The fundamental concepts of cybernetics have proven to be
enormously powerful in a variety of disciplines: computer science,
management, biology, sociology, thermodynamics, etc. Cybernetics and Systems Science combine the
abstraction of philosophy and mathematics with the concreteness of dealing
with the theory and modeling of "real world" evolving systems. Since they
are inherently interdisciplinary, Cybernetics and Systems Science work between and among standard
theories, usually pairwise (e.g. biophysics, sociobiology) but sometimes
across more than two types of systems.
Some recent fashionable approaches have their roots in ideas that were
proposed by cyberneticians many decades ago: e.g. artificial intelligence,
neural networks, complex systems, human-machine interfaces,
self-organization theories, systems therapy, etc. Most of the fundamental
concepts and questions of these approaches have already been formulated by
cyberneticians such as Wiener, Ashby, von
Bertalanffy \cite{V L56}, Boulding, von Foerster, von Neumann,
McCulloch, and Pask in the 1940's through 1960's.
But since its founding, Cybernetics and Systems Science have struggled to find a degree of
"respectability" in the academic community. While little
interdisciplinary work has prospered recently, cyberneticians especially
have failed to find homes in academic institutions, or to create their own.
Very few academic programs in Cybernetics and Systems Science exist, and those working in the
new disciplines described above seem to have forgotten their cybernetic
predecessors.
What is the reason that cybernetics does not get the popularity it
deserves? What distinguishes cyberneticians from researchers in the
previously mentioned areas is that the former stubbornly stick to their
objective of building general, domain independent theories, whereas the
latter focus on very specific applications: expert systems, psychotherapy,
thermodynamics, pattern recognition, etc. General integration remains too
abstract, and is not sufficiently successful to be really appreciated.
As an interdisciplinary field, Cybernetics and Systems Science sees common concepts used in
multiple traditional disciplines and attempts to achieve a consensual
unification by finding common terms for similar concepts in these multiple
disciplines. Thus sometimes Cybernetics and Systems Science abstracts away from concepts,
theories, and terminologies in specific discipline towards general, and
perhaps idiosyncratic, usages. These new conceptual categories may not
be recognizable to the traditional researchers, or they may find no utility
in the use of the general concepts.
Clearly the problem of building a global theory is much more complex than
any of the more down-to-earth goals of the fashionable approaches. But we
may also say that the generality of the approach is dangerous in itself if
it leads to being "stuck" in abstractions which are so far removed from
the everyday world that it is difficult to use them, interact with them,
or test them on concrete problems; in other words, to get a feel for how they
behave and what their strengths and weaknesses are.
Although there are many exceptions, researchers in Cybernetics and Systems Science tend to be
trained in a traditional specialty (like biology, management, or
psychology) and then come to apply themselves to problems in other areas,
perhaps a single other area. Thus their exposure to Cybernetics and Systems Science concepts and
theory tends to be somewhat ad hoc and specific to the two or three
fields they apply themselves to.
