The term of cybernetics began its rise to popularity in 1947 when Norbert Wiener used it to name a discipline apart from touching, but to establish disciplines as electrical engineering, mathematics, biology, neurophysiology and psychology. Wiener needed a name for their new discipline, and he adapted a Greek word meaning “the art of steering” to evoke the rich interaction of goals, predication, actions, feedback and the response in systems of all kinds.

Early applications in the control of physical systems (aiming artillery, designing electrical circuits and simple robots, like drones) clarified the fundamental roles of these concepts in engineering, but the relevance to social systems and the softer sciences was also clear from the start. Many researchers from the 1940s through to the 1960 worked solidly within the tradition of cybernetics without the necessarily using this certain term.

When working to originate the functional models common to many systems, early…