Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine is the founding text of cybernetics, the work in which Norbert Wiener named the field. Its central claim is that information, control, and feedback form a common currency uniting machines, organisms, and societies as self-regulating systems.

Drawing on wartime work on automatic gun-control systems, Wiener generalizes the principle of feedback, a system sensing the gap between its goal and its current state and acting to close it, into an account of purposive behavior. By treating mind and behavior in terms of information and goal-seeking control, the book offered a new way of thinking about purpose in living and non-living systems alike.

The work is the headwaters of the entire cybernetics-and-systems stream, supplying the vocabulary later inherited by Bateson, von Foerster, Maturana, and predictive-processing theorists. Wiener himself was a rigorous mathematician concerned with the human consequences of his ideas; the spiritualized "reality as information" extrapolations came downstream, but the founding move that made mind thinkable as information is his.