Cybernetics Live
Our regular online seminar series features speakers from across the cybernetics and systems community, typically on the third Wednesday of each month, 17:00–19:00 BST.
Renewing the Society’s Educational Mission
The Cybernetics Society exists to advance education, and in particular to advance and spread knowledge of cybernetics, both pure and applied. In this session, Omar Kharoti and the Cybernetics Society Education Committee will introduce the work they have been developing over the past two years. Committee members will then present the parts of that work they have each led. We will close with an open discussion of what this work means more broadly, and of how every member can help renew the Society’s educational mission.
About the speaker. Omar Kharoti is a PhD researcher in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He applies complexity science to strategy and conflict, examining the implications of insurgencies, economies and social structures as complex adaptive systems. Through Entropy Advisory, Omar has spent the past years developing Vandict, a platform that brings together messy, real-world data and analyses it using complexity science and cybernetics as its framework. With Professor Eve Mitleton-Kelly, Omar is co-editing the Elgar Encyclopedia of Complexity in the Social Sciences, to which he has also contributed several entries. Before 2021 he advised the Afghan government. He has also worked as a researcher on a mediation project at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is a Council Member of the Cybernetics Society, where he leads its educational programme.
Cybernetics, Art & the Synthesiser
Peter Kawalek (Centre for Information Management, Loughborough University) and Greg Smith (University of West London) will meet at the Townshend Studio to discuss Cybernetics, Art & the Synthesiser. Ealing College of Art (now UWL) is famous for the work of Roy Ascott who pioneered the integration of cybernetics, interactive telecommunications, and systems theory into the arts, redefining the artwork from a static object into an open, participatory network of communication. Through his visionary teaching frameworks—such as the Groundcourse in the 1960s—and seminal concepts like “telematic art,” Ascott established foundational paradigms for digital aesthetics and collaborative, networked creativity.
Drawing upon the contemporary contributions of Yuk Hui, Peter Kawalek will position the underlying philosophy of Cybernetics and its relation to Art, making reference to novelist Thomas Pynchon, musicians including Rick Rubin, Brian Eno, David Bowie, Radiohead, DJ Spooky and The Who, and theorists including Stafford Beer.
Greg Smith will act as our guide to the Townshend Studio and the collection within. Contributed by Pete Townshend, co-founder of The Who and Ealing School of Art alumnus, who described his time at the School as “a revelation,” the collection is comprised of 12 principal synthesisers, plus many other instruments which have been used by Pete throughout his career.
Critical Realism Philosophy and Cybernetics
Conferences, Conversations and Symposium
Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Ethics: Governing Adaptive and Autonomous Systems
Abstracts will be published in the Enacting Cybernetics Journal. Selected presentations will be invited to publish in Enacting Cybernetics after a secondary peer review process.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded in organizational decision-making, public administration, digital platforms, healthcare, finance, design, architecture, urban systems, and critical infrastructure. As AI systems learn from data, respond to feedback, and influence the environments in which they operate, they should not be understood merely as technical tools. They are components of complex sociotechnical systems involving recursive interactions among algorithms, people, organizations, institutions, built environments, and society.
Read the full call for papers
This call invites theoretical, empirical, design-oriented, and interdisciplinary research examining AI ethics through cybernetics, systems theory, and systems thinking. Classical cybernetics offers a particularly valuable foundation for this agenda. Wiener’s analysis of control, communication, and the societal consequences of automation foregrounds the ethical responsibilities associated with intelligent machines (Wiener, 1948, 1954). Ashby’s concepts of regulation, adaptation, feedback, and requisite variety raise important questions about whether organizations and regulatory institutions possess sufficient capacity to govern complex AI systems (Ashby, 1956). Beer’s organizational cybernetics and Viable System Model further illuminate how autonomy, accountability, coordination, and control may be distributed across organizational levels (Beer, 1981).
The distinction between first-order and second-order cybernetics is central to the proposed conversation. First-order cybernetics commonly treats the system as an object that can be observed, modelled, predicted, and regulated from an apparently external position. Applied to AI, this perspective can support valuable work on feedback mechanisms, performance monitoring, error correction, risk management, and human control. However, an exclusively first-order orientation may reproduce an instrumental understanding of ethics in which harms are treated as technical deviations to be corrected, while the goals, classifications, institutional interests, and power relations built into the system remain insufficiently questioned.
