Cybernetics

Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary[1] approach for exploring

regulatory and purposive systems—their structures, constraints, and
possibilities. The core concept of the discipline is circular causality or
feedback—that is, where the outcomes of actions are taken as inputs
for further action. Cybernetics is concerned with such processes
however they are embodied,[2] including in environmental,
technological, biological, cognitive, and social systems, and in the
context of practical activities such as designing, learning, managing, Principle diagram of a cybernetic
system with a feedback loop
and conversation.

Cybernetics has its origins in the intersection of the fields of control

systems, electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, fuzzy logic, evolutionary biology,
neuroscience, anthropology, and psychology in the 1940s, often attributed to the Macy Conferences. Since
then, cybernetics has become even broader in scope to include work in domains such as design,[3] family
therapy, management and organisation, pedagogy, sociology, and the creative arts.[4] At the same time,
questions arising from circular causality have been explored in relation to the philosophy of science, ethics,
and constructivist approaches. Contemporary cybernetics thus varies widely in scope and focus, with
cyberneticians variously adopting and combining technical, scientific, philosophical, creative, and critical
approaches.

Contents
Overview
Definitions
Etymology
History
Pre 20th Century
Early 20th century
Split from artificial intelligence
Late 20th century
New cybernetics
Cybernetics and economic systems
Subdivisions of the field
In art
In architecture and design
In biology
In computer science
In engineering
In Earth system science
In law
In management
In mathematics
 In psychology
In philosophy
In sociology
In sport
In Technology
See also
External links
Further reading
References

Overview
The essential goal of the broad field of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of
systems that have goals and that participate in circular, causal chains that move from action to sensing to
comparison with the desired goal, and again to action. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or
biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish
the first two tasks.[5] Cybernetics includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as
communication and control in living organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization.

Concepts studied by cyberneticists include, but are not limited to: learning, cognition, adaptation, social
control, emergence, convergence, communication, efficiency, efficacy, and connectivity. In cybernetics these
concepts (otherwise already objects of study in other disciplines such as biology and engineering) are
abstracted from the context of the specific organism or device.

Studies in cybernetics provide a means for examining the design and function of any system, including social
systems such as business management and organizational learning, including for the purpose of making them
more efficient and effective. Fields of study which have influenced or been influenced by cybernetics include
game theory, system theory (a mathematical counterpart to cybernetics), perceptual control theory, sociology,
psychology (especially neuropsychology, behavioral psychology, cognitive psychology), psychoanalysis,
philosophy, architecture, and organizational theory.[6] System dynamics, 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, is a related field.

Definitions
Cybernetics has been defined in a variety of ways, by a variety of people, from a variety of disciplines.

One of the most well known definitions is that of Norbert Wiener who characterised cybernetics as "the
scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine".[7]

Another early definition is that of the Macy cybernetics conferences, where cybernetics was understood as the
study of "circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems".[8]

Cybernetician Stuart Umpleby reports some notable definitions:[9]

"Science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving,
storing and processing information so as to use it for control."—A. N. Kolmogorov
"'The art of steersmanship': deals with all forms of behavior in so far as they are regular, or
determinate, or reproducible: stands to the real machine -- electronic, mechanical, neural, or
 economic -- much as geometry stands to real object in our terrestrial space; offers a method for
the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be
ignored."—W. Ross Ashby
"A branch of mathematics dealing with problems of control, recursiveness, and information,
focuses on forms and the patterns that connect."—Gregory Bateson
"The art of securing efficient operation [lit.: the art of effective action]."—Louis Couffignal[10][11]
"The art of effective organization."—Stafford Beer
"The art and science of manipulating defensible metaphors" (with relevance to constructivist
epistemology. The author later extended the definition to include information flows "in all
media", from stars to brains.)—Gordon Pask
"The art of creating equilibrium in a world of constraints and possibilities."—Ernst von
Glasersfeld
"The science and art of understanding." – Humberto Maturana
"The ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness."—Herbert Brun

Other notable definitions include:

