• The universality and power of the ideas unleashed in this early 'cybernetics group' were so self-evident as to facilitate these ideas' recurrent adoption and adaptation in a variety of disciplines - especially the social sciences - as time went on.
   
  
• The ramifications of the innovations popularly associated with cybernetics (e.g., computers, robotics, systemically-organized enterprises) soon produced apprehensions about their effects on human affairs. Relying on the core principles of cybernetics itself, cyberneticians (especially Wiener) effectively argued the case for the human side of the socio-technical interface.
   
  
• Playing on a concept originating in conversation between Margaret Mead and Heinz von Foerster, the people of cybernetics turned the field on itself - exploring the notion of a 'cybernetics of cybernetics' to yield a second-order cybernetics. This innovation in turn yielded a second-order proliferation of ideas and themes across diverse disciplines.
   
  
• As time went on, new approaches in addressing complex systemic phenomena arose which labeled themselves as something other than cybernetics. However, many of these new fields acknowledged themselves as descendants of, rather than alternatives to, cybernetics. Examples include complexity science, system dynamics, artificial intelligence, and many others.
   
  
• In some cases, these derivative fields' results invited skepticism about their viability or validity - especially with respect to their outcomes' limitations or ramifications for real-world deployment. When such skepticism turned to criticism, people often returned to cybernetics as a source of inspiration for correction or improvement. A good example is that of artificial intelligence (AI), whose value was becoming questionable during the 1980's. In 1986, Winograd and Flores' Understanding Computers and Cognition outlined an alternative approach drawing on (e.g.) the second-order cybernetics work of Maturana and Pask.

• The proliferation of more narrowly defined descendant and derivative fields has obscured the facts that (a) cybernetics continues, and (b) it continues to contribute to human knowledge. One aspect of this problem results from forgetting the origins of later, better-known fields:

  "When, early on, the glitter of exuberance had settled into the dust, the theoretical mathematics of cybernetics became "dynamical systems," the communication aspects morphed into "informatics," prosthetics expanded into "robotics"; at the same time, computer hardware and software advanced at an unbelievable clip. There was little consciousness that it all might be subsumed under the rubric of cybernetics." (Davis, 2002)

• The universality and power of the ideas unleashed in this early 'cybernetics group' were so self-evident as to facilitate these ideas' recurrent adoption and adaptation in a variety of disciplines - especially the social sciences - as time went on.
   
  
• The ramifications of the innovations popularly associated with cybernetics (e.g., computers, robotics, systemically-organized enterprises) soon produced apprehensions about their effects on human affairs. Relying on the core principles of cybernetics itself, cyberneticians (especially Wiener) effectively argued the case for the human side of the socio-technical interface.
   
  
• Playing on a concept originating in conversation between Margaret Mead and Heinz von Foerster, the people of cybernetics turned the field on itself - exploring the notion of a 'cybernetics of cybernetics' to yield a second-order cybernetics. This innovation in turn yielded a second-order proliferation of ideas and themes across diverse disciplines.
   
  
• As time went on, new approaches in addressing complex systemic phenomena arose which labeled themselves as something other than cybernetics. However, many of these new fields acknowledged themselves as descendants of, rather than alternatives to, cybernetics. Examples include complexity science, system dynamics, artificial intelligence, and many others.
   
  
• In some cases, these derivative fields' results invited skepticism about their viability or validity - especially with respect to their outcomes' limitations or ramifications for real-world deployment. When such skepticism turned to criticism, people often returned to cybernetics as a source of inspiration for correction or improvement. A good example is that of artificial intelligence (AI), whose value was becoming questionable during the 1980's. In 1986, Winograd and Flores' Understanding Computers and Cognition outlined an alternative approach drawing on (e.g.) the second-order cybernetics work of Maturana and Pask.

Thus begins a review of the History of Cybernetics and Systems Science at:

"Following Bateson, it is my conviction that the patterns of organization and symmetry embodied in living systems are indicative of mental process; and, that the cybernetic paradigm--with its focus on communication and information as the key elements of the self-regulation and self-organization--best exemplifies these hierarchical patterns of epistemic organization."

The article can be accessed at: