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Teleological Society, to examine 'communication engineering, the
engineering of control devices, the mathematics of time series in
statistics, and the communication and control aspects of the nervous
system'.
4
From the very beginning the Macy Conferences were
concerned as much with machinic as with biological systems. Von
Neumann was also able to engage his interest in game theory, which
enabled the application of methods of mathematical modelling of
various phenomena to society in general. In
, von Neumann, in
collaboration with his colleague at Princeton, the economist Oscar
Morgenstern, published a topic
Theory of Games and Economic
Behaviour
,
5
which proposed the use of such mathematical models
for economic processes. The principles of this idea were easily con-
flated with those of the other researchers in formalizing different
kinds of behaviour.
The most well-known expressions of the ideas discussed in the
Macy Conferences were the two topics written by Norbert Wiener,
which sought to define the new science of self-regulating systems
of all sorts. In
1944
he published
Cybernetics or Control and Com-
munication in the Animal World
6
and in
1948
The Human Use of
Human Beings
.
7
In these topics Wiener formulated the idea of infor-
mation and feedback as the bases of a paradigm for understanding
biological, machinic and social processes. Wiener's conception of
Cybernetics was highly influential both for scientific and humanis-
tic disciplines. Wiener took the term Cybernetics from the ancient
Greek
kybernetikos
, meaning 'good at steering' or 'helmsman'. In this
he was, without his knowing, anticipated by the nineteenth century
French physicist André-Marie Ampère, who suggested the term
for the study of the control of government. Wiener was, however,
aware of the use of the cognate term 'Governor' in the same century
to describe self-regulating machines, such as that developed by Watt
for his steam engines, mentioned in the last chapter.
The near-simultaneous development of Cybernetics and Inform-
ation Theory also encouraged the emergence of other similar ideas.
1950