"The science and art of the understanding of understanding."—Rodney E. Donaldson, the first
president of the American Society for Cybernetics
"A way of thinking about ways of thinking of which it is one."—Larry Richards
"The art of interaction in dynamic networks."—Roy Ascott
"The study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves
from themselves."—Louis Kauffman, President of the American Society for Cybernetics[12]
"The science of design, purposeful activity, and accomplishment."—Angus Jenkinson,
Secretary of the Cybernetics Society[13]
"Cybernetics is a universal science of accomplishment, purposeful activity, design, and
reflexive control. It explains manifold phenomena and aids the design and use of technologies
and practice related to them."–Cybernetics Society[14]

Cybernetics evolved in ways that distinguish first-order cybernetics (about observed systems) from second-
order cybernetics (about observing systems).[15] More recently there is talk about a third-order cybernetics
(doing in ways that embraces first and second-order), being closely related to the autopoietic perspective,
radical constructivism, or, more recently, to enactivism.[16]

Etymology
The word cybernetics comes from Greek κυβερνητική (kybernētikḗ),
meaning "governance", i.e., all that are pertinent to κυβερνάω
(kybernáō), the latter meaning "to steer, navigate or govern", hence
κυβέρνησις (kybérnēsis), meaning "government", is the government
while κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs) is the governor, pilot, or
"helmsperson" of the "ship". Simple feedback model. AB < 0 for
negative feedback.
French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère first coined
the word "cybernetique" in his 1834 essay Essai sur la philosophie
des sciences to describe the science of civil government.[17] The term was used by Norbert Wiener, in his
book Cybernetics, to define the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. In the
book, he states: "Although the term cybernetics does not date further back than the summer of 1947, we shall
find it convenient to use in referring to earlier epochs of the development of the field."[7]
History

Pre 20th Century

The word cybernetics was first used in the context of "the study of self-governance" by Plato in Republic [18]
and in Alcibiades to signify the governance of people.[19] The word 'cybernétique' was also used in 1834 by
the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) to denote the sciences of government in his classification
system of human knowledge.

The first artificial automatic regulatory system was a water clock, invented by
the mechanician Ktesibios; based on a tank which poured water into a
reservoir before using it to run the mechanism, it used a cone-shaped float to
monitor the level of the water in its reservoir and adjust the rate of flow of the
water accordingly to maintain a constant level of water in the reservoir. This
was the first artificial truly automatic self-regulatory device that required no
outside intervention between the feedback and the controls of the mechanism.
Although they considered this part of engineering (the use of the term
cybernetics is much posterior), Ktesibios and others such as Heron and Su
Song are considered to be some of the first to study cybernetic principles.

The study of teleological mechanisms (from the Greek τέλος or télos for end,
goal, or purpose) in machines with corrective feedback dates from as far back
as the late 18th century when James Watt's steam engine was equipped with a James Watt
governor (1775–1800), a centrifugal feedback valve for controlling the speed
of the engine. Alfred Russel Wallace identified this as the principle of
evolution in his famous 1858 paper.[20] In 1868 James Clerk Maxwell published a theoretical article on
governors, one of the first to discuss and refine the principles of self-regulating devices. Jakob von Uexküll
applied the feedback mechanism via his model of functional cycle (Funktionskreis) in order to explain animal
behaviour and the origins of meaning in general.

Early 20th century

Contemporary cybernetics began as an interdisciplinary study connecting the fields of control systems,
electrical network theory, mechanical engineering, logic modeling, evolutionary biology and neuroscience in
the 1940s; the ideas are also related to the biological work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy in General Systems
Theory. Electronic control systems originated with the 1927 work of Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer
Harold S. Black on using negative feedback to control amplifiers.

Early applications of negative feedback in electronic circuits included the feedback amplifier and the control of
gun mounts and radar antenna during World War II. The founder of System Dynamics, Jay Forrester, worked
with Gordon S. Brown during WWII as a graduate student at the Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT to
develop electronic control systems for the U.S. Navy. Forrester later applied these ideas to social organizations,
such as corporations and cities, and he became an original organizer of the MIT School of Industrial
Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

W. Edwards Deming, the Total Quality Management guru for whom Japan named its top post-WWII industrial
prize, was an intern at Bell Telephone Labs in 1927 and may have been influenced by network theory;
Deming made "Understanding Systems" one of the four pillars of what he described as "Profound
Knowledge" in his book The New Economics.
Numerous papers spearheaded the coalescing of the field. In 1935 Russian physiologist P. K. Anokhin
published a book in which the concept of feedback ("back afferentation") was studied. The study and
mathematical modelling of regulatory processes became a continuing research effort and two key articles were
published in 1943: "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian
Bigelow –based on the research on living organisms that Arturo Rosenblueth did in Mexico–; and the paper
"A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts.

