In 1948 the mathematician Norbert Wiener published “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine,” issued by the M.I.T. Press. The book gave a name and a unified framework to a body of work on how systems regulate themselves, drawing together ideas from engineering, mathematics, biology, and neuroscience. Only the year 1948 is documented for the first edition.
Wiener coined the word cybernetics from the Greek for steersman, and used it to describe the study of control and communication, in machines and in living organisms alike. The unifying idea is feedback: a system measures the difference between its goal and its current state and adjusts its behavior to close the gap, the way a thermostat or a ship’s autopilot does. Wiener argued that the same mathematics describes a servomechanism correcting its course and an animal coordinating its movements.
This framing mattered for the prehistory of artificial intelligence because it treated purposeful, goal seeking behavior as something that could be engineered and analyzed, not as a mystery unique to minds. Cybernetics ran alongside and influenced early neural network research, including the McCulloch and Pitts model of the neuron, and it shaped the interdisciplinary conversations that fed into the founding of AI as a field. The primary source used here is the full scan of the book held by the Internet Archive.