Requiem for Cybernetics. The Genesis of Digital

DOI: 10.33917/es-6.204.2025.16-25

In the present work the authors practically present a requiem for cybernetics — a classical management science that has fulfilled its historical role, but is now giving way to new approaches emerging at the junction of the philosophy of knowledge, complexity theory, the cognitive and social sciences. The article gives a historical and philosophical overview of cybernetics — from Plato, Ampere and Wiener to the present day. It is demonstrated that classical cybernetic paradigm — a mechanistic control model with feedback loops and representation of the world as a set of “finite state machines” — has proven insufficient in the era of dynamically changing, weakly deterministic, self-organizing living systems. Analysis of the causes of the methodological crisis in cybernetics at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries is provided and it is argued that its resources are exhausted — further progress requires transition to new conceptual ideas. The authors propose a new engineering approach to understanding the World (K3-Engineering) and an original concept for Genesis of the digital — “Digital Genesis” — as a promising replacement.

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