Cybernetics in History

S ince the end of World War II, I have been working on the many ramifications of the theory of messages. Besides the electrical engineering theory of the transmission of messages, there is a larger field which includes not only the study of language but the study of messages as a means of controlling machinery and society, the development of computing machines and other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory of scientific method. This larger theory of messages is a probabilistic theory, an intrinsic part of the movement that owes its origin to Willard Gibbs and which I have described in the introduction. Until recently, there was no existing word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term, I felt constrained to invent one. Hence "Cybernetics," which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes, or "steersman," the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word "governor." Incidentally, I found later that the word had already been used by Ampere with reference to political science, and had been introduced in another context by a Polish scientist, both uses dating from the earlier part of the nineteenth century. I wrote a more or less technical book entitled Cybernetics which was published in 1948. In response to a certain demand for me to make its ideas acceptable to the lay public, I published the first edition of The Human Use of Human Beings in 1950. Since then the subject has grown from a few ideas shared by Drs. Claude Shannon, Warren Weaver, and myself, into an established region of research. Therefore, I take this opportunity occasioned by the reprinting of my book to bring it up to date, and to remove certain defects and inconsequentialities in its original structure. In giving the definition of Cybernetics in the original book, I classed communication and control together. Why did I do this? When I