For some time now, there has been a page of Wikipedia that I keep finding myself in Complex Systems. But complex systems is an enormous field, so, for this post, I will be talking about one “branch” of systems theory, Cybernetics.
Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary field, meaning it intersects with many different disciplines, so it’s weird in the way that it doesn’t have an identity of its own. I had heard of concepts related to cybernetics in machine learning, psychology, biology, design, linguistics, and even art. The meaning most often associated with the word cybernetics is that of the cyborg, cyberspace, or technology/internet-related vocabulary, which is mostly because the prefix cyber was “stolen” by science fiction authors like William Gibson (Neuromancer, Cyberspace…) that made cyber have the meaning that it has today (cybersecurity, cyberbullying…). It was later used by Donna Haraway in her Cyborg Manifesto that I plan to write about soon, but doesn’t have anything to do the kind of cybernetics I care in this post.
The definition of cybernetics is the field of systems science that studies circular causal systems whose outputs are also inputs, and feedback systems. If you are familiar with delays in music production, you probably already have that concept interiorized. The most intuitive examples are thermostats (where the action of a heater responds to changes in temperature to preserve certain state). The first cybernetic machine designed by humans was probably the Watt steam engine , cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution in England.
The etimology of the word comes from greek κυβερνήτης, meaning captain, steersman or guide. It the same root kubernetes, meaning governor. The steersman interpretation is perhaps the most correct one, as in steering a ship, the steersman maintains a steady course in a changing environment by adjusting in continual response to the effect it is observed as having. It involves changing the environment to perpetuate itself.
Cybernetics has been practiced by every being unconsciously at least since the beginning of evolution. Biology was the seed of cybernetic thinking (think of how hunger works) and remains one of the most prominent fields. The term was coined by Rober Weiner in his book, “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”, after studying parallels between regulatory feedback processes in biological and technological systems. Cybernetics, much like computer science in the 50s and 60s, was fragmented into different sciences, and while CS was able fuse into its own giant concept, cybernetics remains a niche spread throughout philosophy, business management, politics, and sciences.
The history of cybernetics is fascinating to me, as it managed to influence some of the most ahead-of-their-time thinkers in almost every field of study. The part of cybernetics that interests me the most is related to intelligence and consciousness. If you have read my post on The Loping Effect, many of the concepts are strikingly similar. The human brain is a cybernetic machine at its core, and the most probable way I can see to AGI involves having a deeper understanding of the feedback systems. Artificial intelligence involves feedback systems by definition, and my intuition says that consciousness does too. Cybernetics can explain agency without resorting to God or a shallow understanding of the brain. Languages are good examples of cybernetic systems that, without any kind of conscious thought, change constantly to stay afloat, autocorrection through feedback.
The beginning can be traced back to Rober Weiner, who during WW2 was inspired by his work on the automatic aiming and firing of anti-aircraft guns to formulate the first steps of this field, and along with people like McCulloch and von Neumann developed much of the original concepts. Some of those include Self-organization, Negative Feedback, or the Good Regulator Theorem. Cybernetics is entangled with Information Theory, and Weiner´s original work touched many of the same concepts that Shannon did. Later on, during the ’60s and ’70s, some other people took that work, mostly relegated to hard sciences, and applied it to social, ecological, and philosophical concerns.
One cool idea that arose here was that of Second-Order Cybernetics. Associated with Radical Constructivism, this new term extends the principles of cybernetics to include the observer as an integral part of the system. It acknowledges that the act of observation can influence the behavior of the system being observed. This new paradigm didn’t fit well with those working in engineering cybernetics and deepened the differences between the different branches of though.
This new approach where the observer is part of the system becomes more interesting once you realize that almost everything can be seen as a system, and the observer himself is the one that places the line between what is inside it.
Around the same time, Stafford Beer was garnering success applying cybernetics in companies, the so-called management cybernetics. He developed the viable system model, to diagnose the faults in any existing organizational system, and worked great for the steel industry. He was presented with the chance to take his skills to Chile, where the government of Salvador Allende had started rapidly nationalizing many corporations (some of them from the EEUU) to move towards a more centraliced economic system. Fernando Flores and other people realized that the sudden amount of work would make central planning extremely difficult, and sought his help in creating a system to alleviate that problem.
This group was nicknamed the “Santiago Boys” which, with the addition of Stafford, started a project to construct a distributed decision support system to aid in the management of the national economy, It was called Cybersyn (Cybernetics + Synergy). As good as that sounds, they were in the 70s and South-America, so resources were scarce. They found 500 unused telex machines and built a network between factories to report on all kinds of variables (raw materials, supply and demand…). They had many other plans, namely a statistical alerting and planning software (Cyberstride) and an economic simulator (CHECO). Unluckily, a coup the etat in 1973 would stop their efforts, and the whole system ended up getting little use.
The one time where it would come in handy was during October 1972, when about 40,000 truck owners took on strike, and the system was used to help with the efforts of traversing the situation. They were also quite invested in the aesthetic aspect of it, and their Operations Room made Nixon quite angry since he had declared “not a nut or a bolt would go to Chile as long as they embraced socialism.
This podcast offers a great breakdown of the events (it doesn’t dive much into the technology itself thought), and while the political currents didn’t help the project, the tools weren’t quite there as well1. Some other similar efforts arose in the Soviet Union, but it all revolves back to the economic calculation debate. The economy is one of the biggest complex systems that humanity has created and is dependent on the feedback mechanism. I´m convinced that cybernetic planning can do a better job than a classical free market in many aspects, especially in those where government intervention is required either way. Cybernetics could have been socialism’s greatest ally, but unluckily collectivism was defeated too early to make use of the technological advancements of today.
Time will tell if I´m right, but the way I see it, mega-corporations like Amazon or Walmart are already doing that, and it’s going pretty good for them. As the aforementioned Good Regulator Theorem states, “every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system”, so to me it makes sense that as technology improves we are capable of making better models that surpass the human understanding of this system. In a way we are already living in a cybernetic society, but certainly not in the way that Beer envisioned it. In his view, the way to balance individual autonomy and community in complex systems is by managing them from the bottom up (that’s one of the reasons why Allende liked his plan), and that isn’t the case now.
To dive a little deeper into the economic aspect of cybernetics, George Soros (like him or not he has proven to develop one of the most accurate models of humanity), developed the theory of reflexivity to explain how markets work, and it’s basically a cybernetic approach to the economy. Markets are basically viable systems, and while powerful by themselves, they must accept their role as a part of a bigger viable system (society).
There is much to be said about cybernetics, but nowadays there is few people talking about it. Paul Pangaro is probably the person doing the most for the dissemination of cybernetic though, and many of his interviews are valuable. In my uni (computer science), cybernetics were metioned twice that I remember, in Embedded Systems and in Robotics (Weiner was mentioned and negative feedback explained, but only in the context of robots.The teacher defined cybernetics as the method of controlling a robot, while acknowledging that it was a difficult term).
Some interesting links: Cybernetic Socialism Cybernetics around the world Cybersyn 1 Cybersyn 2 Principia Cybernetica Web American Society for Cybernetics 1 American Society for Cybernetics 2 Viable Systems Cybernetics and War
Footnotes
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For comparison, in 1971 there were only 15 nodes (mostly in universities) in ARPANET, the network that would go on to form the Internet. ↩