To Gary Boyd, thank you very much for your suggestions for new lines of
research in cybernetics.
With regard to Heinz von Foerster's suggestion, which you quoted
earlier,
that the original research program of cybernetics has been absorbed by
other disciplines, I think that this is true in part. There has been a
strong move toward subjectivist epistemologies in the social sciences.
Fields such as family therapy have been influenced by
constructivist cybernetics. In engineering, artificial intelligence has
been influenced by Humberto Maturana's work on neurophysiology and
epistemology through the book by Winograd and Flores. Those working on
neural networks have rediscovered the work of McCulloch and Pitts and
others from the 1940s and 1950s. The interdisciplinary field of chaos or
complexity theory is picking up and expanding on the work done around
1960 on the topic of self-organizing systems. Norbert Wiener's idea of a
second industrial revolution was introduced to social scientists by
Daniel Bell who used the term "post-industrial society" and to the
general public by Alvin Toffler who called it "the third wave." In
management the work of Russell Ackoff is regarded by some people as the
next step beyond total quality management. Some people are using
Stafford Beer's viable system model, but not yet very many. Jixuan Hu,
who is the moderator of this list, has just completed a very nice
synthesis of second order cybernetics, self-organizing systems theory,
the work of Stephen Covey, and some models from the field of communications.
And of course the early work in cybernetics affected such fields as
computer science, control systems theory, operations research, and
systems analysis.
I think it is quite natural for an interdisciplinary field to
have its ideas absorbed by neighboring disciplines and to be influenced
itself by general intellectual trends. Indeed that is the
reason for its existence. I think that there will always be a place for
cybernetics as long as there are people in any discpline concerned with
control and communication who believe that they can learn something from
people in neighboring discplines.
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S.A. Umpleby, Dept. of Mgt. Science, GWU, Wash. DC 20052 USA
tel: 202/994-7530, fax: 202/994-4930, e-mail: umpleby@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
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