CYBERNETICS

This word was Norbert Wiener's coinage for self-steering mechanisms, which is to say those entities that, like human beings, respond intelligently to considerations of their own output. For example, if you step (output) on a hot coal (input), you'll probably pull back your foot and won't step on hot coals again. The idea was to make robots capable of this human trait. Necessarily incorporating the new disciplines of information theory, control systems, automatons, artificial intelligence, computer-simulated...