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Comment by sgillen | Hacker News Reader

Missing from the article is any discussion of control theory. In my view cybernetics essentially morphed into modern day control theory, there are many examples of very broad ideas in cybernetics being made specific and rigorous in controls. For example the good regulator theorem became the internal model principle. I encourage anyone interested in learning more about this brand of cybernetics to pick up a control or dynamical systems textbook, researchers have definitely not been idle in this area!

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From article: "Over time, cybernetics’s contributions were stripped away and reclassified as something else. Early work on feedback loops in cognition became AI. Models of the format of feedback loops became information theory. Work on feedback loops around production became part of economics. Work on mathematical representations of complex systems became system dynamics. Work on feedback loops in behavior moved over to sociology and psychology. Cybernetic theory practically founded anthropology and cognitive science."

Control theory is just one amongst many splinters, without any implied primacy of control theory.

Control theory certainly predates Wiener's cybernetics. He did not invent negative feedback analysis nor design of control systems. He did fail to cite previous work, so adherents of cybernetics think he did.

In Cybernetics, he does credit Maxwell, Pitts, etc. He goes through the entire history of science relevant to Cybernetics for the first and second chapters.

He did invent plenty of feedback analysis techniques and modern control systems before writing Cybernetics

There are many developments relevant for cybernetics that were not mentioned in the book Cybernetics, like discoveries of H.S. Black and other engineers in Bell labs, or early mechanical analog computers. Here is a short review of book on the history of control engineering before cybernetics: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/acs.839

"[...] general reader could be forgiven for assuming that Wiener was the originator of the idea of feedback control. Significant though these war-time contributions were, they were not the whole story: as I and others have shown feedback control has had a much longer history"

That text includes more references to papers and books on the history of ideas relevant for control theory and control engineering.

Indeed. It is a necessarily true model of causality.

Highly recommend Minsky's application of the theory on computation: Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines

Interestingly, Minsky went out of his way to hide the production of that project without Weiner to avoid his influence on it--whom he disliked at least at a professional capacity.

There's some part where he shows the symmetry of the machine with the environment implies they are are interchangeable and is merely a description of convenience. Of course this trivially flows from the time reversibility.

here's the pdf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15621846

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