Cybernetics: Where shall we go?

Cybernetics, as defined by Plato and later by Ampère is the science of governance. In the 1940s, Wiener used cybernetics as an umbrella term to refer to control and communication in both the animal and the machine. In the following decades, the term has been defined in various ways by different researchers, and because of this, cybernetics has been perceived rather negatively as a “nomad science”. Consequently, few people understand the true meaning of cybernetics. For the appropriate development of our field of research, we think it is necessary to re-consider the meaning and the scope of cybernetics, so that we can have a relatively clear mission in our research. In this paper, we try to provide a kind of governance message that might also be very weak, but nevertheless may be helpful for the cybernetics community to become cybernetic itself.