Cybernetics and the Human Use of Human Beings

Cybernetics is not a much used term these days,  probably its closest term today is 'Computer Science',  but that implies a colder, technical aspect than we are dealing with today, when we introduce cognitive methods as sensors.   I note that they mention the dangers of its use by 'totalitarianism',  which still has an extreme ring that most people reject.    But remember too that Cybernetics is a Russian term, and ultimately links to the Soviet and German socialist experiments,  which have clearly failed.   Wiener though was prescient, and his work is worth reading even today.

What Would the Father of Cybernetics Think About A.I. Today?
Looking back on Norbert Wiener’s seminal 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings.  By  Seth Lloyd in Slate. 

The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener’s 1950 popularization of his highly influential book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), investigates the interplay between human beings and machines in a world in which machines are becoming ever more computationally capable and powerful. It is a remarkably prescient book, and remarkably wrong. Written at the height of the Cold War, it contains a chilling reminder of the dangers of totalitarian organizations and societies, and of the danger to democracy when it tries to combat totalitarianism with totalitarianism’s own weapons.

Wiener’s Cybernetics looked in close scientific detail at the process of control via feedback. (Cybernetics, from the ancient Greek for helmsman, is the etymological basis of our word governor, which is what James Watt called his pathbreaking feedback control device that transformed the use of steam engines.) Because he was immersed in problems of control, Wiener saw the world as a set of complex, interlocking feedback loops, in which sensors, signals, and actuators such as engines interact via an intricate exchange of signals and information. The engineering applications of Cybernetics were tremendously influential and effective, giving rise to rockets, robots, automated assembly lines, and a host of precision-engineering techniques—in other words, to the basis of contemporary industrial society. .... "