History of Cybernetics

To better understand the principle of cybernetics first of all we need to

understand the term and see from where it comes from.
Cybernetics comes from the Greek: “κυβερνητική” which means “governance”,
“κυβερνώ” that has the meaning of govern and “κυβερνη” an administrative
unit.Cybernetics is the science of general regularities of control and information
transmission processes in different systems, whether machines, animals or
society.
Cybernetics studies the concepts of control and communication in living
organisms, machines and organizations including self-organization.It focuses on
how a(digital, mechanical or biological) system processes information, responds
to it and changes or being changed for better functioning (including control and
communication).
Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science.It originated “at the junction” of
mathematics, logic, semiotics, physiology, biology and sociology.Among its
inherent features, we mention analysis and revelation of general principles and
approaches in scientific cognition.Control theory, communication theory,
operations research and others represent most weighty theories withing
cybernetics 1.0.
In ancient Greece, the term “cybernetics” denoted the art of a municipal
governor.
Therefore, cybernetics 1.0 can be defined as “The Science of Control and Data
Processing in Animals, Machines and Society”.An alternative is the definiction of
Cybernetics as “The Science of General Regularities of Control and Data
Processing in Animals, Machines and Society”.
The history of science development has “romantic” periods.One of them fell on
the middle of the 1940s, at the end of the World War II to be more precisely.
The first factor concerned an intensive flow of scientific and applied results.Just
imagine: the end of the World War II, dynamic growth of industry, the way out of
the crisis in physics, the appearance and rapid development of atomic physics,
quantum mechanics, general and special relativity theory and astrophysics, etc.
The second factor was associated with the comprehension of science
interdisciplinary by researchers from different branches.Interdisciplinary implies
that there exist general approaches and regularities in different scientific
branches and it is possible to perform an adapted translation of results between
some branches.This led to the obvious necessity of generalization search, not only
within the framework of acertain field of knowledge or at a junction of fields, but
at their intersection.In other worlds the matter was not even to create new
paradigms for a branch, but to apply joint efforts of physicians and biologists,
mathematicians, engineers and physiologists, etc., for obtaining fundamentally
new results and breakthrough technologies.
The third factor was the role and benefit of science became evident for
everymen and politicians.The former enjoyed scientific results owing to their
rapid and mass implementation.The latter realized that science is an important
public and economic drive of a society and got accustomed to that project-based
management of applied research that allow predicting and in part guaranteeing
its duration and results.
However, the flight of thought and stormy feelings of any romanticism go in
parallel with overestimated expectations.Moreover, the onrush development of
any science is inevitably followed by its normal advancement.

Wiener’s Cybernetics
Any science is determined by its problem domain and an integrated set of
methods, therefore sciences can be divided into:
- subject-oriented sciences studying a certain subject by different methods
- method-oriented sciences developing a certain set of methods applicable to
different subjects
- synthetic sciences mostly developing and/or generalizing methods of
certain sciences in application to subjects of these and/or other sciences
 Cybernetics has been always assigned a wide range of assessments by experts
and everymen, from “cybernetics has discredited itself against all expectations
and ceased to exist by today” to “cybernetics cover all the things”.
A definition for cybernetics can’t be explicitly pronounced because this science
goes into the comprehensive category, cybernetics would hardly posses a unique
definition.Moreover, the meanings of terms describing this category also evolve
with the course of time.
Alongside with general cybernetics, there exist sectoral types of cybernetics.A
most natural approach is to separate out technical cybernetics, biological
cybernetics and socioeconomic cybernetics besides theoretical cybernetics.
It is possible to compile a more complete list of special types of cybernetics in
the descending order of the current level of exploration:
- technical cybernetics, engineering cybernetics
- biological and medical cybernetics, evolutionary cybernetics, cybernetics in
psychology
- economic cybernetics
- physical cybernetics
- social cybernetics, educational cybernetics
- quantum cybernetics
As standing apart, there is a branch of biological cybernetics known as
cybernetic brain modeling integrated with artificial intelligence, neural and
cognitive sciences.A romantic idea to create a cybernetic brain at least partially
resembling a natural brain stimulated the founding fathers of cybernetics.
 Sources

Cybernetics From Past to Future by D.A. Novikov

Bazele ciberneticii economice by Emil Scarlat, Nora Chiriţă, Ioana Bradea, Camelia
Delcea