“The essence of cybernetic organizations is that they are self-controlling, self-maintaining, self-realizing. Indeed, cybernetics has been characterized as the “science of effective organization,” in just these terms.
But the word “cybernetics” conjures, in the minds of an apparently great number of people, visions of computerized information networks, closed loop systems, and robotized man-surrogates, such as “artorgas” and “cyborgs.””

—  Richard F. Ericson

Visions of Cybernetic Organizations (1972)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The essence of cybernetic organizations is that they are self-controlling, self-maintaining, self-realizing. Indeed, cy…" by Richard F. Ericson?
Richard F. Ericson photo
Richard F. Ericson 8
American academic 1919–1993

Related quotes

Ervin László photo

“Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

hence one actually or potentially open
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 38.

Francis Heylighen photo

“W. Ross Ashby is one of the founding fathers of both cybernetics and systems theory. He developed such fundamental ideas as the homeostat, the law of requisite variety, the principle of self-organization, and the principle of regulatory models.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

" Ashby's book "Introduction to Cybernetics http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASHBBOOK.html" at Principia Cybernetica Web, 1999-2003
Principia Cybernetica Web, 1999-2003

Stuart A. Umpleby photo

“During the 1950s and 1960s most of the work which was called cybernetics tended to focus on control systems in engineering or on applications of the concept of feedback in fields ranging from mathematics to sociology. At the 1970 meeting of the American Society for Cybernetics in Philadelphia Heinz von Foerster sought to redirect attention to the original interests which had led to the founding of the field of cybernetics. In a paper titled "Cybernetics of Cybernetics" he made a distinction between first order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observed systems, and second order cybernetics, the cybernetics of observing systems.”

Stuart A. Umpleby (1944) American scientist

Stuart A. Umpleby (1991) "Strategies for Winning Acceptance of Second Order Cybernetics." In George E. Lasker, et al. (eds.) Advances in Human Systems and Information Technologies. Windsor, Canada: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 1992. pp. 97-196. (paper)

“If cybernetics is the science of control, management is the profession of control”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Decision and control: the meaning of operational research and management cybernetics, 1966, p. 239 cited in: A. Ghosal (1978) Applied cybernetics: its relevance in operations research. p. 2 and many other sources.

“Cybernetics, based upon the principle of feedback or circular causal trains providing mechanisms for goal-seeking and self-controlling behavior.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

“The word 'cybernetics' is still new to many people, even though it has now been an accepted word of our language for some ten or fifteen years. Speaking generally, cybernetics is the scientific study of control and communication. It is an attempt to give an integrated account of both physical and biological systems in terms of their capacity to communicate between different points of the system, and in terms of their control.
There has been considerable research into general methods of communication in recent years, and this has been primarily the work of communication engineers, who are trying to discover in general terms what they themselves are doing.”

Frank Honywill George (1921–1997) British psychologist

George (1958) "Cybernetics and biology" in: M.L. Johnson Ed. New biology. Ns 26-31. p.106

“A great deal of the thinking here has been influenced by cybernetics and information theory, though this has been used as much to extend the scope of closed-system as to improve the sophistication of open system formulations. It was von Bertalanffy (1950) who, in terms of the general transport equation which he introduced, first fully disclosed the importance of openness or closedness to the environment as a means of distinguishing living organisms from inanimate objects.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 22.

“What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'—or situation relative to its object—becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" (2014), in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, p. 516

Qian Xuesen photo

“The purpose of "Engineering Cybernetics" is then to study those parts of the broad science of cybernetics which have direct engineering applications in designing controlled or guided systems. It certainly includes such topics usually treated in books on servomechanisms. But a wider range of topics is only one difference between engineering cybernetics and servomechanisms engineering. A deeper - and thus more important - difference lies in the fact that engineering cybernetics is an engineering science, while servomechanisms engineering is an engineering practice.”

Qian Xuesen (1911–2009) Chinese rocket scientist

Source: Engineering cybernetics, (1954), p. vii

“Cybernetics, although not ignoring formal networks, suggests that an informal communications structure will also be present such that complex conversations at a number of levels between two or more individuals exist.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Source: Dealing with Complexity (1988), p. 79.

Related topics