What Is Cybernetics? ' 



By Donald M. MacKay 



Professor of Communication, University of Keele, Staffordshire, England 



[With 3 plates] 



A RAILWAY TRAIN iieeds no steering gear. The forces required to 

 correct for tlie buffetings of wind and way are supplied automatically, 

 by the sideways reaction of the rails against the wheel flanges. A 

 ship, lacking such implicit means of guidance, requires a helm, nor- 

 mally controlled by a helmsman. The Latin for helmsman is guher- 

 nator; the Greek, hyhernetes. From the first comes our word gover- 

 nor. From the second, in 1843, Andre Ampere derived the term 

 cybernetics (la cybernetique), to denote the science of government. 



In 1948, Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 

 nology independently proposed the same term for "The Science of 

 Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine," as 

 the title of a book whose repercussions are among the remarkable 

 scientific phenomena of our century. Just as it appeared, the war- 

 born art of eliminating the human element in military missiles was 

 being rapidly adapted to peaceful applications in all manner of in- 

 dustrial areas, aided by the explosive postwar development of elec- 

 tronic computing techniques. At the same time the physiologists and 

 students of animal beha^dor, many of them fresh from wartime ex- 

 perience in radar and electronics, were alive as never before to the 

 possibilities of explaining all bodily activity — even at the human 

 level — in terms of hierarchies of "self-guided" mechanisms. In the 

 ferment of ideas thus generated, the growing realization that scien- 

 tists in these widely separated areas had a common problem was due 

 in no small measure to Wiener's book. 



"Wliat, then, is this common problem ? In brief, it is to understand 

 (or procure) the organization of effective action — of all processes, 

 whether artificial or natural, in which goals, ends, standards are 

 sought or maintained, and unacceptable states or events avoided. As 

 a discipline, cybernetics thus belongs to the same family as engineer- 

 ing, and no sharp lines can be drawn between the two. 



1 Reprinted by permission from Discovery (London), vol. 23, No. 10, October 1962. 



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