“The result of Wiener’s book [Norbert Wiener] was that the notion of feedback penetrated almost every aspect of technical culture. Though the central concept was both old and commonplace in specialized circumstances, Wiener gave the idea legs by generalizing the effect into a universal principle: lifelike self-control was a simple engineering job. When the notion of feedback control was packaged with the flexibility of electronic circuits, they married into a tool anyone could use. Within a year or two of Cybernetics’s publication, electronic control circuits revolutionized industry.”
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The cybernetic principle the engineers discovered is a general one: if all the variables are tightly coupled, and if you can truly manipulate one of them in all its freedoms, then you can indirectly control all of them. This principle plays on the holistic nature of systems. As Latil writes, “The
regulator is unconcerned with causes; it will detect the deviation and correct it. The error may even arise from a factor whose influence has never been properly determined hitherto, or even from a factor whose very existence is unsuspected.” How the system finds agreement at any one moment is beyond human knowing, and more importantly, not worth knowing.
The irony of this breakthrough, Latil claims, is that technologically this feedback loop was quite simple and “it could have been introduced some fifteen or twenty years earlier, if the problem had been approached with a more open mind…”
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Free mind on "free space" 