Cybernetics Quotes

“Systems theory”

“Information theory”

“[Cybernetics is] the art of ensuring the efficacy of action.”

“Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine”

“If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control”

“cybernetics”

“Wikipedia: Cybernetics”

“Cybernetics is the science of the process of transmission, processing and storage of information.”

“Cybernetics is the study of systems and processes that interact with themselves and produce themselves from themselves.”

“The cybernetics phase of cognitive science produced an amazing array of concrete results, in addition to its long-term (often underground) influence:”

“An opportunity for cybernetics to change the course of the philosophy of mind was missed when intentionality was misinterpreted as "the providing of coded knowledge".”

“Cybernetics is the science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors; showing how they may be constructed and what can be inferred as a result of their existence.”

“Defining 'Cybernetics', Stuart Umpleby (1982), revised 2000 at asc-cybernetics.org”

“CYBERNETICS. Catch on to this word now. It's a new coined to label the fast-growing electronic brain system of industry which mat have more effect on the way we live than will atomic energy.”

“The theory of information became the cornerstone of cybernetics because the latter deals with "the study of systems of any nature that are capable of receiving, storing and processing information and utilizing it for control".”

“Cybernetics is the general science of communication. But to refer to communication is consciously or otherwise to refer to distinguishable states of information inputs and outputs and /or to information being processed within some relatively isolated system.”

“For Stafford Beer, cybernetics was ‘the science of which operational research is the method’: ‘The representation and analysis of real world processes using logic, mathematics and computer science’, Operations Research (OR) and its offspring Systems Analysis (SA) transformed the manner in which war was prepared for, planned and imagined.”

“… Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a brilliant mathematician who recently won fame with his invention of cybernetics, a new science of communications... His prolonged studies of the striking analogies between the control systems in animal bodies and those in complex machines became the basis of his newly created cybernetics, a science of communications.”

“Perhaps the most important single characteristic of modern organizational cybernetics is this: That in addition to concern with the deleterious impacts of rigidly-imposed notions of what constitutes the application of good "principles of organization and management" the organization is viewed as a subsystem of a larger system(s), and as comprised itself of functionally interdependent subsystems.”

“Cybernetics is still headline news, and increasingly we hear about its applications to new fields of scientific and industrial endeavour. Stafford Beer's new book Cybernetics and Management is an admirable account on the relation that exist between cybernetics and the problems of management in industry [and]... covers a range of applications that have not previously been dealt with in print.”