Cyber-Renaissance: Resuming the Evolution of Cybernetics After the Biological Computer Laboratory (1976)
Sunday, September 20, 2026 | 12:00 PM EDT | 6:00 PM CEST | 12:00 AM China (Monday, September 21, 2026)
Micah Nkrumah Ardayfio provides an analysis of cybernetics as a science, of its branches, and of the barriers facing a second-order led revolution capable of addressing the polycrisis.
Cybernetics gave rise to many disciplines: control theory, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, the systems tradition, human-computer interaction, artificial life, and the chosen “heir” to its name, second-order cybernetics. I focus on the second-order branch and its descendants because they are suited to a class of challenges the others have failed to meet: the polycrisis. The polycrisis names a condition in which distinct crises, climatic, economic, ecological, and political, interact so that their combined effects exceed the sum of their parts. Over time the second-order tradition has accumulated foundations uniquely positioned to tackle challenges of this class.
The foundations, however, are constrained by obstacles in application and pedagogy. I have encountered both firsthand, as a recent student of the second-order tradition and as a researcher applying it to concrete polycrisis problems such as the agriculture crisis. In this presentation, I tie the constraints I faced to the theory of scientific revolutions and paradigms. Umpleby has read cybernetics through Kuhn’s philosophy of science for years, and with Medvedeva and Lepskiy reveals the scientific revolution of cybernetics (2019).
I first re-emphasize Umpleby’s assertion that cybernetics has depended on its standing as a science, and so on the paradigmatic units that constitute one. I then independently argue that internal and external changes since the closure of von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory in 1976 have produced something like a model crisis in the paradigm. From elsewhere in the field, the same changes could look like productive plurality. However, from the vantage of this presentation, and on Kuhn’s account, such a crisis is what gives rise to failures in puzzle-solving, and potentially in teaching.
I finally look for alternative frameworks of science that could stabilize meaning, restore a disciplinary matrix, and accommodate what the field has become since the BCL closure. My search leads back to older conceptions of science, in particular those of Aristotle and Leibniz. I utilize these to distinguish fundamental incompatibilities in the field from perspective based misunderstandings.
Participants’ Bios
Micah Nkrumah Ardayfio is an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) studying Information Systems and Data Analytics. At CMU-CyLab he led a research thrust on developing ecologically inspired intelligence systems through the lens of complexity theory. Prior to university, he led the R&D lab at Velera Foundation for four years, where he developed cryptographic protocols for distributed network communication and federated learning.
Session will be moderated by Paul Pangaro, Director of the Laboratory for Cybernetics at Carnegie Mellon University and current President of the American Society for Cybernetics. His CMU page is here; his personal site is pangaro.com.
