Can a cybernetic society still leave room for irreducibly human qualities like ambiguity, conscience, dissent, and interior life? Otherwise, once governance runs through signals, scores, and feedback loops, we risk treating people less like citizens and more like nodes in a control system.
That’s Exactly the point I am leading to. The question of Agency. Humans have agency, machines don’t. A free society allows or permits or enables that agency, but there are still cybernetic principles regarding how all those free agents interact.
Your conclusion - "a true cybernetics of society is yet to be developed" - may point to something beyond cybernetics altogether. Karl Deutsch himself described three models of thinking: mechanical, organic, cybernetic. Each assumed a steersman. What if the fourth model isn't a better cybernetics of society, but a model where coordination happens through the exchange of knowledge itself - without a steersman? Not control through feedback, but value through communication that produces understanding neither participant had before.
When “coordination happens through the exchange of knowledge itself” that sounds to me exactly like a human-centered cybernetics in politics, and in markets, Hayek’s conception of the price system as a communication medium that reflects aggregate valuations of individuals. A lot of people are still stuck on the idea that “cybernetics” means the control of machines, that is exactly what I am trying to move beyond.
Can a cybernetic society still leave room for irreducibly human qualities like ambiguity, conscience, dissent, and interior life? Otherwise, once governance runs through signals, scores, and feedback loops, we risk treating people less like citizens and more like nodes in a control system.
That’s Exactly the point I am leading to. The question of Agency. Humans have agency, machines don’t. A free society allows or permits or enables that agency, but there are still cybernetic principles regarding how all those free agents interact.
Your conclusion - "a true cybernetics of society is yet to be developed" - may point to something beyond cybernetics altogether. Karl Deutsch himself described three models of thinking: mechanical, organic, cybernetic. Each assumed a steersman. What if the fourth model isn't a better cybernetics of society, but a model where coordination happens through the exchange of knowledge itself - without a steersman? Not control through feedback, but value through communication that produces understanding neither participant had before.
When “coordination happens through the exchange of knowledge itself” that sounds to me exactly like a human-centered cybernetics in politics, and in markets, Hayek’s conception of the price system as a communication medium that reflects aggregate valuations of individuals. A lot of people are still stuck on the idea that “cybernetics” means the control of machines, that is exactly what I am trying to move beyond.
Only possible via pervasive & ubiquitous networks … but access then becomes control too.