In 1948, Claude Shannon published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” quantifying information and noise. The same year, Norbert Wiener released Cybernetics, focused on control and feedback in animals and machines.
Those languages—bits, entropy, feedback—became the Esperanto of engineers, neuroscientists, and AI pioneers. They made it possible to talk about “intelligence” in terms of signal processing and goals.
Cybernetics also anticipated ethical and social debates on automation. Its direct influence on AI products faded relative to statistical ML, but its conceptual footprint remains in reinforcement, control, and adaptive systems.
