The science of information, feedback, and control — how systems learn, adapt, and steer.
Cybernetics is the science of information, feedback, and control — the study of how systems, living or mechanical, sense their world, learn, adapt, and steer toward a goal.
It gave us the vocabulary of feedback loops that runs through systems thinking, and it reaches from Wiener's founding work to second-order cybernetics — the application of cybernetic principles to cybernetics itself. This section collects foundational readings and living resources in the field.
Wiener defines the field. The founding text.
A less technical discussion of cybernetics and society.
Written as an accessible introduction to Wiener's ideas.
The Pulitzer-winning set of stories and essays on information, incompleteness, and mind.
Cybernetics and systems theory, a hypertext glossary, and foundational readings.
History of the field, its central figures, and newsletter archives.
Paul Pangaro on what cybernetics is — and how it differs from AI.