Cybernetics

Cybernetics is the study of communication and feedback control in machines and humans. Cybernetics analyzes the ability of humans, animals and some machines to respond to or make adjustments based upon sensory input from the environment. This process of response or adjustment is called feedback or automatic control. For example, the household thermostat uses feedback when it turns a furnace on or off based on its measurements of temperature. The earliest known feedback control mechanism, the centrifugal governor, was developed by Scotsman James Watt in 1788. Watt's steam engine governor contained two weighted arms that were hurled outward by centrifugal force as engine speed increased. Once the arms reached a certain point, they triggered a mechanical link which closed a valve, thus preventing engine from exceeding a certain speed, keeping it at a constant rate. The principles of feedback control were first clearly defined by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), a American mathematician. Wiener was a child prodigy who could read and write by the time he was three years old. Wiener earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard at the age of nineteen. Wiener was particularly intrigued by the parallels between the behavior of computers and the functioning of the brain and nervous system in higher organisms. Turned down for military duty due to poor eyesight, Wiener and his colleague, Julian Bigelow, worked for the government during World War II, developing radar and missile guidance systems using automatic information processing and machine controls.

After the war Wiener continued to work in machine and human feedback research along with another associate, Arturo Rosenblueth (1900-1970), a Mexican physiologist. In 1948, Wiener summarized his findings in Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine. The word "cybernetics," coined by Wiener, comes from a Greek word kybernetes, meaning steersman. Wiener's book, a popular one even outside of the scientific community, enumerated the principles of feedback systems. Wiener continued to lecture and teach the many uses and possibilities for cybernetics, but also warned of the possible dangers in his second book, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, published in 1950. In this book, Wiener cautioned that an increased reliance on machines might initiate a decline in human intellectual capabilities. With the advent of the digital computer, cybernetic principles such as those illuminated by Wiener could be applied to increasingly complex tasks, resulting in machines with the practical ability to carry out meaningful work. In 1946, Delmar S. Harder devised one of the earliest such systems to automate the manufacture of car engines at the Ford Motor Company. The system involved an element of thinking--the machines regulated themselves, without human supervision, to produce the desired results. Harder's assembly-line automation produced one car engine every 14 minutes--compared with the 21 hours it had taken humans previously. By the 1960s and 1970s, the fields of cybernetics, robotics and artificial intelligence began to skyrocket. A large number of industrial and manufacturing plants devised and installed cybernetic systems such as robots in the workplace. In 1980 there were roughly about 5,000 industrial robots in the United States; by the year 2000, researchers estimate there could be half a million.