On Control and Communication: Self-regulation and Coordination of Actions

The term control is a loaded one and the term communication needs much clarification. In 1948 Wiener encapsulated the outcome of discussions about feedback loops and circular causality in self-regulating systems in his book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and this was formally the beginning of cybernetics as a discipline. The name comes from the Greek for steersman (the equivalent in Latin is gubernatur), a term that Plato used to describe the art of steering ships; much later, in the nineteenth century, the French scientist Ampère, used it in reference to the science of government. In the second edition of his book, Wiener added a few chapters showing the relevance of cybernetics to learning, artificial intelligence, adaptation and language. Today feedback mechanisms are ubiquitous; they happen whenever part of the output of a system returns as its input, which is thereby changed. This is the case of a normal heating system and any servo-mechanism ranging from missiles to robots. It is also the case of complex systems, which depend on memory to learn; feedback is happening when input information is affected by the output of the previous observation. As for communication we understand it as coordination of actions, going beyond making sure that the message has been received; only when we manage to produce coordinated actions we can claim that communication has been achieved.