First wave The initial focus of cybernetics was on parallels between regulatory feedback processes in biological and technological systems. Two foundational articles were published in 1943: "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology" by
Arturo Rosenblueth,
Norbert Wiener, and
Julian Bigelowbased on the research on living organisms that Rosenblueth did in Mexicoand the paper "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" by
Warren McCulloch and
Walter Pitts. The foundations of cybernetics were then developed through a series of transdisciplinary conferences funded by the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, between 1946 and 1953. The conferences were chaired by
McCulloch and had participants that included
Ross Ashby,
Gregory Bateson,
Heinz von Foerster,
Margaret Mead,
John von Neumann, and
Norbert Wiener. In the UK, similar focuses were explored by the
Ratio Club, an informal dining club of young psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers that met between 1949 and 1958. Wiener introduced the neologism
cybernetics to denote the study of "teleological mechanisms" and popularized it through the book
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
In the Soviet Union, Cybernetics was initially considered with suspicion but became accepted from the mid to late 1950s. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, cybernetics' transdisciplinarity fragmented, with technical focuses separating into separate fields.
Artificial intelligence (AI) was founded as a distinct discipline at the
Dartmouth workshop in 1956, differentiating itself from the broader cybernetics field. After some uneasy coexistence, AI gained funding and prominence. Consequently, cybernetic sciences such as the study of
artificial neural networks were downplayed. Similarly,
computer science became defined as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Second wave The second wave of cybernetics came to prominence from the 1960s onwards, with its focus shifting away from technology toward social, ecological, and philosophical concerns. It was still grounded in biology, notably
Maturana and
Varela's
autopoiesis, and built on earlier work on
self-organising systems and the presence of anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings. The Biological Computer Laboratory, founded in 1958 and active until the mid-1970s under the direction of
Heinz von Foerster at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, was a major incubator of this trend in cybernetics research. , an early form of cybernetic
economic planning. Focuses of the second wave of cybernetics included management cybernetics, such as
Stafford Beer's biologically inspired
viable system model; work in family therapy, drawing on Bateson; social systems, such as in the work of
Niklas Luhmann; epistemology and pedagogy, such as in the development of radical constructivism. Cybernetics' core theme of circular causality was developed beyond goal-oriented processes to concerns with reflexivity and recursion. This was especially so in the development of
second-order cybernetics (or the cybernetics of cybernetics), developed and promoted by Heinz von Foerster, which focused on questions of observation, cognition, epistemology, and ethics. The 1960s onwards also saw cybernetics begin to develop exchanges with the creative arts, design, and architecture, notably with the
Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition (ICA, London, 1968), curated by
Jasia Reichardt, and the unrealised Fun Palace project (London, unrealised, 1964 onwards), where
Gordon Pask was consultant to architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood. In 1962, Qian Xuesen recruited
Song Jian and
Guan Zhaozhi to establish China's first cybernetics laboratory with him. Following the
Sino-Soviet split, cybernetics was deemed disreputable in China. The field was again favored in the 1970s and 1980s following
Deng Xiaoping's emphasis on modernisation. Practical design disciplines have drawn on cybernetics for
theoretical underpinning and transdisciplinary connections. Emerging topics include how cybernetics' engagements with social, human, and ecological contexts might come together with its earlier technological focus, whether as a critical discourse or a "new branch of engineering". ==Key concepts and theories==