Cybernetics promised a merger of human and computer. Then why do we feel so out of the loop?

It began in the crucible of a world at war. The word cybernetics was coined in 1948 by the MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, a man wrestling with the urgent problem of how to make a machine shoot down another machine. He reached back to the ancient Greek for kubernétes , the steersman, the one who guides and corrects. Plato had used it as a metaphor for governing a polis. Wiener used it to describe a new science of self-governing systems, of control and communication in the animal and the machine. The core idea was feedback, a circular flow of information that allows a system to sense its own performance and steer itself toward a goal.

The idea was not about mechanics but about behavior. The focus shifted from what things are to what they do . A thermostat maintaining