Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. In other words, it is the science that studies energy flows closely linked to control theory and systems theory. Both in its origins and in its evolution, in the second half of the 20th century, cybernetics is equally applicable to physical and social systems. Complex systems affect their external environment and then adapt to it. In technical terms, it focuses on control and communication functions: both external and internal phenomena of the system. This ability is natural in living organisms and has been imitated in machines and organizations. Special attention is paid to feedback and its derived concepts.

Cybernetics, according to epistemologist, anthropologist, cyberneticist, and father of family therapy Gregory Bateson, is the branch of mathematics that deals with problems of control, recursion, and information. Bateson also claims that cybernetics is "the biggest bite of the fruit from the tree of knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2,000 years".

Stafford Beer, a philosopher of organizational and managerial theory, who Wiener himself said should be considered the father of management cybernetics, defines cybernetics as "the science of effective organization."

According to Stafford Beer, cybernetics studies the information flows that surround a system, and the way in which this information is used by the system as a value that allows it to control itself: it occurs both for animate and inanimate systems indifferently. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary science, and is as linked to physics as it is to the study of the brain as it is to the study of computers, and it also has a lot to do with the formal languages of science, providing tools with which to objectively describe the behavior of all these systems.

Stafford Beer himself stated: "Probably the first and clearest insight into the nature of control was that it is not about pulling levers to produce desired and inexorable results. This notion of control applies only to trivial machines."

A total system that includes any kind of probabilistic element is never applied - from weather to people; from the markets, to economic policy. The characteristic of a non-trivial system that is under control is that despite dealing with variables too large to quantify, too uncertain to express, and even too difficult to understand, something can be done to generate a predictable target.

In a very poetic reflection given by Gordon Pask, cybernetics is “the science of metaphors to be defended.”

Recurring concepts for your research

The Modelling means observing homogeneous but different elements of a case, separating the persistent and common elements, in order to arrive at the representation of an abstract system, which is capable of describing all the individual elements within that system. Cybernetic modeling is a logical-mathematical modernization. However, in the legal framework it is a verbal or logical-traditional modeling.

Black box is one of the methods developed by cybernetics to explain partially unknown phenomena. It is a system of which the operating rules are not known, but only the input data and the output data.

Trial and error is a method that refers to determination, testing and correction, regardless of its exact translation into trial and error. It must also be studied in mathematical terms because it is the basis of innovation.

Etymology

Norbert Wiener found just the word he wanted in the operation of the great ships of ancient Greece. At sea, the great ships battled against the rain, the wind and the tides; issues by no means predictable. However, if the man, operating at the tiller, could keep his gaze on a distant lighthouse, he could manipulate the tiller, constantly adjusting it in real time, until reaching the light. This is the helmsman's job. In Homer's rude times the Greek word for the helmsman was kybernetes, which Wiener translated into English as cybernetics, in Spanish cibernética."

History

Cybernetics is a science born around 1942 and initially promoted by Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth Stearns whose objective is "control and communication in the animal and in the machine" or "to develop a language and techniques that will allow us to approach the problem of control and communication in general”. However, it should be clarified that the beginning of this discipline can be taken in the year 1940 with the investigations of Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush on calculating machines and on electrical networks with Yuk Wing Lee. Although the term will not be coined until 1947. In 1950, Ben Laposky, a mathematician from Iowa, created oscillations or electronic abstractions by means of an analog computer: this possibility of manipulating waves and recording them electronically is considered the awakening of what would be called computer graphics and, later,, computer art and infoart. Also, during the fifties, William Ross Ashby proposed theories related to artificial intelligence.

Cybernetics gave great impetus to information theory in the mid-1960s; the digital computer replaced the analog in the elaboration of electronic images. In those years, the second generation of computers (with transistors in 1960) appeared, concluding at that time the first computer drawings and graphics, and the third (with integrated circuits, in 1964) as well as programming languages.

In 1965 the exhibition ”Computer-graphik” took place in Stuttgart. But the exhibition that consecrated the trend was the one that took place in 1968 under the title "Cybernetic Serendipity" at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Also in that year, the exhibition "Mindextenders" at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in London stood out.

In 1969 the Brooklyn Museum organized the exhibition “Some more Beginnings”. In that same year, in Buenos Aires and other cities in Argentina, Art and Cybernetics was presented, organized by Jorge Glusberg. This exhibition would inaugurate the principles of the digital art/image relationship in that country. In Spain the first manifestation was that of "Computable Forms"- 1969- "Automatic generation of plastic forms" -1970-both organized by the Calculation Center of the University of Madrid. In the first months of 1972, the German Institute of Madrid and Barcelona presented one of the most complete exhibitions that has taken place in Spain, entitled <Impulse computer art>

The first experiences of what would later be called net.art. they go back to the year 1994. It is important to clarify that by the 1960s there were already some antecedents. In any case, it can be established that the first experiences where computer technology placed at the service of the community functioned as an aesthetic support took place in those years and broke with the idea of a linear reading of the work...

