I don’t know which meaning of “cybernetics” you’re referring to, but I’ve often thought the original movement (circa 1950–1980) was a lost goldmine for worldbuilders.
Cybernetics started as an interdisciplinary movement looking at all systems that influenced their environments via feedback mechanisms—from biology to economics, sociology, anthropology, neurology, and robotics. It looked at things like how systems need to model the things they’re trying to influence, how they need to match their degrees of freedom, and how they need to delegate control to their subsystems—all things worldbuilders would do well to consider, even for things like constructing magic systems.
But that version of cybernetics lost favor in the early 80s with the rise of neoliberalism, because it conflicted with the later’s ideology of universal market-based dynamics. The only part that survived was robotics, because the neoliberals never came up with a market-based theory of kinematics.
@AbouBenAdhem@diarcesia Also, there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on fuzzy logic, which is kind of an offshoot of cybernetics (fuzzy control systems and fuzzy cognitive maps)
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How do you incorporate cybernetics in your project? | Spyke
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I don’t know which meaning of “cybernetics” you’re referring to, but I’ve often thought the original movement (circa 1950–1980) was a lost goldmine for worldbuilders.
Cybernetics started as an interdisciplinary movement looking at all systems that influenced their environments via feedback mechanisms—from biology to economics, sociology, anthropology, neurology, and robotics. It looked at things like how systems need to model the things they’re trying to influence, how they need to match their degrees of freedom, and how they need to delegate control to their subsystems—all things worldbuilders would do well to consider, even for things like constructing magic systems.
But that version of cybernetics lost favor in the early 80s with the rise of neoliberalism, because it conflicted with the later’s ideology of universal market-based dynamics. The only part that survived was robotics, because the neoliberals never came up with a market-based theory of kinematics.
@AbouBenAdhem @diarcesia I like the version of cybernetics that had the concept of hysteresis.
A lot of that approach made its way into dynamical systems theory and control theory.
@AbouBenAdhem @diarcesia Also, there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on fuzzy logic, which is kind of an offshoot of cybernetics (fuzzy control systems and fuzzy cognitive maps)