Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the science of feedback loops. Wiener coined the term in 1948 from the Greek kybernetes, the steersman of a ship, because he understood that the central question of any purposive system is not what its components can do but whether someone is reading the water and adjusting the tiller. Cybernetics treats intelligence as a property of loops rather than of individual minds or machines — a relational, distributed phenomenon that lives in the connections between components rather than within any component alone. The field flourished in the 1940s and 1950s, gave birth to control theory and information theory, and was then deliberately excluded from the AI research agenda at the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop. It is now being rediscovered, sixty years later, as the framework the AI safety community needs and the AI field was constructed to avoid.