Cybernetics
[si-bər-NED-iks]
Part of speech: noun
Origin: Greek, 1940s
1.
The science of communications and automatic control systems in both machines and living things.
Examples of Cybernetics in a sentence
"Scientists who study cybernetics are fascinated by the connections between computers and the human brain."
"Sci-fi TV shows have long imagined a world where cybernetics is far more advanced than it is in real life."
About Cybernetics
This futuristic word has ancient language roots. The Greek word “kubernētēs” means to steer — adopted to discuss how the human brain might steer or communicate with computers, and vice versa. It seems like the stuff of sci-fi, but the field has been studied by scientists and mathematicians since the 1940s.
Did you Know?
Mathematician Alan Turing was one of the early promoters of cybernetics as a field of study. As one of the earliest computer scientists, he had a hypothesis that the human brain was essentially a digital computing machine. The Turing test, proposed in 1950, helped evaluate whether an artificial computer is thinking.