In 1936, Ștefan Odobleja published "Phonoscopy and the clinical semiotics". In 1937, he participated in the
IX International Congress of Military Medicine with "Demonstration de phonoscopie"; in the paper he
disseminated a prospectus announcing his future work, "Psychologie consonantiste", the most important of his
writings, where he lays the theoretical foundations of generalized cybernetics. The book, published in Paris by
Librairie Maloine (vol. I in 1938 and vol. II in 1939), contains almost 900 pages and includes 300 figures in
the text. The author wrote at the time that "this book is ... a table of contents, an index or a dictionary of
psychology, [for] a ... great Treatise of Psychology that should contain 20–30 volumes". Due to the beginning
of World War II, the publication went unnoticed (the first Romanian edition of this work did not appear until
1982).

Cybernetics as a discipline was firmly established by Norbert Wiener,

McCulloch, Arturo Rosenblueth and others, such as W. Ross Ashby,
mathematician Alan Turing, and W. Grey Walter. In the spring of 1947,
Wiener was invited to a congress on harmonic analysis, held in Nancy
(France was an important geographical locus of early cybernetics together
with the US and UK); the event was organized by the Bourbaki and
mathematician Szolem Mandelbrojt.

During this stay in France, Wiener received the offer to write a manuscript on
the unifying character of this part of applied mathematics, which is found in
the study of Brownian motion and in telecommunication engineering. The
following summer, back in the United States, Wiener decided to introduce the
neologism cybernetics, coined to denote the study of "teleological
mechanisms", into his scientific theory: it was popularized through his book Norbert Wiener
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine.[7] In the UK this became the focus for the Ratio Club.

In the early 1940s John von Neumann contributed a unique and unusual
addition to the world of cybernetics: von Neumann cellular automata, and
their logical follow up, the von Neumann Universal Constructor. The result of
these deceptively simple thought-experiments was the concept of self
replication, which cybernetics adopted as a core concept. The concept that the
same properties of genetic reproduction applied to social memes, living cells,
and even computer viruses is further proof of the somewhat surprising
universality of cybernetic study.

In 1950, Wiener popularized the social implications of cybernetics, drawing

analogies between automatic systems (such as a regulated steam engine) and
human institutions in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society (Houghton-Mifflin).
John von Neumann

Split from artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at the Dartmouth workshop in 1956. After some
uneasy coexistence, AI gained funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the study
of artificial neural networks were downplayed; the discipline shifted into the world of social sciences and
therapy.[21]

Prominent cyberneticians during this period include Gregory Bateson and Aksel Berg.

Late 20th century

Cybernetics in the Soviet Union was initially considered a "pseudoscience" and "ideological weapon" of
"imperialist reactionaries" (Soviet Philosophical Dictionary, 1954) and later criticised as a narrow form of
cybernetics.[22] In the mid to late 1950s Viktor Glushkov and others salvaged the reputation of the field. Soviet
cybernetics incorporated much of what became known as computer science in the West.[23]

Published in 1954, Qian Xuesen published work "Engineering Cybernetics" was the basis of science in
segregating the engineering concepts of Cybernetics from the theoretical understanding of Cybernetics as
described so far historically.

While not the only instance of a research organization focused on cybernetics, the Biological Computer Lab at
the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Heinz von Foerster, was a major center
of cybernetic research for almost 20 years, beginning in 1958.

