Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century

Ronald Kline, drawing on research from his book "The Cybernetics Moment," examined how Wiener used mathematics both to establish the boundaries of cybernetics and to extend its reach into new domains. Kline noted that Wiener himself was cautious about applying cybernetic concepts too broadly, warning against excessive optimism regarding their use in the social sciences while praising Gregory Bateson's more careful interdisciplinary work.

Kline traced the decline of cybernetics as a unified discipline, attributing it in part to unfortunate associations with L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics and with 1960s counterculture movements that borrowed cybernetic language without its intellectual rigor. He argued that the prefix "cyber," now ubiquitous in terms like "cybersecurity" and "cyberspace," had ironically "flattened the rich conceptual framework" that Wiener had constructed, reducing a profound intellectual achievement to a mere linguistic prefix.