Second-order cybernetics challenges the assumption that designers, researchers, managers, auditors, and regulators stand outside the systems they seek to govern. It emphasizes reflexivity, self-reference, observer participation, and the ways in which knowledge and system boundaries are constructed (von Foerster, 2003). From this perspective, AI ethics concerns not only how intelligent systems are controlled, but also who defines their purposes, whose observations become data, whose values shape their classifications, and who is authorized to decide whether an outcome is ethical. A critical dialogue between first- and second-order cybernetics can therefore expose the limitations of control-centred governance while supporting more reflexive, participatory, and accountable approaches to AI.
Recent Information Systems research similarly emphasizes that managing AI requires more than improving algorithmic performance. AI generates organizational tensions concerning autonomy, control, knowledge, accountability, and the changing relationship between human and machine agency (Benbya et al., 2021; Berente et al., 2021). Ethical AI consequently demands systemic approaches that examine feedback loops, unintended consequences, stakeholder interdependence, institutional responsibility, contested system boundaries, and the distribution of power throughout the AI lifecycle.
Submissions from interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives are strongly welcomed. We particularly encourage contributions from design, architecture, urban studies, healthcare, political science, economics, behavioural science, sociology, psychology, public policy, law, philosophy, organization studies, Information Systems, computer science, engineering, and related fields. Collaborative research integrating technical, organizational, spatial, political, economic, behavioural, and ethical perspectives is especially encouraged.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- First-order and second-order cybernetics as foundations for AI ethics
- The limits of control-oriented and technocratic approaches to responsible AI
- Reflexivity, observer participation, and the construction of AI system boundaries
- Feedback, learning, adaptation, and ethical drift in AI systems
- Requisite variety and institutional capacity for governing AI
- Human oversight, meaningful control, and human–AI autonomy
- Viable systems, organizational design, and distributed accountability
- AI, architecture, urban systems, and the governance of built environments
- Algorithmic bias, fairness, transparency, explainability, and contestability
- Power, surveillance, platform control, and the political economy of AI
- Behavioural responses to automated decision-making
- Participatory and inclusive approaches to AI design and governance
- System dynamics and causal-loop modelling of AI-related harms
- Cross-disciplinary approaches to the social and cultural implications of AI
Submissions should make a clear contribution to Information Systems, management, organization studies, design, architecture, the social sciences, or related interdisciplinary fields. Authors are encouraged to move beyond static ethical principles and investigate how ethical outcomes emerge, stabilize, or deteriorate through interactions among technical architectures, organizational routines, managerial decisions, spatial arrangements, political institutions, economic incentives, regulation, and affected communities.
Studies combining conceptual rigour with practical implications for managers, designers, architects, policymakers, regulators, technologists, and civil-society stakeholders are particularly encouraged.
References
- Ashby, W. R. (1956). An introduction to cybernetics. Chapman & Hall.
- Beer, S. (1981). Brain of the firm (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons.
- Benbya, H., Pachidi, S., & Jarvenpaa, S. L. (2021). Special issue editorial: Artificial intelligence in organizations—Implications for information systems research. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 22(2), 281–303. https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00662
- Berente, N., Gu, B., Recker, J., & Santhanam, R. (2021). Managing artificial intelligence. MIS Quarterly, 45(3), 1433–1450. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2021/16274
- Mingers, J., & Walsham, G. (2010). Toward ethical information systems: The contribution of discourse ethics. MIS Quarterly, 34(4), 833–854. https://doi.org/10.2307/25750707
- von Foerster, H. (2003). Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition. Springer.
- Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Or control and communication in the animal and the machine. MIT Press.
- Wiener, N. (1954). The human use of human beings: Cybernetics and society (Rev. ed.). Houghton Mifflin.
C3-TUFF 2027: Complexities, Challenges, Capabilities — New Threats. New Thinking.
A conference on security, fraud and investigation at Burleigh Court, Loughborough University, exploring how emerging technologies are changing threats and the capabilities needed to respond. It brings together leaders, practitioners and researchers from telecommunications, financial services, law enforcement and government to ask how we counter fraud at machine speed, how we verify increasingly autonomous systems, and how intelligence, investigation and regulation must evolve.
Attendance is by invitation: apply for a registration code on the event page.
Cybernetics Conversation 2027
More details to follow.
Cybernetics Society Symposium: “Cybernetics Literacy”
More details to follow.
Enacting Cybernetics Journal
Enacting Cybernetics is an open-access journal published by the Cybernetics Society, focused on exploring and developing the many ways in which cybernetics may be practised in the world.
Calendars
For a broader view of cybernetics and systems events worldwide, see our Calendar page.