New cybernetics

In the 1970s, new cyberneticians emerged in multiple fields, but especially in biology. The ideas of Maturana,
Varela and Atlan, according to Jean-Pierre Dupuy (1986) "realized that the cybernetic metaphors of the
program upon which molecular biology had been based rendered a conception of the autonomy of the living
being impossible. Consequently, these thinkers were led to invent a new cybernetics, one more suited to the
organizations which mankind discovers in nature - organizations he has not himself invented".[24] However,
during the 1980s the question of whether the features of this new cybernetics could be applied to social forms
of organization remained open to debate.[24]

In political science, Project Cybersyn attempted to introduce a cybernetically controlled economy during the
early 1970s.[25] In the 1980s, according to Harries-Jones (1988) "unlike its predecessor, the new cybernetics
concerns itself with the interaction of autonomous political actors and subgroups, and the practical and
reflexive consciousness of the subjects who produce and reproduce the structure of a political community. A
dominant consideration is that of recursiveness, or self-reference of political action both with regards to the
expression of political consciousness and with the ways in which systems build upon themselves".[26]

One characteristic of the emerging new cybernetics considered in that time by Felix Geyer and Hans van der
Zouwen, according to Bailey (1994),[27] was "that it views information as constructed and reconstructed by an
individual interacting with the environment. This provides an epistemological foundation of science, by
viewing it as observer-dependent. Another characteristic of the new cybernetics is its contribution towards
bridging the micro-macro gap. That is, it links the individual with the society".[27] Another characteristic noted
was the "transition from classical cybernetics to the new cybernetics [that] involves a transition from classical
problems to new problems. These shifts in thinking involve, among others, (a) a change from emphasis on the
system being steered to the system doing the steering, and the factor which guides the steering decisions; and
(b) new emphasis on communication between several systems which are trying to steer each other".[27]
Recent endeavors into the true focus of cybernetics, systems of control and emergent behavior, by such related
fields as game theory (the analysis of group interaction), systems of feedback in evolution, and metamaterials
(the study of materials with properties beyond the Newtonian properties of their constituent atoms), have led to
a revived interest in this increasingly relevant field.[5]

Cybernetics and economic systems

The design of self-regulating control systems for a real-time planned economy was explored by economist
Oskar Lange, cyberneticist Viktor Glushkov, and other Soviet cyberneticists during the 1960s. By the time
information technology was developed enough to enable feasible economic planning based on computers, the
Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries began moving away from planning[28] and eventually collapsed.

After the fall of the Soviet Union a proposal for a "New Socialism" was outlined by the computer scientists
Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in 1995 (Towards a New Socialism), where computers determine and
manage the flows and allocation of resources among socially owned enterprises.[29]

On the other hand, Friedrich Hayek also mentions cybernetics as a discipline that could help economists
understand the "self-organizing or self-generating systems" called markets.[30] Being "complex
phenomena",[31] the best way to examine market functions is by using the feedback mechanism, explained by
cybernetic theorists. That way, economists could make "pattern predictions".[32]

Therefore, the market for Hayek is a "communication system", an "efficient mechanism for digesting dispersed
information".[33] The economist and a cyberneticist are like garderners who are "providing the appropriate
environment".[33] Hayek's definition of information is idiosyncratic and precedes the information theory used
in cybernetics and the natural sciences.

Finally, Hayek also considers Adam Smith's idea of the invisible hand as an anticipation of the operation of the
feedback mechanism in cybernetics.[34] In the same book, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek mentions,
along with cybernetics, that economists should rely on the scientific findings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy
general systems theory, along with information and communication theory and semiotics.[34]

Subdivisions of the field

Cybernetics is sometimes used as a generic term, which serves as an umbrella for many systems-related
scientific fields.

In art

Nicolas Schöffer's CYSP I (1956) was perhaps the first artwork to explicitly employ cybernetic principles
(CYSP is an acronym that joins the first two letters of the words "CYbernetic" and "SPatiodynamic").[35] The
prominent and influential Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
1968 curated by Jasia Reichardt, including Schöffer's CYSP I and Gordon Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles
installation. Pask's reflections on Colloquy connected it to his earlier Musicolour installation and to what he
termed "aesthetically potent environments", a concept that connected this artistic work to his concerns with
teaching and learning.[36]

The artist Roy Ascott elaborated an extensive theory of cybernetic art in "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic
Vision" (Cybernetica, Journal of the International Association for Cybernetics (Namur), Volume IX, No.4,
1966; Volume X No.1, 1967) and in "The Cybernetic Stance: My Process and Purpose" (Leonardo Vol 1, No
2, 1968).
Art historian Edward A. Shanken has written about the history of art and cybernetics in essays including
"Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s"[37][38] and From Cybernetics to Telematics: The
Art, Pedagogy, and Theory of Roy Ascott (2003),[39] which traces the trajectory of Ascott's work from
cybernetic art to telematic art (art using computer networking as its medium, a precursor to net.art).

