Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation (Macy Conferences)

Contribution to AI

Before there was a field there was a room. Roughly twenty people met in New York on 21 March 1946 under the title "Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems" — mathematicians, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists and engineers who shared no journal and no vocabulary — and went on meeting until April 1953. What the foundation supplied was money and, more importantly, a format its conference director Frank Fremont-Smith had been refining since the 1930s: a small membership that returned meeting after meeting, unfinished work instead of polished papers, and a stenographer taking down the argument itself. Applied to feedback, that arrangement did what the participants' own departments could not, obliging Wiener, von Neumann, McCulloch, Pitts, Shannon, Bateson and Mead to make their separate notions of information, purpose and control intelligible to one another. The name arrived late: cybernetics was adopted as the conference title only for the sixth meeting in 1949, following Wiener's book, and the transactions of the final five meetings, edited by Heinz von Foerster, read as a discipline arguing itself into being. Two things outlasted the series. One is the premise that goal-seeking behaviour in brains, machines and societies can be described in a single language, which the Dartmouth generation inherited even while rejecting the analogue machinery around it. The other is the interdisciplinary workshop as a way of starting a science.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).