Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

Cybernetics framed systems as maintaining goals by sensing their output and feeding it back to adjust their input, whether the system is a thermostat, an animal, or a servomechanism. Wiener drew together control theory, feedback, and communication to treat purpose and self-correction as engineering problems. The framework influenced control engineering, early thinking about learning machines, and how researchers modeled adaptive and self-regulating behavior.