In architecture and design

Cybernetics was an influence on thinking in architecture and design in the decades after the Second World
War. Ashby and Pask were drawn on by design theorists such as Horst Rittel,[40] Christopher Alexander[41]
and Bruce Archer.[42] Pask was a consultant to Nicholas Negroponte's Architecture Machine Group,
forerunner of the MIT Media Lab, and collaborated with architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan
Littlewood on the influential Fun Palace project during the 1960s.[43] Pask's 1950s Musicolour installation
was the inspiration for John and Julia Frazer's work on Price's Generator project.[44]

There has been a resurgence of interest in cybernetics and systems thinking amongst designers in recent
decades, in relation to developments in technology and increasingly complex design challenges.[45] Figures
such as Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro and Ranulph Glanville have made significant contributions to both
cybernetics and design research. The connections between the two fields have come to be understood less in
terms of application and more as reflections of each other.[46]

In biology

Cybernetics in biology is the study of cybernetic systems present in biological organisms, primarily focusing
on how animals adapt to their environment, and how information in the form of genes is passed from
generation to generation. There is also a secondary focus on combining artificial systems with biological
systems.[47] A notable application to the biology world would be that, in 1955, the physicist George Gamow
published a prescient article in Scientific American called "Information transfer in the living cell", and
cybernetics gave biologists Jacques Monod and François Jacob a language for formulating their early theory of
gene regulatory networks in the 1960s.[48]

In computer science

Computer science directly applies the concepts of cybernetics to the control of devices and the analysis of
information - examples being cellular automatons and decision support systems.

In engineering

Cybernetics in engineering is used to analyze cascading failures and

system accidents, in which the small errors and imperfections in a
system can generate disastrous outcomes.

In Earth system science

Geocybernetics aims to study and control the complex co-evolution of

ecosphere and anthroposphere,[49] for example, for dealing with An artificial heart, a product of
planetary problems such as anthropogenic global warming.[50] biomedical engineering.
Geocybernetics applies a dynamical systems perspective to Earth
system analysis. It provides a theoretical framework for studying the
implications of following different sustainability paradigms on co-evolutionary trajectories of the planetary
socio-ecological system to reveal attractors in this system, their stability, resilience and reachability. Concepts
such as tipping points in the climate system, planetary boundaries, the safe operating space for humanity and
proposals for manipulating Earth system dynamics on a global scale such as geoengineering have been framed
in the language of geocybernetic Earth system analysis.

In law

As a form of regulation, cybernetics has been always close to law, specially in regulation and legal sciences.

In management

Management as a field of study covers the task of managing a multitude of systems (often business systems),
which presents a wide natural overlap with many of the classical concepts of cybernetics.

In mathematics

Mathematical cybernetics focuses on the factors of information, interaction of parts in systems, and the
structure of systems.

In psychology

In science, the human mind and individuals are often observed as autonomous and interconnected systems,
allowing the cybernetic approach to be leveraged in those fields of study as well.

In philosophy

In his 1990 essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control" Gilles Deleuze argues that society is undergoing a
shift in structure and control. The author claims institutions and technologies introduced since World War II
have dissolved the boundaries between these enclosures. As a result, social coercion and discipline have
moved into the lives of individuals considered as "masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'" to be controlled
cybernetically. These mechanisms of modern societies of control are described as continuous, following and
tracking individuals throughout their existence via transaction records, mobile location tracking, and other
personally identifiable information.[51]

Gregory Bateson saw the world as a series of systems containing those of individuals, societies and
ecosystems. Each of these systems has adaptive changes which depend upon feedback loops to control
balance by changing multiple variables. He saw the natural ecological system as innately good as long as it
was allowed to maintain homeostasis, and that the key unit of survival in evolution was an organism and its
environment.[52]

