CYBERNETICS IN HISTORY
Since the end of World War II, I have been working
on the many ramifications of the theory of messages.
Besides the electrical engineering theory of the transrnission
of messages, there is a larger field which includes
not only the study of language but the study of
messages as a means of controlling machinery and
society, the development of computing machines and
other such automata, certain reflections upon psychology
and the nervous system, and a tentative new theory
of scientific method. This larger theory of messages is
a probabilistic theory, an intrinsic part of the movement
that owes its origin to Willard Gibbs and which
r have described in the introduction.
Until recently, there was no existing word for this
complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole
field by a single term, I felt constrained to invent one.
Hence "Cyb~m~!!~s," which I derived from the Greek '
word kubernete~,or "~>teersman," the same Greel<w6rd
from which we eventually derive our word "governor."
Incidentally, I found later that the word had already
been used by Ampere with reference to political
science, and had been introduced in another context
by a Polish scientist, both uses dating from the earlier
part of the nineteenth century.
I wrote a more or less technical book entitled
Cybernetics which was published in 1948. In response
to a certain demand for me to make its ideas acceptable
to the lay public, I published the first edition of The
Human Use of Human Beings in 1950. Since then the