“You cannot understand the modern world without going back to its electronic roots.”

Marian: Can you define cybernetics? While the term has become unused, what is its reality today?

Baptiste Rabin:Cybernetics know cybernetics, whose principles they laid out in the middle of the twentieth century^e Century, such as control and communication science. Communication on the one hand: the world is reduced to the circulation of information, to the flow of data, so much so that Norbert Wiener, mathematician and central figure of the cyber movement, can confirm this “To live is to live with enough information”. Control on the other hand: Information is routed to and through assessment devices that calculate the gap between required performance and current performance in order to redirect system behavior in a productive manner.

Let’s take a simple example – A negative feedback loop Technically – to make us understand: in the case of a heating system, the required temperature is the initial information – the goal of the system – that the boiler seeks to achieve, but it adjusts its voltage according to the temperature recorded at time t, until the desired temperature is reached. We can then say that the control/communication pair defines the process of regulation. This type of thinking, which also includes the phenomena of learning when the feedback loops are positive, has spread in the vast majority of contemporary science, from cognitive science to artificial intelligence, from new communication theories to genetics, and education sciences to management.

Cybernetics breaks down two traditional limits that have shaped human thought. »