Рефлексивные процессы и управление. Сборник материалов XI Международного симпозиума 16-17 октября 2017 г., Москва

In some ways, cybernetics is back where it was shortly after World War II, having to rely on its appeal to bright and enthusiastic minds to approach and pursue the subject, to build new communities, and to develop the future of cybernetics practically from scratch. Given the success of cybernetics in the middle of the last century, it is prudent to take a look back, and to examine how early cybernetic thinkers may have connected with control and communication early in their lives.

It may be no coincidence that cybernetics owes its greatest advances to a generation, which, during its childhood years, commonly played with toy steam engines. This toy may very well have played a key role in acquainting this generation early on with principles of control and communication, of measurement, signaling and adaptation via feedback, to instill an interest in self-regulating systems. Being mass manufactured, the toy steam engine was itself a product of the industrial paradigm initiated by its full-scale predecessor, and as a miniaturized reincarnation, it helped a new generation to pave the path from the industrial era to the information era.

In the information age, however, technical principles of communication and control manifest themselves far beyond the thresholds of human perception in miniscule, electrical and optical signals, and have thus escaped from the realm of playful childhood experience. In contrast to the steam engine and the immediate comprehensibility of the functional principles underlying its operation, more recent cybernetic concepts are less accessible to early learning and study. This begs the question: What learning resources and playthings can cybernetics offer to young people in this day and age to learn its key principles, and to possibly help develop cybernetics further in the future?

In the past decade, there have been proposals and initiatives the within the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) to develop an introductory course to cybernetics, referred to as "Cybernetics 101". For the most part, these initiatives are currently dormant. One important reason for this appears to be a dilemma between the ambition to create a general, one-fits-all curriculum on the one hand, and the large degree to which the promotion of cybernetics depended on particular individuals in the past.

This is a proposal for a presentation of an initiative that aims to develop a suitable and contemporary pedagogy for cybernetics and related learning materials for both individual as well as for organized learning. It is at this time a personal initiative, but this may change in the future. Analogously to Margaret Mead‘s (1968) call to the American Society for Cybernetics to apply cybernetics to itself ("cybernetics of cybernetics"), it aims to utilize cybernetic resources and accomplishments of the past in the pedagogy of cybernetics to perpetuate the discipline into the future in times of dwindling institutional support. It takes a hands-on, constructivist learning approach with a focus on applied computer-programming based exercises using low-cost hardware and free software.

Its primary goal is to introduce key first- and second-order cybernetic concepts developed since World War II in a way that is accessible for speculative interaction and digital experimentation, somewhat in the way the toy steam engine gave access to experimentation with self-regulation in mechanical systems. It is hope that this will help re-align the developments of cybernetics (as a philosophical field) and computing (as an engineering field) in some places.

The computing field, itself a spawn of cybernetics in some ways, recently experienced a proliferation of study and play resources for "makers" and young people to familiarize themselves with digital technology, programming and networking. Of these, the single-board low-cost computer Raspberry Pi, its open-source operating system Raspbian (a Debian-derived Linux) and the programming language Python 3 were chosen at the technical basis for this project.

The course is designed to enable both individual self-study as well as formal classes, and it fit the scope of a one-semester introductory undergraduate module. As a electronically enhanced textbook, it offers a coherent overarching narrative that is illustrated and substantiated by various demonstrations, anecdotes, short audio and video clips of cybernetic sources, and, first and foremost, hands-on exercises. Aiming to inspire an appreciation for the concerns and characteristics of cybernetics, the course design currently focuses on assumptions that set cybernetics apart form other fields in the systems research family, as well as from conventional natural science: Observer-dependence, non-determinability, circular causality, and self-organization.