In Robert Park’s stimulating review of Steven Jones’s Against Technology (Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 60 4 2007 59 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2731976 April 2007, page 59 ), there is an historical error: Although Norbert Wiener did use the term “cybernetics” in his 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Houghton Mifflin), he had already brought out a book in 1948 entitled Cybernetics . 1 I still have a copy that I bought in December 1948 when I was studying mathematical biology at the University of Chicago.
Apparently, André Ampère had already used the term cybernétique to describe the art of government, and much earlier Plato used the Greek term kybernetes, meaning governor and steersman, in conjunction with governance.
Of interest in conjunction with Jones’s book and Park’s review is the wide-ranging introduction to Wiener’s book on cybernetics, which he wrote in 1947 while he was at the National Institute of Cardiology in Mexico City. Wiener expressed concern that those who have contributed to the then-new science of cybernetics “stand in a moral position which is, to say the very least, not very comfortable,” because they are contributing to the concentration of power, which always tends to end up “in the hands of the most unscrupulous.” He offered, nevertheless, the “very slight hope” that a better understanding of man and society would result.