganisms
• SynergeticsTemplate:Disambiguation needed
• Variety (cybernetics)
• Viable Systems Approach