Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity

6 Cybernetics

Here I need only mention the fact that cybernetics is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others

(Ashby 1956, p. 4)

6.1 Introduction

Norbert Wiener defined cybernetics as the study of “control and communication in the animal and the machine” and used this definition as the subtitle of his book Cybernetics (1948). It provides the clues as to its origins in biology and in engineering. As soon as Wiener begins to consider regulation in biological systems, he turns to Cannon's research on homeostasis. The same is true of Ashby in An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), that other foundational text of the trans‐discipline. Cannon's work in biology was touched upon in Section 3.2. We will now look at the contribution of engineering to the development of cybernetics by considering two key concepts developed in that discipline as it sought to enhance its ability to design and operate complex machines.

The first of these concepts is “negative feedback control.” Otto Mayr (1975) has charted the historical origins of feedback devices applied in water clocks, thermostats, and windmills. Ktesibios of Alexandria, in the third century BCE, used a float valve, similar to the mechanism employed in modern flush toilets, to enable his water clock to keep the time. The first automatic temperature ...