And Norbert Wiener, father of cybernetics, sought to combine the human and the machine into a system initially, but not only, an anti-aircraft system that was defined by the way in which it controlled itself.At first blush these look like futures that simply failed.
A Chinese engineer who had been schooled in control theory in Moscow just after Stalin's death (at which point cybernetics, previously bourgeois and reactionary, became acceptable), he rose to pre-eminence in China's military-industrial complex.
The term provided a sexy-sounding but informative semantic umbrella for a research programme that encompassed such previously disparate fields as operations research, cybernetics, logic and computer science.
He derived the term from the words cybernetics, the science of replacing human functions with computerized ones, and punk, the cacophonous music and nihilistic sensibility that developed in the youth culture during the 1970s and '80s.
This enhanced ability of computers has made possible two different views of cybernetics.
A derivation of the mathematical equations of prediction had been accomplished in a limited sense some years before Wiener's work on cybernetics.
Bigelow was already known for being the coauthor of a paper that would become the foundation of the new field of cybernetics.
During his researches on cybernetics, Wiener recognized that, if computers could be programmed to solve certain mathematical equations, then the data read from physically generated time series (or numerical values indexed consecutively in time and related through a transformation) could be extrapolated.
It combined a fascination for cybernetics (the science of communication and control theory, especially with regard to the human nervous system and brain) with a "punk," or alienated, social consciousness, thus melding elements of soft and hard science fiction.
The roots of the discipline of information science lay in three post-World War II developments: the Shannon-Weaver information theory model, Norbert Wiener's conception of the science of cybernetics, and rapid advances in the design and production of electronic computers.