The root of cybernetic theory

The term cybernetics comes from the Greek Κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs, which refers to the helmsman, who "rules" the ship). The word cybernétique was also used in 1834 by the physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) to refer to the government sciences in his system of classifying human knowledge.

Historically, the first mechanisms to use automatic regulation (although the word cybernetics was not used for them at that time) were those developed to measure time, such as water clocks. In them, water flowed from a source, such as a tank into a reservoir, and then from the reservoir to the clock mechanisms. Ctesibius used a cone-shaped float device to control the water level in his reservoir and adjust the speed of the water flow accordingly to maintain a constant level of water in the reservoir so that it did not overflow or be allowed to run in dry. This was the first truly automatic prosthesis of a normative device that does not require external intervention between the feedback and the control mechanism. Although they did not refer to this concept with the name of Cybernetics (they considered it as a field of engineering), Ktesibios and others such as Heron Heron of Alexandria and Su Song are considered some of the first to study cybernetic principles.

The study of cybernetics in its current sense begins with the mechanisms of teleology (from the Greek τέλος or telos for end, goal, or purpose) in machines with corrective feedback dates from the late 1700s when the steam engine of James Watt. This engine was equipped with a governor, a centrifugal feedback valve to control engine speed. Alfred Russel Wallace identified it as the principle of evolution in his famous 1858 paper. In 1868, James Clerk Maxwell published a theoretical paper on governors, one of the first to discuss and refine the principles of self-regulating devices.

Jakob von Uexküll applies the feedback mechanism through his working cycle model (Funktionskreis) in order to explain animal behavior and the origins of meaning in general, and uses the word &# for the first time 34;cybernetics" referring to self-regulating systems. In his book Cybernetic, which he dedicates to his science partner, the Illustrious Master Arturo Rosenblueth, a physiologist with a focus on the central nervous system, he challenges Norbert Wiener to use his mathematical models to reproduce the automatic system of neural networks that govern automatism. respiratory ^{[citation needed]}. In fact, the virtual space that exists in the dendritic endings made him imagine navigation in a virtual space, hence cybernautics or cybernauts translate what he wanted to say: navigate in something that exists but that nobody sees.

Structure

The classification was made by Georg Klaus:

• 1. System Theory has had a strong impact on social sciences
• 2. Information Theory developed mainly by Shannon with great importance in the field of electronic treatment
• 3. Control theory is responsible for the study of techniques for the government of mechanisms and physical-biological structures
• 4. Theory of Strategic Games developed by Oskar Morgenstern configures one of the bases to study simulation programs
• 5. Theory of Algorithms allows to pass from formulations of ordinary language and therefore imprecise to formulations in rigorous language

Cybernetics and robotics

Many people associate cybernetics with robotics, robots, computers and the concept of cyborg due to its use in some science fiction works, but from a strictly scientific point of view. Scientifically, cybernetics is about control systems based on feedback.

Applications

Certain applications of robotics may have some "disadvantages"; For example:

• The creation of complex machines that replace workers would lead to a cut in staff.
• In the future it would no longer take care of "old" personnel and hire young technicians for the maintenance of machines.
• It is a very powerful technology but its great limitation is to find the nervous machine-system relationship, as for this one should know the nervous system perfectly.

Advantages

• The reduction of working days; complex or routine work would become machines. In addition, cybernetics provides a great contribution to the medicinal field.
• A greater knowledge of how complex systems work could lead to the solution of complex problems as well as criminality in large cities.

Disadvantages

• Replacement of human labor by robotic labor.
• Eventually it would increase social inequality, favoring those who have the resources to acquire and use machines.
• The most industrialized countries would exercise even greater control over the least technologicalized countries, which would be dangerously dependent on the former.

Transforming disadvantages into advantages

• The replacement of the "barata" labor by complex machines emancipates the man from unpleasant work.
• As cybernetics and automation become more and more cherished, the so-called "unemployment" would become what the Greeks called "ocio" or liberal arts of free or unslaved men.
• By replacing human labor by robotic labor, man would finally be emancipated from annoying, routine, alienating, dangerous, harmful, degrading, soda, etc.
• There would be no greater reason to continue the "man by man" exploitation system.

Cybernetics and technological revolution

Cybernetics has played a decisive role in the emergence of the current technological revolution. Alan Turing, student of John von Neumann (another of the pioneers of cybernetics), both precursors of the computer, and Claude Shannon, student of Norbert Wiener with his Theory of Information

Cybernetics and education

The concepts and principles of cybernetics have also been applied in the pedagogy known as cybernetics pedagogy.