THE ADAPT IVE BRAIN - The Cybernetic Brain - page 3

some people Think ThaT cyberneTics is anoTher word for auTomaTion;
some ThaT iT concerns experimenTs wiTh raTs; some ThaT iT is a branch
of maThemaTics; oThers ThaT iT wanTs To build a compuTer capable of
running The counTry. my hope is ThaT . . . people will undersTand
boTh how These wonderfully differenT noTions can be simulTaneously
currenT, and also why none of Them is much To The poinT.
stAFFoRd beeR, CybernetiCs and ManageMent (1959, Vi)
To speak of a hisTory, any hisTory, as Though There was buT one some-
how canonical hisTory . . . is misleading. . . . any enTiTy, culTure
or ciVilisaTion . . . carries innumerable, in some ways differing,
hisTories.
GoRdon PAsk, “inTeracTions of acTors” (1992, 11)
The word “cybernetics” was coined in 1947 by the eminent American math-
ematician Norbert Wiener and his friends to name the kind of science they
were discussing at the famous Macy conferences held between 1946 and
1953. 1 It was derived from the Greek word kybernetes (Latin equivalent, gu-
bernator ) meaning “governor” in the sense of “steersman,” so one could read
“cybernetics” as “the science of steersmanship”—and this is, as it happens, a
good deinition as far as this topic is concerned. The matter was made more
interesting and complicated, however, by Wiener's 1948 topic which put the
word into circulation, Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal
and the Machine . There Wiener tried to tie together all sorts of more or less in-
dependent lines of scientific development: digital electronic computing (then
still novel), information theory, early work on neural networks, the theory of
servomechanisms and feedback systems, and work in psychology, psychiatry,
decision theory, and the social sciences. There are many stories to be told of
the evolution, the comings together, and the driftings apart of these threads,
only a few of which have so far attracted the attention of scholars. 2 One can
almost say that everyone can have their own history of cybernetics.
In this topic I do not attempt a panoptic survey of everything that could
be plausibly described as cybernetic. I focus on the strand of cybernetics that
interests me most, which turns out to mean the work of a largely forgotten
group of British cyberneticians, active from the end of World War II almost to
the present. Even to develop an overview of British cybernetics would require
several topics, so I focus instead on a few leading lights of the ield, the ones