The term “Cybernetics” comes from a word originally meaning “helmsman” in Greek. How could we operate a ship to its destination while maintaining a stable situation with changes in the surrounding environment, such as raging waves and winds or sudden changes in the weather? Similarly, cybernetics, which aims to design a way to flexibly respond to an infinitely changeable environment, has become a general term for academic disciplines since the 20th century that have attempted to comprehensively understand the relationship between living organisms in general and nature and society from the concept of information. Its main focus was to make it possible to control the communication circuits of objects ranging from physical phenomena to organisms and social economy in terms of technological engineering. Cybernetics thus put animals, including humans, on the same level as machines linked to computers and developed theories and practices to make their communications and operation commands responsive to changes in the open environment. The influence of cybernetics can be seen in the widespread use of terms such as “cyborg” and “cyberspace.”

The origin of cybernetics dates back to the United States immediately after World War II. Against the backdrop of an unsettled society entering the Cold War, the Macy Conference was held from 1946 to 1952, bringing together scientists at the forefront of their fields. This was an attempt to address various fields such as mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, neuroscience, and cultural anthropology from the perspective of information technology, and it was an interdisciplinary effort that laid the foundation for the development of today’s computers, communication devices, and artificial intelligence. For example, Norbert Wiener and Claude Shannon were central figures in formulating the theories of communication and control that have been used to this day, while conducting research on high-speed computers that could accurately measure the trajectory of missiles in a certain environment during wartime. These studies were also infused with the work of John von Neumann, who created the prototype of today’s computers, and Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who attempted to make possible the logical computation of animal neural circuits. Consequently, not only physical phenomena such as information transmission but also organisms and society in general were regarded as systems that can respond to changes in the environment, and important concepts that are necessary for such systems were developed, such as “feedback,” “noise/pattern,” and “homeostasis.”

Other participants in the conference included Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead from the field of anthropology, who had a decisive influence on the development of their respective fields. In the 1960s and later, under the name of Second Order Cybernetics, Heinz von Förster, Humberto Maturana, and others proposed the concept of “autopoiesis,” which extended the aforementioned discussion to living systems. The goal here was to devise a dynamic hierarchical system from the perspective of “simulation” and “complexity” that would encompass the mind and life of humans, animals, and plants, as well as organizational management and economic systems.

In relation to design, Herbert Simon, an economist who published The Sciences of the Artificial (first edition in 1967, third edition in 1996), cannot be overlooked. The book considered all artifacts produced by human engineering as objects of design and attempted to make them controllable from the perspective of cybernetics. Specifically, not only products by engineers and buildings by designers, but also all intellectual activities such as psychology, economics, organization theory, and computer science were included in the category of design and are positioned as the core of each specialized education. The design of artifacts is not limited to simple and linear cause-and-effect relationships but is also about transforming these objects into something that can respond to various changes within a certain environment that contains multiple variables. This understanding has been carried over to the new positivism, statistical thinking, and cognitive science, which often rely on data and simulation. Simon’s argument was to systematize all artifacts, from information engineering to organizational management, as a “science of design” taking over cybernetics in this comprehensive perspective.

In fact, from the practical design research of Donald Norman and others to the current rise of artificial intelligence and behavioral economics, the science of design, which is mainly oriented toward social science, has “problem-solving” and “evaluation and measurement” at its core to make human behavior controllable. Rather than products and objects themselves, they are attempts to control the way we behave and make decisions. These trends are naturally linked to design via information terminals such as programming, GUI, and infographics, given their origins. Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that the influence of cybernetics, along with the technologies of computers, the Internet, and artificial intelligence, has permeated the entire sphere of our lives today.

However, it should be added that critical thinking about the systematicity and omnipotence of these systems has been developed in theory developed by the humanities and the practice of art and design. For example, from the mid-20th century, philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze developed critical philosophy thinking about the influence of cybernetics in their time. In the field of art, from the 1960s onwards, Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), which aimed to work with technology, mainly in New York, and “Cybernetic Serendipity”, an exhibition of early computer art held in London in 1968, there have been many practices, mainly in media art, that have attempted to adopt a critical attitude while incorporating the influence of cybernetics. These historical precedents have been inherited into practices such as net activism and speculative design that warn about the current wave of new platforms being set up online, such as the so-called “GAFA” (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon).

(MASUDA Nobuhiro)

References

• Deleuze, Gilles (1990) “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle”, in Pourparlers 1972-1990, Les éditions de Minuit（ジル・ドゥルーズ（2007） 「追伸──管理社会について」（『記号と事件 1972-1990年の対話』宮林寛訳、河出文庫所収））
• Simon, A Herbert (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial, Third Edition, The MIT Press（ハーバート・サイモン（1999）『システムの科学（第三版）』稲葉元吉、吉原英樹訳、パーソナルメディア）
• Wiener, Norbert (1948=1961), Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, MIT Press（ノーバート・ウィーナー（2011）『サイバネティクス 動物と機械における通信と制御』池原止戈夫・彌永昌吉・室賀三郎・戸田巌訳、岩波文庫）