Bateson, in this subject, presents western epistemology as a method of thinking that leads to a mindset in
which man exerts an autocratic rule over all cybernetic systems and in doing so he unbalances the natural
cybernetic system of controlled competition and mutual dependency. Bateson claims that humanity will never
be able to control the whole system because it does not operate in a linear fashion, and if humanity creates his
own rules for the system, he opens himself up to becoming a slave to the self-made system due to the non-
linear nature of cybernetics. Lastly, man's technological prowess combined with his scientific hubris gives him
the potential to irrevocably damage and destroy the "supreme cybernetic system" (i.e. the biosphere), instead
of just disrupting the system temporally until the system can self-correct.[52]

In sociology

By examining group behavior through the lens of cybernetics, sociologists can seek the reasons for such
spontaneous events as smart mobs and riots, as well as how communities develop rules such as etiquette by
consensus without formal discussion. Affect Control Theory explains role behavior, emotions, and labeling
theory in terms of homeostatic maintenance of sentiments associated with cultural categories.

The most comprehensive attempt ever made in the social sciences to increase cybernetics in a generalized
theory of society was made by Talcott Parsons. In this way, cybernetics establishes the basic hierarchy in
Parsons' AGIL paradigm, which is the ordering system-dimension of his action theory. These and other
cybernetic models in sociology are reviewed in a book edited by McClelland and Fararo.[53]

In sport

A model of cybernetics in Sport was introduced by Yuri Verkhoshansky and Mel C. Siff in 1999 in their book
Supertraining.

In Technology

Cybernetics has been used as a general reference for the science between the interjection of disciplines
Medicine and technology. This involves sciences such as Bionics, Prosthetics, Neural network, Microchip
implants, Neuroprosthetics and Brain-computer interface.

Cybernetics is a major theme in the implementation of transhumanism and androids.

See also
Autonomous agency theory Superorganisms
Complex systems Synergetics (Haken)
Cybernetics Society Tektology
Gaia hypothesis Variety (cybernetics)
Industrial ecology Viable system theory
Principia Cybernetica Viable system model
Ratio Club Viable systems approach

External links
General

Norbert Wiener and Stefan Odobleja - A Comparative Analysis (http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/

Comp/CompJurc.htm)
Reading List for Cybernetics (http://bactra.org/notebooks/cybernetics.html)
Principia Cybernetica Web (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html)
 Web Dictionary of Cybernetics and Systems (https://web.archive.org/web/20091213161047/htt
p://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/asc/indexasc.html)
Glossary Slideshow (136 slides) (http://www.gwu.edu/~asc/slide/s1.html)
"Basics of Cybernetics" (https://web.archive.org/web/20100811013353/http://www.smithsrisca.
demon.co.uk/cybernetics.html). Archived from the original (http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/
cybernetics.html) on 2010-08-11. Retrieved 2016-01-23.
What is Cybernetics? Livas short introductory videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hjAX
kNbPfk) on YouTube

Societies

American Society for Cybernetics (http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/)

IEEE Systems, Man, & Cybernetics Society (http://www.ieeesmc.org/)
International Society for Cybernetics and Systems Research (https://web.archive.org/web/2015
0226115753/http://3rd-street.net/Group/index.php/index.php?topic=68.msg216#msg216)
The Cybernetics Society (http://www.cybsoc.org)

Further reading
Arbib, Michael A. (1987). Brains, machines, and mathematics (2nd ed.). New York: Springer-
Verlag. ISBN 978-0387965390.
Arbib, Michael A. (1972). The Metaphorical Brain (https://archive.org/details/metaphoricalbrai00
mich). Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-03249-6.
Ascott, Roy (1967). Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision. Cybernetica, Journal of the
International Association for Cybernetics (Namur), 10, pp. 25–56
Ashby, William Ross (1956). An introduction to cybernetics (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/Intr
oCyb.pdf) (PDF). Chapman & Hall. Retrieved 3 June 2012.
Beer, Stafford (1974). Designing freedom (https://archive.org/details/designingfreedom00beer).
Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley. ISBN 978-0471951650.
François, Charles (1999). "Systemics and cybernetics in a historical perspective (https://web.ar
chive.org/web/20060616081808/http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/~gossimit/ifsr/francois/papers/systemi
cs_and_cybernetics_in_a_historical_perspective.pdf)". In: Systems Research and Behavioral
Science. Vol 16, pp. 203–219 (1999)
George, F. H. (1971). Cybernetics (https://archive.org/details/cybernetics0000geor). Teach
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